You'd be surprised what a difference it makes to accessibility to always have a redundant elevator. Elevators break down surprisingly often. I never really appreciated them until I tried pushing my kids in a stroller years ago through the very inaccessible Montreal underground. Making a person...

In fact the only place in the system that lacked a redundant elevator was one part of Blair station that was from the original transitway. It's now getting two new elevators https://www.octranspo.com/en/news/article/blair-station-elevator-replacement/

Ottawa's design spec for all stations, ever since the first part of line 1 is there must be redundant elevators that doesn't require a person to travel to another entrance. Even way out in the boonies at stations like Bowesville there's 4 elevators and it's in the middle of a forest and farm...

A couple new virtual tours, this time of Line 1 East. One thing that's new in all the East stations is a windscreen in front of the main entrances. I guess kinda neat for less wind, but maybe somewhat annoying to have to walk around Trim...

I'm guessing January, similar to what happened here in Ottawa for Line 2. Final bits after the passing test went well into November, and then they didn't want to start things in December as too many staff were off for the holidays They probably won't do the very tepid gradual launch thing they...

I recently flew out of Montreal to Europe. I didn't do it because it was cheaper, I did it because there was more flight choices. If I had left from Ottawa I would have landed in Paris at 6am with kids in tow. I wanted to get there later in the morning. When I can fly out of Ottawa I do...

The biggest problem of all of it is reputational damage to transit. All O-Train lines have a reliability (defined as arriving within 30 seconds of scheduled arrival time) of well over 98%, which is higher than the majority of urban rail lines in North America. But the initial problems were so...

I'm sure it was mentioned somewhere way back, but why did they end up choosing single bore for this? It seemed for a while twin bore was the default for projects, but it seems single bore is back in vogue. I'm curious as to the reasoning

Basically it's an endless game of finger pointing. The city blames RTG and Alstom, despite the weird requirements in their RFP that wanted an LRT to perform at subway levels. Alstom and RTG blame the city for crazy requirements, yet both accepted them in the RFP RTG blames Alstom and says...

Interesting. In Ottawa, I'd say people use "The LRT" more often than they do O-Train, despite the branding

Oh, when I saw this article a while ago I thought a few platforms had to be extended for it to work https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/skytrain-station-platform-extension

The Dorval mayor has pleaded for it, but it's very expensive. Also, with Alto maybe it's irrelevant in the future anyway. If Alto doesn't stop there, people would probably trek from Gare Centrale anyway

I feel like there's also a political reason to call it "light rail". It makes it sound cheaper, easier and more palatable to taxpayers than "subway" or "metro", even when the lines are quite blurry on a technology front

I'm kind of wondering if this little dance means that the province is trying to deflect blame onto the TTC if September doesn't happen .https://www.cp24.com/politics/toronto-city-hall/2025/07/17/ontario-doubles-down-on-september-opening-for-eglinton-lrt-despite-ttc-calling-timeline-a-reach/

I'm glad they did that, Ottawa overhangs the platforms too but we did that from the get go. But originally years ago I read that Translink was planning to do some kind of complicated selective door opening thing for stations where they couldn't extend the platform to something like 120m. The...

Trim station walkthrough

Fare capping for Presto users starts next month (already been in place for a while for OPay users) https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/oc-transpo-rolling-out-fare-capping-for-presto-card-users-aug-1/

Ignoring the flaws of the Confederation line, it actually was not nearly as easy to convert the Transitway as they were sold when they built it in the 80s The curves were too sharp and a number needed to be altered, which is why there's an odd "ghost bridge" near Tremblay. Salt damaged a number...

Sure, easy **cough cough Ottawa cough cough***

They wouldn't run all 28 though, you need spares, and some will always be undergoing routine maintenance. What's the realistic max frequency?