The long-awaited public hearings on Ottawa’s light rail traffic system (LRT) begin Monday morning, and papers presented by key players reveal new details about the atypical design of city trains and backstage tensions.
The decade since the city council decided to bid for a new east-west line and tunnel has not turned out as expected.
A sinkhole opened during the tunnel, the train opened more than 15 months late and a myriad of technical problems stalled passengers before two trains derailed last summer.
Attorneys for the main parties, including the City of Ottawa, Rideau Transit Group, and train maker Alstom, have now presented their versions of who and what is to blame in the initial statements during four weeks of hearings.
Mayor Jim Watson could see some of the proceedings and has been called to testify on June 30, but said last week that the public inquiry was a decision made by the province with which the city should “coexist” and that he hoped he wouldn’t get carried away. of the recent reliability of the Confederate Line.
On the other hand, the builder and maintainer of the system, Rideau Transit Group, a consortium formed by ACS Infrastructure, SNC-Lavalin and Ellis Don, sees the work of the light rail commission as its opportunity for frustrated users to have the ” full photo “because under his contract” the city controls what information can be made public “.
Here’s what the initial statements say about some key issues.
The design of the train
Both the city and the Rideau Transit Group (RTG) point the finger at Alstom. The city sees it as a subcontractor RTG has not been properly managing the maintenance of the trains it supplied.
RTG said it did not want Alstom trains, but went with them because the city “left no doubt that it wanted the Alstom vehicle” during the tender process for the $ 2.1 billion contract.
The fact that a piece of Alstom train caused a derailment last August should have led the commissioner to look at why Alstom trains were chosen a decade ago, RTG lawyers say.
Emergency vehicles are parked near the scene of a derailed LRT train in Ottawa on September 19, 2021. The commission begins hearings Monday and the public can attend and watch them online at 9 a.m. (Nicholas Cleroux / Radio-Canada)
CBC News reported in 2019 that Ottawa would not receive the tested Citadis train from Alstom as expected, but a new model called the Citadis Spirit.
Alstom now explains that no train manufacturer in the world had an existing train to offer Ottawa. He joined RTG’s bidding team in late 2012 and tried to meet the city’s prices and technical demands with tight deadlines.
The city of Ottawa wanted a train to fit unusually 120-foot-long platforms, with a capacity for 24,000 passengers per hour. Alstom explains that it was more than twice the 10,000 passengers who usually carry a light rail vehicle similar to a subway car.
“To date, Citadis vehicles operating on the Ottawa Confederation line are the longest [light rail vehicles] operating in North America “.
Why the LRT was launched late
Residents watched as Rideau Transit Group failed to meet the original May 2018 delivery date for the new Confederation line, and then missed several before finally opening to passengers in September 2019. .
Ottawa City Council’s external attorneys have delayed RTG from coordinating the schedules of its subcontractors, especially train maker Alstom and Thales, who built the computer control system, but not the 2016 sinkhole. swallow part of Rideau Street.
The city was supposed to have a “limited role” as the owner in a public-private partnership and only realized that the delivery date was no longer “realistic” in 2017, they say.
A worker examines the sinkhole in June 2016 as concrete is poured to stabilize the area and protect the foundations of buildings near Rideau Street. (Patrick Pilon / Radio-Canada)
For Rideau Transit Group, however, the sinkhole had “a major cascading impact” that left the work behind for at least nine months. In addition, he alleges that “a faulty municipal infrastructure of the ground water network may have caused the sinkhole.”
Alstom, however, said the delay began long before the collapse, when the city was “more than a year behind in completing its design choices” for train cars, delaying the development of a prototype one year.
Alstom’s lawyers continue to say that the Ottawa LRT was deemed fit for service too soon.
“All parties were aware that the system was not ready for the revenue service, but the City Council and RTG went ahead,” they argue.
“Instead of further delaying the start of revenue service, the city preferred to start the system on September 14, 2019, whatever happens.”
“The result was predictable,” added Alstom’s lawyers, who argued that it made financial sense for RTG to get the final payment for the construction and enter the maintenance period when it could pass on the costs to Alstom.
The tense relationship
It’s no secret that the city of Ottawa and the Rideau traffic group have been fighting for months: they have multimillion-dollar lawsuits in court.
In the consultation documents, the city blames the consortium, which has a $ 1 billion maintenance contract for 30 years, for having responded to the LRT’s numerous operational problems in a “curve of view and ad hoc “.
“Essentially, RTG expects to receive full monthly payment for the service while offering skeleton maintenance services,” the city’s attorneys write. “When RTG is exercised, performance improves.”
Rideau Transit Group, however, presents the city of Ottawa as a “contradictory” and “inflexible” micro-manager. The consortium alleges that the city requested a $ 500,000 maintenance deduction for a broken toilet mirror.
When the LRT developed problems in the fall of 2019 that got stuck, which RTG said could have saved residents if it had had a “soft launch,” RTG’s lawyers suggest that “the city succumbed to pressure policies to act “hard”.
A crowd of light passengers is waiting for a train to arrive at Tunney’s Pasture Station on October 10, 2019. An on-board computer crashed, causing delays on the Ottawa LRT line for the third day in a row shortly after opening the system. (Kate Tenenhouse / CBC)
“The success of a [public-private partnership] The project depends on the parties being genuine partners, “RTG writes.
The commission begins hearings Monday and the public can attend and watch online at 9 p.m. They continue until July 8, and will hear dozens of witnesses, including high-profile municipal and corporate officials.
The City of Ottawa is represented by Singleton Urquhart Reynolds Vogel LLP. Rideau Transit Group’s lawyers are from Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP, and Alstom’s are from Glaholt Bowles LLP. All are Toronto-based companies.
Everything will be overseen by Commissioner William Hourigan, a judge at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Ottawa Morning7: 32 Public consultation on LRT begins
Documents released before a long-awaited public inquiry into Ottawa’s light rail system reveals new details about the city’s unusual train design and backstage tensions.