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Manifesto Multilinko 2
Mostly about Ottawa
Why Ottawa’s Citadis Spirit trains will never work
Summary
The City of Ottawa bought the wrong trains for Line 1 (Confederation Line), using the wrong process, and then doubled down by buying more of the wrong trains for Line 1 Stage 2, and now we’re fucked.The train will never do what it is supposed to do, because what it is supposed to do is an impossible combination of contradictory design elements.
The only future for Ottawa LRT Line 1 is to rip up the whole thing and install new tracks with new trains on a new alignment which will probably never happen or if it does is decades away.
Details
1. Fundamentally the wrong procurement process
The city should have specified:- A proven system (non-negotiable)
- The number of passengers per hour per direction (pphpd)
- The frequency of the trains
Why multiple outside experts? Because selecting the train type and then the specific train is the most fundamental decision of the entire line. If you pick the wrong train, you’re fucked.
The city absolutely should not have been in the business of specifying the train type.
But instead, the city relied on councillors (who are not rail experts) and staff (who are not rail experts) and a single flawed, skewed expert report that clearly was all designed to select light rail as the vehicle type even though the vendors and other cities universally advised heavy rail for Ottawa’s required passenger volumes.
2. Fundamentally the wrong procurement design
Once they chose the wrong type of vehicle there’s basically nothing that would have fixed the procurement other than an expert review step that could take you back to the beginning. But there was no such step.After that everything just cascades into one bad decision after another.
The city apparently created a procurement where the bidders were bound to specific train vendors. So once they selected a bidder, that bidder only has a small number of train vendors it can work with, all other vendors are excluded.
Then the city ridiculously overspecified the train. In particular, the city wanted a light rail train that worked like a heavy rail train, which is just, well, stupid. A sedan is not a truck. They’re just fundamentally different things. You can’t put a different undercarriage on a sedan and it magically becomes a truck. You can’t do some Wile E. Coyote thing and stick a rocket onto a skateboard and it becomes a reliable transit system.
The city trapped itself in a loop where it was asking for a light rail train that could do heavy rail train things, and it wanted a proven train, but there is no such proven train, because what they were asking for is impossible, so RTG proposes some cobbled-together CAF train, which the city rejects, and then we get a last minute substitution of an Alstom train because that’s apparently the only other vendor that RTG has available anyway.
What’s supposed to happen is the vendors tell you what train type based on your few priority requirements and then you have a procurement where you invite ALL vendors to make proposals, then you pick a specific train based on their proposals and then you design the entire system, rails and all, around the train you’ve picked.
3. We literally bought a train off a PowerPoint
I feel bad for both RTG and Alstom, who are in an impossible position. The city has specified an imaginary train. No train can meet the city’s ridiculous contradictory specifications. What vendor is going to tell them that and kill the procurement?So the city rejects the CAF train as unproven (because no such proven train exists) and then in the weirdest twist of the entire catastrophe, they buy an Alstom train, an entirely imaginary Alstom train hurriedly cobbled together with components from trains in cities that have completely different requirements.
It’s literally a PowerPoint that says sure here’s your impossible train and it’s proven in the sense that a brand new car design with a proven sparkplug is proven.
There also should have been an expert review step at this point which should also have taken us back to the very beginning, but there wasn’t.
I’m not going to cut out and paste every single slide, you can see them all in “Ottawa Light Rail Transit Project: Tunney’s Pasture to Blair Station, Vehicle Ad-Hoc CCM, July 18, 2012” (PDF) – or see an Internet Archive copy (PDF). (CCM stands for Commercially Confidential Meeting.) Here are three examples of their slides:
Different vehicles, different climates, different passenger volumes and still nowhere close to “at least 5 years in revenue service”. (As a side note, when they say SNCF Nantes Citadis, they mean the Dualis, a vehicle that had been in service for barely a year.)
And the city accepts it.
And now we’re fucked.
Also the rails are wrong for the train, and the track curves are wrong for the train (or probably for any train), and RTG/RTM is terrible at its job, and Alstom is trying to conjure up expert rail staff in a small city in a continent with very few expert rail staff to start with, and we froze the budget at an amount that was too small and constrained the entire system build-out, but that’s all a bonus on top of the fundamentally wrong chain of decisions.
And there were no consequences whatsoever for the Mayor, Councillors, staff, and private sector consultants and contractors so we can be guaranteed that there is no disincentive to just repeat this same disaster all over again, which is what we continue to see in big-bang public and private sector implementations of new services over and over again.
4a. Also we screwed Toronto!
As a bonus, in an apparent copy-paste of Ottawa’s procurement, Toronto has two lines that will use these fundamentally ill-suited trains. They might escape some of the disaster through lower passenger loads and better rails, but that seems unlikely.4b. And we screwed Quebec City!
Quebec City has inexplicably also chosen the Citadis Spirit for its tramway.5. Why the Citadis Spirit will never work
Our train is some jumble of components that are trying to take a light rail train (a train designed for light suburban use) and make it do heavy rail things (a train designed for intensive frequent core system use). This is impossible. Even on the best platform in the world it would be impossible, and there are plenty of indications that the Dualis wasn’t the best platform to start with anyway.We should have just bought a proven metro (subway type) train, or at worst bought Calgary’s high-floor light rail vehicles or basically anything proven that would have been more suited to our actual requirements than a low-floor light rail suburban surface train.
Anyway, in the unlikely event you want to read the actual details, I have written other thousands of words including:
- Revisiting Ottawa’s 2009 and 2012 Rail System Selection
- Is there a way forward for Ottawa’s LRT?
- Citadis Dualis and Citadis Spirit tram-train
I don’t know if I have much more to say, there are only so many ways you can frame a fundamentally wrong decision that had no consequences for any of the decisionmakers and that has trapped the entire transit-using city in a situation that would take billions of dollars (and widespread admissions of total failure) to fix.
Why Ottawa’s Citadis Spirit trains will never work
Summary The City of Ottawa bought the wrong trains for Line 1 (Confederation Line), using the wrong process, and then doubled down by buying more of the wrong trains for Line 1 Stage 2, and now we&…
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