Ottawa
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Our emphasis on selecting the lowest bidder for procurement is a serious issue.
A saying I use all the time is, "If you think a professional is expensive, just wait until you hire an amateur."
Except the costs for stage 1 and 2 per kilometre are the second lowest of all Canadian transit projects, adjust for inflation (REM is 1st, but they got more ROW for free). We could have built a heavy rail system, but it's not like anything is irredeemable with it as it is. The costs of running R1 service are a drop in the bucket when you look at what MTL and Toronto are paying for their new builds vs what we pay for ours.
You can call it unreliable. You can call it dinky. But good luck trying to call it expensive.
https://youtu.be/6_bSx4eqtdE
Yes, you're 100% in it being cheap.
I think I should have been more clear, it was cheap to build, but now look at it. Not just from it needing to be repaired, but peopels time is wasted, more busses need drivers and diesel fuel, how many man hours were spent investigating the solution, testing, and implementing. There's many downstream effects of it being cheaper initially that can be hard to see or measure.
But yes, it was cheap to build, especially the eastern extension which is a good thing, transit projects in NA are WAY too expensive.
Most of those man-hours are paid for by RTG et. al, not on taxpayer dime. Lost productivity is harder to quantify, but both that and the diesel and bus operator hours are drops in the bucket compared to the transitway days. It is easy to find pictures of the bumper to bumper bus pileups on Albert and Slater.
I may remind you that the city paid an unprecedented amount of this project out of pocket. Doing it right (Automated light metro, like the SkyTrain or REM) wasn't an option, especially for a project with as tenuous support as the LRT had.
It's easy to criticize, but in many ways, Watson had no other choice than to stay the course, at least if he wanted the project to go ahead and to stay in office. As imperfect and inept as he was, he had a vision for the city, not something that can be said of many Ottawa mayors.
Fun fact: As it is now, zero major changes would be needed to run the trains at GoA4 (full automation with no driver onboard), just changing the settings on the onboard computer (VOBC).
We were supposed to have GoA4 in the yard, but the fact that has not been implemented displays the level of faith in the system...