The Ottawa Citizen - link
Published: Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Alain Mercier, the new chief of public transit in Ottawa, is in for quite a ride.
He officially takes over in March from another Montrealer, Alain Carle, who was abruptly gone from the top job at OC Transpo almost as soon as he took it over. He lasted barely six months, then vanished in a puff of bureaucratic secrecy. Fired for cause, but the city refused to say what the cause was.
Fine. Let's try again.
Mr. Mercier takes over a transit system in much worse trouble than the one Mr. Carle got. Light rail is dead and nobody knows what comes next. A large faction on city council is at odds with the mayor over how big a priority public transit ought to be. Riders on the most crowded routes want more vehicles devoted to them, but the downtown streets they use can't take the extra rush-hour traffic and the city government doesn't want to pay more anyway. Nobody knows how to serve the suburbs, especially Riverside South, whose residents were expecting rail in their community.
Customer service -- passenger comfort, uniformly friendly staff, buses that arrive on schedule -- remains as deficient as it was when Mr. Carle was hired to improve it, yet the city's plan is to double the proportion of trips people take on bus and O-Train.
Into this mass of contradictions glides Mr. Mercier, whose most relevant experience, according to the city, is in inter-city transportation rather than urban transit. He has his work cut out for him.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007