ottawa: another bad day for inter-agency communication

Somehow, a construction project started on Ottawa's Slater Street without anyone warning the transit agency, even though this street has crucial bus lanes that form part of the region's busway network.  The result: long lines of trapped buses stretched across the city, and new barriers to pedestrian access to transit:

Moral:  Transit is always an inter-agency endeavor, dependent on many actors in the city apart from the transit agency.  The road authority, the land use authority, and the authority that supervises and licenses construction can all undermine transit with a few careless steps.  Your transit will always be only as good as your inter-agency communication. 

  

Comments

[Dan]

I have some nice photos of this traffic jam on the Transitway that extends all the way West to Bayview station.

[Corey Burger]

An excellent argument could be made by this little mess-up for having agreements between cities and transit agencies wherein if a physical bus lane is closed another lane is dedicated during construction.

[anonymouse]

That's part of the compromise of running buses on streets. The transit agency gets the ROW off its books and isn't financially responsible for its maintenance, but at the same time it loses control of the ROW where its service and its maintenance.

[David in Ottawa]

Follow-up article with more info:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Ottawans+fume+over+delays/3358577/story.html

I can't help but think this is part of the lack of BRT's ability to plant itself in the mental maps of the populace, including in particular those of the utility companies and the roads authority. It seems highly unlikely if light rail was running on Slater that anyone would have dared contemplate digging up tracks or digging up the road beside tracks without considering the consequences on the light rail system. Even if it somehow managed to get past the management types at the utility and the city, the construction crew on the ground would have had to wonder about it before doing anything. It's not like they would just show up, put up a few cones across the tracks once one train had gone by and start cutting the rails before the next shows up, after all. But buses, well, buses are flexible right, so they can go around obstacles. And so they have to.

[Carl]

The article David posted is depressing. This closure occurs in a city which has declared BRT to the primary form of transit in a country which has high transit usage.

It does show the lack of permanence and priority for bus transit capacity, and while Jarrett may argue this is cultural, it is unfortunately also reality in North America - whether expressed as the fact that police, delivery trucks and taxis park in bus lanes with no consequence when it's convenient for them, or that a main bus transfer station on our bridge route in Seattle will be eliminated when the bridge is rebuilt with no replacement provide.

[Dan]

Ottawa is in terrible shape this summer with all of these construction projects. The main bike path in the West is closed for construction and the alternate route, Carling, is also under construction.

Whether I bike or bus to work, there are huge delays.

[Wad]

What happened in the photo that people had to climb out of the bus window and pommel-horse over the concrete barrier?

[David in Ottawa]

The concrete barrier is up to protect the worksite (a BRT platform being rebuilt) from wayward traffic.

The drivers refused to open the doors (understandably - the drivers would get in no end of trouble for letting people off in such a location) so the people who were sick of not going anywhere had no choice but to get out by the windows.

[Matt Fisher]

The current closure of the O-Train, which was supposed to have reopened on August 15, has been held back to the end of the month, and this sucks. I wish it were back in service, but Ottawa is currently a bus city, not a rail city. :(