It was one of several notes Larry Gaul wrote in the weeks and months leading up to and following the LRT’s testing phase in July and August 2019 and its eventual opening in September of that year.
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Two months after the Confederation Line of Ottawa LRT system opened to the public, a senior adviser to OC Transpo suggested that communications between operator OC Transpo and Rideau Transit Maintenance, which provides maintenance on the line, were poor, noting in an email that “our recent vehicle problems on the main line are killing us.”
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Larry Gaul, who has over three decades of light rail experience in Washington, DC and Dallas, Texas, and who was hired by OC Transpo to provide operational support and evaluation as the city prepared its Stage 1 Confederation Line for operation, made the comment in a November 2019 email to RTM manager Tom Pate. It was one of several notes Gaul wrote in the weeks and months leading up to and following the LRT’s testing phase in July and August 2019 and its eventual opening, after being approved for Revenue Service Availability, in September of that year. .
On Tuesday, Gaul testified before the Ottawa LRT Commission’s public inquiry and, at times, seemed to back off, or at least explain and ameliorate, some of his frustrations as the project neared completion.
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When questioned by John McLuckie, an attorney for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279, Gaul said that, unlike his experience in DC and Dallas, where the light rail systems were operated and maintained by the same entity, the Ottawa system, with the city providing operation, but the Rideau Transit conglomerate, along with Alstom, doing maintenance, risked greater opportunities for breakdowns.
Gaul also stated that he was aware of efforts by OC Transpo director John Manconi to pressure RTM and Alstom to provide more resources to address the issues.
“There’s a phrase that Mr. Manconi used to use all the time,” Gaul said. “Was: This system will not open until it is ready to open.”
The theme of communication difficulties between the city (LRT operators) and its providers and maintainers continued during day 16 of the investigation.
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Tuesday’s other witness, Troy Charter of OC Transpo, echoed the concern that RTM, RTG’s maintenance division, should have had more people in Ottawa to address deficiencies in the system, essentially “overhiring,” especially when Confederation Line opened to the public.
Charter defended OC Transpo’s decision to place people on the Confederation Line to discover faults before the public and to issue work orders to RTM, which RTM CEO Mario Guerra, in earlier testimony, described as “an army “from people whose sole function was to find problems and report them.
Mannu Chowdhury, an attorney for conglomerate RTG, said Tuesday that approximately 900 work orders were issued to RTM in September 2019, costing RTG more than $15 million in fines, while only about 100 were issued by comparison. in each of the following three. months.
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“I think that’s the expectation that the public has,” Charter said. “If the problems didn’t exist, we wouldn’t have anything to report.”
Gaul also noted that shortly before leaving the Ottawa project in December 2019, he proposed creating a problem-solving task force with OC Transpo and RTM staff.
But Gaul, who, when the testing phase began in late July 2019, expressed doubt that the system would pass, added that things improved markedly after the first three or four days of failures forced a reboot.
Both Gaul and Charter testified Tuesday about altering the testing criteria during that period, reducing the number of two-car trains needed from 15 to 13 and lowering the required score results from 98 percent in 12 days to 96 percent. in just nine of 12 days, which had been the requirement set in 2017. The score change, Gaul said, was initially proposed by former RTG CEO John Lauch and presented at a meeting called by Manconi, then director of OC Transpo. That testimony was at odds with what Lauch said last week, when he testified that the idea was Manconi’s in an effort by the city to help RTG pass the test.
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Charter said Tuesday that he doesn’t remember for sure that Lauch initiated the change. Regardless of who initiated it, however, both Charter and Gaul indicated that the city supported it and did not feel it was done simply to facilitate RTG’s passage.
Gaul said that the initial minimum score of 98 percent was probably unattainable all the time and that a 96 percent pass rate would not affect security or the customer experience.
“I was very doubtful that 98 percent was even realistic,” Gaul said. “You would have a 94 percent day or so, then you need a series of 100 percent reliability days, and this is a whole new system. You will not get 100 percent reliability. There will be problems, so I’m not sure you could have made up the difference if you had a day or two of 94 or 95 percent.
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“From a customer perspective, they would never know the difference between 96 percent and 98 percent.”
Gaul added that it was Pat Scrimgeour, director of planning and transit customer systems for OC Transpo, who explained to him that the reduction in trains from 15 to 13 reflected lower ridership expectations.
The most pointed questioning of the day came in the late afternoon, when Alstom’s lawyer, Michael Valo, criticized Charter on several issues, including the suggestion that Charter gave the system a passing grade on August 16 during the evidence after Manconi pressured him to do so, which Charters denied, and questioning how the operator of the train that derailed in September 2021 could not have realized what was happening at the time.
Valo also questioned a number of points in the Mott MacDonald Report, an April 2022 independent review of the Confederation Line Stage 1 commissioned by the city.
