Clive Doucet: Ford's Hail Mary Metrolinx proposal for Ottawa's LRT will fall short

The western line now runs along  the western parkway instead of along Carling Avenue where people actually live and is now fouling what was a rather lovely linear park.  The trains themselves have proven to be fragile, failing in inclement weather. 

What Ottawa needs is not a Metrolinx takeover, which has its own problems, but a mayor who actually knows something about transit.  There hasn’t been one since Bob Chiarelli brought in the first Ottawa LRT line, on time and on budget, back in the early 2000s.

Phase II was signed and sealed with Siemens International and would have been five times cheaper, more accessible and served more people.  It was crushed when Mayor Chiarelli was defeated in 2006 by a high tech Mayor who was sure he could  re-set the Chiarelli/Doucet transit project  like a cranky computer app.

There is a slight difference between reformatting a computer app and reconfiguring the physical infrastructure of billions in city rail hardware.  Nonetheless, he won and the contract with Siemens was abandoned.   It cost tens of millions just to leave the contract, and started us down the path we’re on now.

These original mistakes have inspired a cascade of further destructive decisions that continue like bad breath from all levels of government. The latest is from the federal government for a new road bridge across the Ottawa river which will create more traffic snarls and divide more Ottawa neighborhoods. 

Ottawa doesn’t need another King Edward truck route.  It needs to use the cross river bridges it has now, much better. Starting with a rail link like Chiarelli originally proposed.

The city’s declining, but extremely costly transit service is the result of a series of decisions by consecutive Mayors who pretended to know what they were doing, but didn’t. A businessman and a career politician, neither knew enough about transit to lead this massive project. 

A deal to save Ottawa transit with Metrolinx that re-jigs the cost-share arrangement and diffuses responsibility, sounds tempting like a Hail Mary pass at the end of a losing game, but it won’t solve anything.  Ottawa’s transit problems started in the ballot box and that’s where they will be fixed.

Anyone for Mayor?

Clive Doucet