In September 2021, inspired by Canadian transit king Reece Martin and his walk of Toronto’s Yonge
subway, we decided to walk the length of the O-Train in Ottawa. This was during the federal
election, a very festive season in the Canadian capital. Before we were able to make the video,
the thing happened. No, not COVID — that was old news at this point.
We’re talking about the disappointing and embarrassing fiasco where Ottawa’s
two-year-old light metro system derailed and stayed out of service for almost two months.
[Good evening. It’s now week 4 with no train service in the capital. No date on when the system
will be back up and running.] Not wanting to rub salt in the wound, we put that video on hold.
Now that the train has been back and running for a while, we want to share
our walk and tell the story of Ottawa’s troubled train, covering the good and the bad.
We started at the westernmost of the O-Train’s 13 stations,
Tunney’s Pasture, a government campus providing parking lots and empty grass with a side of office
space. It’s here that the origin of the train is obvious — it used to be a bus rapid transit
system called the Transitway, based on bus-only roads and bus lanes. The Transitway still exists,
you can take it west from Tunney’s Pasture, but the O-Train replaced the middle 12 kilometres,
which included building a downtown tunnel because of really serious bus crowding. Walking east from
Tunney’s Pasture, we get to follow along a nice multi-use trail. This is the one that tells you
to walk your bike at every intersection, which is strange and out-of-touch, but setting aside that
complaint, the O-Train is actually impressively well integrated into Ottawa’s multi-use pathways.
Our next stop is Bayview, which connects the Confederation Line that we’re following to
the older Trillium Line, the original O-Train service built in 2001 that’s currently closed
for upgrades. While not the focus of our walk, the Trillium Line is a marvel of cheap transit.
By repurposing an existing rail corridor, they got an 8 kilometre transit line for a bargain price of
$21 million. After Bayview we continue towards the Lebreton Flats. Right now it’s a big empty
field to the west of downtown but it used to be a working class neighbourhood destroyed by fire,
rebuilt, and then intentionally destroyed to make way for a government office campus that…
didn’t actually end up getting built. The O-Train on the other hand did get built,
but it was handed over to the city 456 days late,
with city inspectors finding problems with the switches, security cameras,
fencing, waterproofing in tunnels, concrete quality, and many, many, many other things.
In the middle of the Lebreton Flats we found our next station, Pimisi, the last
stop before the O-Train goes into the tunnel under downtown Ottawa. The Confederation Line
opened to the public in September of 2019, but the problems continued. Over the next two years,
the train experienced issues with the doors after some people tried to pry them open,
reports of a sewage smell in some stations, overhead wires breaking, misshapen and cracked
wheels, and switches freezing in the winter. Then, in August 2021, a train derailed due to an axle
problem and the whole system went down for a week. But wait a second, you say, wasn’t the derailment
in September? There were actually two derailments — the second one in September that put the train
(and this video) out of service for a few months happened because of “inconsistent and incomplete
maintenance” after the first derailment. The private consortium that operates the train
put it back into service with loose bolts, and it turns out that’s… not a good idea.
Leaving Pimisi we headed towards downtown Ottawa, climbing the hill and ignoring a pretty
inconvenient detour sign to make it to Queen Street, the downtown street that the O-Train
follows under. The first downtown station is Lyon. It looks like it’s pronounced Lyon,
like the city in France, but it’s actually pronounced Lyon, like in William Lyon
Mackenzie King, 10th Prime Minister of Canada. Except that it’s not actually named after him,
it’s actually named after a lion, wait no, it’s named after the lesser known Robert Lyon,
mayor of Ottawa in 1867. Continuing down Queen Street we find the second downtown station,
Parliament, although no one’s quite sure what it’s named after.
What makes the derailment and technical issues so frustrating
is that the O-Train is actually really nice. While it uses light rail vehicles,
this isn’t a streetcar or tram that shares the road with cars. It’s fully grade-separated,
like a metro or subway. It has trains running every five minutes for most of the day,
and a capacity of more than 10,000 passengers per direction per hour, roughly comparable to a
ten lane highway. Obviously though, none of this matters if the train isn’t actually in service,
and it’s clear that this whole debacle has shaken the image of public transit in Ottawa. You hear
lots of stories about people getting frustrated enough that they buy a car, which is sad because
this isn’t a problem with public transit in general, it’s a problem with how this particular
project was built and managed by a particular private consortium. But tell that to someone
who needs to get to work or an appointment and is packed onto a crowded shuttle bus that takes
twice the time and suddenly it feels irrelevant that most other cities have trains that work.
