The long-awaited public hearing on Ottawa’s Light Rail System (LRT) kicks off Monday morning, and documents submitted by key players reveal new details about the atypical design of city trains and strained backstage relations.
The decade since the city council decided to take bids for a new east-west line and tunnel did not turn out as expected.
A hole opened during tunneling, the train opened more than 15 months late and countless technical problems blocked passengers before two trains derailed last summer.
Lawyers for key countries – including the city of Ottawa, Rideau Transit Group and train maker Alstom – have now set out their versions of who and what is to blame in the introductory statements for the four-week hearings.
Mayor Jim Watson may oversee some of the proceedings and was called to testify on June 30th, but said last week that the public inquiry was a provincial decision that the city should “live” with, and he hopes no to take away from the recent reliability of the Confederation Line.
On the other hand, the creator and maintainer of the Rideau Transit Group – a consortium of ACS Infrastructure, SNC-Lavalin and Ellis Don – sees the work of the Light Rail Commission as a chance for frustrated riders to get the “full picture” because under his contract “The city controls what information can be made public.”
Here is what the introductory statements say on some key issues.
The design of the train
The city and the Rideau Transit Group (RTG) point the finger at Alstom. The city sees it as a subcontractor RTG has failed to properly maintain the trains it has delivered.
RTG said it did not want Alstom trains, but went with them because the city “left no doubt that it wanted an Alstom vehicle” during the bidding process for the $ 2.1 billion contract.
The fact that part of an Alstom train caused derailment last August should prompt the commissioner to consider why Alstom trains were chosen a decade ago, RTG lawyers say.
Emergency vehicles are parked near the site of a derailed LRT train in Ottawa on September 19, 2021. The Commission begins hearings on Monday and the public can attend and watch online at 9 a.m. (Nicholas Clare / Radio Canada)
CBC News reported in 2019 that Ottawa is not receiving the proven Alstom Citadis train, as expected, but a brand new model called the Citadis Spirit.
Alstom now explains that no train manufacturer in the world had an existing train to supply to Ottawa. He joined the RTG application team late, back in 2012, and tried to meet the city’s prices and technical requirements in a short time.
The city of Ottawa wants a train that can hold unusually long 120-meter platforms, with a capacity of 24,000 passengers per hour. That’s more than twice the 10,000 passengers that typically carry a light rail vehicle, and it’s like a subway car, Alstom explains.
“To date, Citadis vehicles running on the Ottawa Confederation are the longest [light rail vehicles] operating in North America. “
Why LRT starts late?
Residents watched as Rideau Transit Group failed to meet the initial delivery date of the new Confederate line in May 2018 and then missed several others before finally opening its doors to passengers in September 2019.
Ottawa’s outside lawyers have noted the delay in RTG, which does not coordinate the schedules of its subcontractors, especially train manufacturers Alstom and Thales, who built the computer control system – but not the 2016 hole that engulfed part of Rideau Street.
The city should have had a “limited role” as owner in a public-private partnership and realized that the date of the broadcast was no longer “realistic” in 2017, they say.
A worker surveyed the hole in June 2016 while pouring concrete to stabilize the area and protect the foundations of nearby buildings on Rideau Street. (Patrick Pylon / Radio Canada)
For the Rideau Transit Group, however, the hole had a “significant cascading impact” that left work for at least nine months. In addition, it is claimed that “the defective municipal water supply infrastructure in the soil may have caused a sinkhole.”
However, Alstom said the delay began long before the sinking, when the city was “more than a year late in finalizing its design decisions” for the wagons, delaying the development of a prototype by a year.
Alstom’s lawyers continue to argue that Ottawa’s LRT was considered operational too early.
“All countries knew that the system was not ready to serve revenue, but the city and RTG kept going,” they said.
“Instead of further delaying the start of the revenue service, the city chose to launch the system by September 14, 2019, no matter what.”
“The result was predictable,” added Alstom’s lawyers, who said it made financial sense for RTG to receive its final payment for construction and enter a maintenance period when it could pass on Alstom’s costs.
The busy relationship
It’s no secret that the city of Ottawa and the Rideau Transit Group have been fighting for months – they are suing multimillion-dollar cases.
In the investigation documents, the city accuses the consortium, which has a 30-year $ 1 billion maintenance contract, of responding to LRT’s many operational problems in a “short-sighted and ad hoc” way.
“Essentially, RTG expects to receive the full monthly maintenance fee while providing skeletal maintenance services,” the city’s lawyers wrote. “When RTG is loaded, productivity improves.”
However, the Rideau Transit Group describes the city of Ottawa as a “competitive” and “inflexible” micro-manager. The consortium claims the city has requested a $ 500,000 deduction for maintenance due to a broken toilet mirror.
When the LRT developed problems in the autumn of 2019 that congested riders – something that RTG could spare residents if there was a “soft launch” – RTG’s lawyers suggest that the city has succumbed to political pressure to act. “Firm”.
Crowds of light passengers are waiting for a train to arrive at Tunney’s Pasture Station, October 10, 2019. The on-board computer broke down, causing delays on the Ottawa LRT line for the third day in a row, not after the system opened. (Kate Tennenhaus / CBC)
“The success of a [public-private partnership] The project depends on the fact that the countries are real partners, “RTG writes.” Currently, RTG parties’ relations with the city are in a difficult situation and must be reset for the people of Ottawa. “
The commission begins hearings on Monday and the public can attend and watch online at 9 a.m. They run until July 8 and will hear dozens of witnesses, including high-ranking city 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 lawyers are from Glaholt Bowles LLP. All are Toronto based companies.
Everything will be monitored by Commissioner William Hurrigan, a judge at the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Ottawa 7:32 a.m. Public investigation begins at LRT
Documents released ahead of the long-awaited public inquiry into Ottawa’s light rail system reveal new details about the city’s atypical train design and strained backstage relations.
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