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The City of Ottawa has laid out its testing plans for the Trillium Line LRT and promised that councillors will be updated daily on test results.
That commitment to openness about the testing of the Trillium Line is a marked change from the secrecy that surrounded testing of Stage 1, the Confederation Line, in 2019 — a secrecy that was condemned in the 2022 judicial inquiry into problems on the Confederation Line.
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A “high-level summary” of Trillium Line testing from Michael Morgan, the city’s director of rail construction, is to be delivered to the LRT sub-committee at its May 31 meeting.
It says the Trillium Line, which runs north-south from Bayview to Limebank with a spur to the Ottawa airport, will operate for 14 days with full simulated passenger service and must maintain a 98.5-per-cent on-time performance. That means stopping at each station for no more than three minutes and departing within 30 seconds of the scheduled time. The 98.5-per-cent target will be calculated from a rolling average over the 14-day testing period.
The builder, TransitNEXT, will also have to meet a reliability standard “such that the performance criteria for Trial Running are achieved and that would otherwise lead to zero performance deductions during the Maintenance Period,” the report says.
The 14-day trial run will be followed by a seven-day test of “failure scenario management.”
“This segment is specifically dedicated to testing various failure management scenarios typical of those encountered in regular Revenue Service such as door issues and immobilized trains. The pass/fail outcome for Trial Running acceptance is not determined by this segment,” Morgan’s report says.
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A summary of the day’s test results will be provided to councillors on each business day during the testing period, the report says.
That daily summary of results was missing from Confederation Line testing five years ago. In his scathing assessment of the troubled construction and operation of the Confederation Line, Justice William Hourigan reserved some of his harshest criticism for how councillors were kept in the dark during testing. He blamed former mayor Jim Watson, former city clerk Steve Kanellakos and former transit general manager John Manconi.
When the Confederation Line trains performed poorly during the first three days of testing in the summer of 2019, Manconi drafted a memo to inform councillors of the problem, but Kanellakos ordered him not to send it, Hourigan wrote
“The Commission further finds that Manconi revealed, in a moment of candour, the real reason the July 31, 2019, memorandum was not sent,” Hourigan wrote. “He testified that, if he released it, he feared the council would “ask too many questions.”
Hourigan accused Kanellakos of deliberately misleading council about poor test results. Kanellakos resigned just days before Hourigan released his report. Watson didn’t run for re-election in 2022 and Manconi left Ottawa for a job in Texas with LRT builder STV.
No opening date has been set for the Trillium Line, which is already two years behind schedule. Transit General Manager Renée Amilcar has maintained the train will be running by spring, although Morgan says a start in August or September is more likely.
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