Kim Moriarty reports on how when LRT is finally complete, it could mean big changes for Ottawa residents, and not all positive. Photos by Kim Moriarty.
People all over Ottawa have been waiting six years and three months since the City of Ottawa’s municipal council first unanimously approved a new LRT transit system. This process has been a game of waiting for many Ottawa residents.
Kirstin Pulles has been waiting for the LRT system since she moved to Ottawa in 2016. Standing in the cold snowy winter days or in the scorching heat, she said that there have been multiple times where a full bus has driven past her and made her late for class or wait for the next bus just to get home from work or grocery shopping.
“I am sure I spent at least an hour on the bus each day, other days two or three hours and so I’ve adapted to this,” said Pulles, describing her experience as a commuter.
“I’ll do my readings on the bus—I’ll eat my food on the bus. The bus becomes a place where you live because you have to.” – Kirstin Pulles, Free Transit Ottawa volunteer
Pulles said she dreams of an Ottawa where mobility is reliable and accessible for everyone while taking into account the current global warming state.
“Transit is the place where social justice and the environmental movement meet . . . You can build a functioning transit system in the city that would work for everybody and where there’s less stigma but there’s also reduced emissions,” she said.
According to her, it is this sentiment that led her to become involved with Free Transit Ottawa, a local advocacy group. The group comprises of environmental and social justice activists who view public transit as having a crucial role in reversing climate change. One can find Pulles and fellow group members riding the bus in Ottawa.
Transit challenges
Pulles said she was inspired to challenge city councillors to a transit week challenge. This challenge, she explained, comprised of a week during which constituents pushed their city councillors to take the bus for all their transportation needs.
It all started as a joke, said Pulles. “Imagine if we could just get them to ride the bus, then they’d understand. Then it turned to maybe we actually could.”
Pulles said she wanted city councillors to get on the bus so they could see the problems first hand, to show them that there is strong support for transit and to keep city councillors accountable on the transit platforms they ran on.
According to the City of Ottawa, the city’s population from 2011 will increase by about 400,000 people by the year 2036.
This anticipated population increase means needing to make the daily commute of people all over the Ottawa-Gatineau region all the more efficient. For Ottawa city councillors, that would mean the extension of the existing LRT system—the O-Train.
Pro’s and cons of the new LRT line
The new LRT line will be called “Confederation Line”—phase one of the largest infrastructure projects in the history of Ottawa—costing $2.1 billion. The contract to build the transit system was awarded to the Rideau Transit Group (RTG) in 2013, following which they began construction that has since been delayed four times.
On March 5, RTG’s chief executive officer, Peter Lauch, announced during a city finance and economic development committee meeting that the group would not be able to meet the then-anticipated operational date of Mar. 31.
Under the City of Ottawa and RTG’s contract, the company has 60 days to provide a new operational date. Lauch and John Manconi, Ottawa’s general manager of transportation, said the date that the city can now expect the transit system to be handed over by will be July 1 of this year—Canada Day.
As of now, RTG has until the end of June to ensure the transit system is operational. Members of the city’s transit commission say they are confident that RTG will meet the new operational deadline, but transit advocates and OC Transpo bus drivers say they are more concerned about how the launch of the LRT will affect the rest of the transit system.
Allan Hubley, Kanata South city councillor and the chair of the transit commission, said the new transit system will be more reliable than the existing one.
“The LRT is going to connect the city through all of the different communities and create a better commuter experience for people,” Hubley said.
Hubley said many of his constituents commute to the downtown core every day. Hubley said having the LRT accessible to his constituents can eliminate time spent on the road, leaving them unaffected from accidents or other delays outside the LRT line.
“The current mobile split tells us 22 per cent of the people use the buses,” she said. “Part of the business case as to why we had to do LRT is that we can’t add any more buses because we can’t get them into the downtown core,” explained Hubley.
Hubley added that “reports expect the 22 per cent ridership will grow to 25 per cent when the LRT is operational.”
He also explained the comfortability of the train and how it’s different from taking the bus or driving.
“It’s hard to imagine that kind of commute when you are either used to the bus or your car, but I believe people will embrace it.” Allan Hubley, Kanata South city councillor on the new LRT line
With the completion of the LRT line, Hubley explained that the bus and LRT system will work complementary to each other. He said the system will be based on a hub and spoke model with the buses designed to get riders to the LRT stations themselves.
Being the chair of the transit commission, Hubley is not only responsible for the LRT but also responsible for the rest of transit in the city. He said there will great improvements to our transit system that riders will embrace but those changes can’t be made until the LRT line is completed.
Julia Szwarc, a volunteer with Free Transit Ottawa, is concerned about these changes. To Szwarc, buses aren’t the only transit system that needs to be improved to get people to the LRT. She said she thinks bike lanes are being overlooked as a transit method to help people get to the LRT. Other transit options would be to create a high-occupancy vehicle lane (HOV) on Bank Street to better the flow of traffic, said Szwarc.
“The main concern that I have is that some routes will be cancelled once the LRT is rolled out,” said Szwarc.
Bus drivers doomed?
On July 25, 2018, Manconi said at a city council meeting that 345 OC Transpo bus drivers will be laid off once the Confederation Line is operational. This is because OC Transpo announced in 2016 that it would be taking 170 to 180 buses off the road meaning fewer bus drivers will be needed.
During construction, OC Transpo hired hundreds of new bus drivers to accommodate the detour routes due to the construction of the LRT. Most of these new hires will be left jobless but are unaware of when this will happen.
“Ideally, I’d love to see those routes that will be cancelled and those drivers be redistributed to have better service to get people to the LRT,” said Szwarc.
E, an OC Transpo bus driver who wished to remain anonymous, said this change won’t affect him personally, but he’ll have to say goodbye to many of his close coworkers. E has worked for OC Transpo for four years and has applied to become an LRT operator with the hopes that it will keep his job safe from future layoffs.
E said that he and his coworkers are concerned about the future of transport in Ottawa. He explained that the demands of drivers now are unreasonable.
Recovery times, which is the time a driver has to rest between finishing a route to starting a new one, are being shortened. E said this is due to the detours that have been put in place.
Because recovery times are being shortened and detours are causing routes to take longer, E explained that this affects the driver’s next trip.
E added that he is concerned that more will be demanded of bus drivers. He said he could be forced back to work on weekends when this is his only time to spend with his family. Flexibility was a lot greater before, E explained. He said drivers could be forced back into night shifts or split shifts. A split shift is when a driver has a time gap between their routes.
Pulles said there are different improvements the city and OC Transpo can take into consideration, like citizen and bus driver input, when making changes to the transit system. Pulles said that this was one of the “driving forces” that pushed her to organize the transit week challenge.
City councillor Glen Gower, from ward six Stittsville, took the transit challenge head-on by documenting his experiences.
“The one day that week, when I didn’t take transit, was when my dog had a vet appointment in the south part of Ottawa . . . that’s a good example of hearing from residents who don’t have the option to take a car and how that impacts their ability to get around in the city; whether it’s to get their kids to an appointment or to do something outside of commuting hours, it can be a real challenge,” said Gower.
The point of this challenge was to bring transit issues to the attention of city councillors, explained Pulles, and Gower can be an example of this.
“I do think it is important that councillors have an awareness… we spend over half a billion dollars a year on public transit and personally, I am on the transit commission and in order to make the best decisions, I need to have an understanding of how things work and how riders use and experience the system.” – Glen Gower, city councillor for ward six Stittsville.
Pulles said she is interested in challenging city councillors to use transit for years to come. She said she hopes this will inspire city councillors to reduce fares and make improvements to the transit system that Ottawa residents need.
