Yesterday, Ottawa city council (wisely) decided to cancelled the RFP for a call-announcement system. see http://www.cfra.com/?cat=1&nid=68965
The original $8M dollar investment so that operators would not have to use the microphones they already have, was bad money. Worse money was that the price was now $17M for a "CleverDevices" system that would not have helped.
A member of Friends of the O-Train writes anecdoctally of an experience almost every transit user has had: buses do not show up, and nobody knows where they are.
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Last Friday evening, in very cold & wet conditions, I & many other people waited in Ottawa South for over 50 mins for not just one, but ultimately two late #1s.
Three calls to customer service were made including one to the supervisor. The first call looked up the bus and found it at Bank & 1st running 14 minutes late.
When the bus still had not arrived 15 minutes later I called again. After much delay I was told that it had not moved and now the second bus was running late too. Then I asked if they could tell us what was wrong or contact the driver, of course they couldn't.
I had no option but to keep waiting, meanwhile my nephew's hockey game at Bank & Wakley (the object of my trip) was now well into the second period.
Finally the first bus arrived. The driver was very applogetic.
He had called into his dispatcher, but the dispatcher didn't notify customer service, and customer service couldn't reach the dispacher.
What was the cause of the delay? A hockey game at the Civic Centre!! That was it!! I guess that is all it takes to cripple OC Transpo on Bank Street.
The Lansdown Live irony could not have been greater.
Not only was this all complete organizational & operational idiocy: the fact the buses had GPS even further underscores what a waste of a system we have.
(that means that a CleverDevices system would have had the exact same people fault, except that it would cost more)
BTW, I finally got to the game very cold and very frustrated and saw the last 8 minutes. Thankfully it included my nephew generating an assist for the winning goal.