More rider feedback on day 9 of Ottawa's train shortage
Doug Hempstead | CBC | Posted: January 30, 2020 1:11 PM | Last Updated: January 30, 2020
Not as many satisfied or unbothered stories as yesterday
Good morning commuters!
Yesterday I presented some of the tales of woe, meh and satisfaction I've been sent from a week where we've seen hundreds of buses cancelled and four straight days with fewer-than-required trains.
It's been nine straight weekdays overall, with eight or nine tunning today.
As you might expect, the first round of stories attracted some new tales.
The mehs and satisfied ones have disappeared.
"I waited more than 40 minutes for my bus. Two of them were cancelled due to the train shortage, and guess what? The next two were too full and the drivers didn't bother stopping.
I live in Barrhaven and we were at least 10 people waiting. Some were getting so frustrated that they even went on the Transitway and tried to stop a bus passing by to get on it (I don't blame them for trying).
The bus obviously didn't stop.
We ended up driving our car to Tunney's Pasture to catch the train from there. My neighbour's daughter had an exam at 8:30 a.m. and we were still waiting for the bus at around 7:40 a.m. It takes 50 minutes to get downtown from where we live.
Imagine the stress. That's unacceptable. We can't rely on the service at all!
People are getting late to school, to work or to important appointments. It's as if OC Transpo has zero respect for people who spend their hard-earned money on an expensive monthly pass (in terms of the quality of service that we're getting for what we pay).
I've never experienced such a poor service in my life. I didn't grow up in Ottawa, but apparently it used to be worse before. I wonder how that's even possible." — Soha
"I've honestly given up with public transportation in Ottawa. The trains are not the only problems.
I'm someone who doesn't need LRT but deals with the separate nightmare that are the buses consistently being late or not showing up at all.
When I say late, I don't mean five or 10 minutes, more like 20 to 30 minutes.
I never assume I will be on time anymore because it changes every day. Frankly, I am planning on getting my license as a result." — Ian
"People may remember years ago NASA did a review of the potential 'points of single failure' on the Apollo program. Those small items which, if they failed and had no backup, could cause catastrophic failure of the rocket systems.
The LRT suffers a similar problem.
Many buses lead to Tunney's Pasture or Blair station every morning, which is fine so long as the linear LRT system works. One failure and it crashes the system.
The system lacks resiliency to these all too frequent problems.
As someone who travelled on the London Tube for many years, there are multiple workarounds, on admittedly a very much larger sprawling network, to get from point A to B.
Here we have all our eggs in one increasingly unreliable basket." — John
"One of my colleagues would take a bus from her home in the Avalon area of Orléans to get to Blair.
However, so many of the buses from her area were cancelled this morning., she had to take her car to get to work." — Rita