Continuing east to the edge of downtown we see the wonderful Chateau Laurier
alongside some unfortunate choices of Ottawa urbanism. This government building currently
houses the Canadian Senate, but it used to be Ottawa’s central railway station. In the 1960s
they moved the train station to the suburbs and replaced the central tracks with what people at
the time saw as the way of the future: roads. One of these roads snakes its way up beside the old
train station and requires pedestrians to cross by means of a dark underpass. This is downtown
Ottawa, between all the tourist attractions — not some low density area without pedestrians.
The next station on our journey is Rideau, serving the Byward Market, a peaceful, car-free pedestrian
area — hey, wait a second, that’s not true — ssshhh, it has potential. Moving on, we pass by
an intersection so safe that they had to provide a cage to keep the cars safe from the pedestrians.
We’re being a little snarky here because the next section of the walk starting at
the University of Ottawa is actually pretty great. As the train comes out from its tunnel
it gains back a multi-use pathway that sticks around for the next few stations and completely
bypasses the road network, which is really the gold standard of active transportation.
This path was built using leftover space after the bus rapid transit system was converted to a train.
Our next stop along the O-Train is Lees, which comes before the Rideau River, which is different
from the Rideau Canal. One benefit Ottawa residents got from the train derailment fiasco
was free transit for December as an apology. Some people criticized it as not really free
because we’re all paying for it in the end but in this case it actually was free because it was
funded by withholding payments to the consortium that was responsible for all these mishaps. It
didn’t make up for two months of no train at all but it did encourage us to take a few extra trips.
Next we follow the multi-use trail to Hurdman, Hurdman station, which has a big bus terminal
that connects to a line of Ottawa’s bus-only Transitway. We took this Transitway to get to
the airport once and honestly there’s nothing as satisfying as being in a bus barrelling down
a dedicated roadway with no single-occupant cars or any cars at all slowing you down.
Well, except for doing the same thing in a train, but that’s less of a unique experience.
Hurdman is also a connecting point for lots of multi-use pathways.
After Hurdman we continued on the multi-use pathway to Tremblay,
which connects to the newer suburban Via Rail station built in the 1960s. This is where you
can catch trains to Montreal, Toronto, and beyond. While it’s not quite as central as
the old downtown station that we mentioned before, this suburban station is still pretty accessible,
being only 10 minutes from downtown on the O-Train. And removing the train tracks from
the Rideau Canal opened up the space to the very nice multi-use pathways of today.
After Tremblay we follow some sidewalks and a tunnel under Highway 417 to get to
Saint-Laurent station, which connects to a big mall and has a major bus
terminal where we once caught a bus to Toronto. This is where our journey gets more suburban.
It doesn’t feel like they expected anyone to actually walk east from the mall here.
Once we get to our next station, Cyrville, things get better with some decent multi-use pathways,
although it’s not very direct due to taking a big detour to get around a highway. One aspect
of the O-Train that we appreciate is that it uses Presto fare cards, which are also used in Toronto.
Unfortunately, Ottawa’s transit is kind of expensive. It has the highest fares of any system
with urban rail in Canada, and it has the second most expensive monthly pass. People often debate
between the goals of free transit and better service and we mostly fall on the side of better
service, but getting fares closer to three dollars than four also seems like a reasonable goal.
We end our walk at the current eastern terminus of the O-Train,
Blair, which is also attached to a big mall. It’s kind of unfortunate that following the
old bus roads means the O-Train isn’t as close to as many homes as it could have been under a
different alignment, especially in the east but also the west, but at the same time reusing old
infrastructure to get more transit for the same amount of money is a strategy we can appreciate.
So that’s our experience with the O-Train. On one hand,
it was genuinely impressive coming to a smaller Canadian city and encountering what feels 85%
like a real subway or metro system. We love the frequencies and the fact that it doesn’t
interact with traffic at all, another benefit of reusing the old transitway. On the other hand,
it’s embarrassing when you have people visit and you have to tell them “yeah, we have a train; no,
it’s not currently in service”. Fortunately the future is looking pretty bright. When you include
Line 1, which we walked, as well as Line 2, the O-Train is currently about 20 kilometres long.
Another 43 kilometres of transit is currently under construction and due for completion in
the next few years. A further 28 kilometres have been proposed. We’re not sure there’s
any overarching simple explanation for why this one system has had so many problems, but there
is a public inquiry underway that will hopefully shed some light by the end of the summer and we
have to assume that these problems were temporary growing pains of a new system. Fingers crossed.
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