Trillium Line LRT delayed again, City of Ottawa subcommittee told

Article content

The opening date for Ottawa’s Trillium Line LRT continues to slide, with a target for revenue service now ranging from June right through until September.

That would push the north-south Trillium Line linking Bayview Station to Limebank Road with a spur to the Ottawa airport two years behind the original contracted opening date.

Article content

As recently as last week, Transit General Manager Renée Amilcar said the Trillium Line was on track for an opening this spring. On Thursday, however, director of construction Mike Morgan told the city’s light-rail sub-committee that driver training and final software testing of telephone and alarm lines could add months to that.

Article content

At least three more months are needed to train all the operators needed for full service, Morgan said. In addition, software glitches and potentially other unexpected bugs make nailing down a start date impossible, he said.

“For anyone to pick a date, we need to see the trains running reliably throughout the day and over weekends and we’re not at that point yet,” Morgan said. “Once we get to that point, we can be more definitive.

“As we’re testing the system, we’re trying to find issues and … To the extent that we find issues now, we need time to correct them and that has an impact on our confidence when we can open.”

The Trillium Line was originally supposed to be ready for August 2022, but various delays, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, slowed construction. The city had hoped to have the line ready for the 2023 school year. That got pushed back to December 2023, then spring 2024.

News of even more delays clearly frustrated councillors.

“We’ve had delay after delay after delay,” River Ward Coun. Riley Brockington told reporters after the meeting. “It seems with every update here at the sub-committee we get an announcement that it will be delayed yet again.

Article content

“Obviously, building an LRT line you’re going to have delays. I think most reasonable people can expect that. But we’ve done this once already,” he said, noting the contractor had already been allowed to “take a breath” and revise its timelines.

“We need the train to be safe. We need to thoroughly test it. We need to know that whatever bugs they find are addressed… But, if people aren’t adhering to deadlines, if people aren’t honouring contracts … then I do believe people need to be held accountable. The people of Ottawa are exhausted.”

Brockington was also frustrated by delays opening a pedestrian bridge crossing the Rideau River between Carleton University and Vincent Massey Park. The bridge, which is part of the Trillium Line project, has been in place since last summer, but remains fenced off to users.

Morgan said the contractor was waiting for warmer weather to do the final weatherproofing of the bridge and to finish electrical work. He would not say when the pedestrian bridge might open.

Earlier in the meeting, the sub-committee was briefed on how the city’s response to recommendations of the 2022 judicial inquiry into problems with the construction and operation of the Confederation Line. That irony wasn’t lost on sub-committee chair Steve Desroches.

Article content

“Every day the train’s not operating is frustrating to me and to the citizens of Ottawa, (but) this is not a problem that’s going to be solved by lawyers,” Desroches said.

“These key pieces are essential to the safety and the long-term operation of the system so that, when we launch it, it’s truly ready to go. It’s always ironic that, at the same meeting where we’re talking about this project, we go over those very, very hard lessons we learned from the first stage of the LRT and that’s to not have a dysfunctional relationship with our contractor.

“We have to remember the experience we had with Stage 1. We don’t want to repeat that.”

Article content