Ottawa city councillors demanding emergency transit commission meeting
Posted Oct 28, 2019 05:50:00 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
City council representatives want to talk about delays and glitches that OC Transpo users continue to experience, about six weeks after the launch of the $2.1-billion light rail Confederation Line.
A group of councillors are demanding to have an emergency transit commission meeting.
“A number of us have been discussing this, we are worried about it,” said Catherine McKenney, councillor and member of the City of Ottawa's Transit Commission. “We feel that the unreliability of both the buses and the trains are really rapidly eroding public trust in our system. I don't feel we should wait another week for the regular transit meeting.”
A transit commission meeting was supposed to happen October 16, but was cancelled and rescheduled for November 6.
McKenney, along with councillors Carol Anne Meehan and Riley Brockington, have been receiving little communication on how OC Transpo is trying to address the problems with the light rail system.
“As transit commissioners, [and] as [an] elected official, I am not getting near the communication that I require to respond to residents,” McKenney said.
If an emergency meeting is called, McKenney wants to question Rideau Transit Groups' 12 days of testing and a memo that was not sent out back in July that detailed how staff were considering “pausing the process.”
“I want answers about that 12 day period and how well the trains ran, what was happening, what were some of the things they were seeing,” asked McKenney. “And did we accept the handover and put this into revenue service before it was ready.”
McKenney is also concerned that if the trains are not operating properly during the fall season, it will be much worse come wintertime.
