Deachman: News flash — LRT did NOT break down in that winter storm

How’s a columnist supposed to rail against rail when the trains keep running?

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Published Jan 16, 2024 • Last updated 1 hour ago • 3 minute read

On the weekend, the LRT worked better than anyone could have reasonably predicted, given its well-documented aversion to weather events. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

It was going to be a slam-dunk of a column. The snows that came down like Dylan Thomas’s wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays this past weekend would surely overpower our enfeebled, weather-phobic light-rail system and knock the trains out, one after the other. Rum-laden St. Bernards would be dispatched to dig through avalanches and rescue trapped passengers from Blair to Bayview. Travellers would shake their fists at OC Transpo, and social media would spill over with vitriol.

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But it didn’t happen.

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Mother Nature even had hubris on her side. Recall the previous Tuesday, when Environment Canada predicted up to 20 cm of snow. Nowhere near that much fell, at least not in the city, but the following day, a memorandum from transit boss Renée Amilcar explained how OC Transpo, Rideau Transit Maintenance and the city’s Public Works Department had worked together to keep transit moving: running extra trains, de-icing overhead wires, maximizing carbon strips (whatever that means) and deploying staff to monitor switches and other infrastructure.

I’m sure everyone was anxious for her update; who among us, after all, went to bed the night before thinking that all would go smoothly and end well?

Yet Jon MacLean, who relies on the trains for three or four round trips each week, found a somewhat annoying subtext to the message. “Don’t congratulate yourself for doing what we expect you to do,” he said when I met him Friday at the St. Laurent station.

MacLean was one of a handful of LRT riders I spoke with that day in advance of the big weekend storm that we all just KNEW was going to send service off the rails. What, I wanted to understand, goes through riders’ minds regarding the LRT when the weather office issues winter storm warnings? How were they going to feel on Saturday when they couldn’t get to their pharmacy, to work, to pottery class, to see friends and family?

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Instead, they DID get to those places. Oh, sure, there were some transit holdups and kinks, most — at least the ones that I saw and heard about — related to buses and road-clearing. Some articulated buses got stuck, as they are prone to, but there WAS a tonne of snow, and some allowances have to be made for that.

I watched one would-be bus passenger at a stop on Somerset Street West, unable to summit the mountain that a street plow had left between the sidewalk and her bus. That particular impasse was overcome, though, when the bus driver drove slowly for half a block until a break in the snowbank appeared, allowing the woman to get on; I only hope all drivers were as kind.

But back to the LRT: it worked better than anyone could have reasonably predicted, given its well-documented aversion to weather events. For those who, like myself, expected to come out of the weekend railing against the rail, OC’s success was, I’ll admit … bewildering. Until now, there was always something reliable about its unreliability. This time, the expected failures around which Ottawans regularly rally weren’t there.

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Gone was the opportunity to use satisfyingly terrible headlines, such as “Snow Way Around It,” “LRT Takes a Powder,” “Riders Left to Chill” or “Snowcation at the Station.”

Instead, there was a strange sense of “What now?” and “What might this mean when the next storm comes?” Or, dare I even think it, “Have we arrived?” Has Ottawa’s LRT become the equivalent of a cloudy day when you’re uncertain about whether you should take an umbrella? MacLean tried to remain levelheaded about LRT and the weather. “Frustration isn’t going to change anything,” he said. “When the weather’s bad, I just set out half an hour earlier.”

That makes sense; even the optimist in me thinks it’s still far too early to applaud OC Transpo. These successes during a storm-and-a-half don’t provide nearly enough data to reach any reliable conclusion about the fixes being applied to LRT.

But they are encouraging. If you’ve spent much time at all on the trains, you know how dramatically they slow down on curves. Maybe, just maybe, things are actually turning a corner? Perhaps. But there’s still a lot of winter left. Don’t put those headlines away just yet.

Born in Fort William, a city that no longer appears on maps, Citizen columnist Bruce Deachman has called Ottawa home for most of his life.

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