News   Mar 28, 2024
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Ottawa Transit Developments

In the misery loves company department, or perhaps dampening my optimism that Ottawa's troubles will be over soon


 
It's only 3 straight days of catastrophic LRT failures :)

Today and Monday was only catastrophic bus failures, which is the OC Transpo we all know and love here in Ottawa

Also they started with just enough trains for load because OC Transpo always looked at this as a money saving exercise, which goes away if you allow slack in the system

There original intention was to run singles outside of peak periods, by design we were supposed to be standing room only at all times of day. It turns out coupling and uncoupling is more tricky then they thought, so now the trains are in semi permanent pairs.

Only Ottawa would introduce a new rail service and reduce service on many connecting bus routes at the same time. Don't they understand that ridership does not grow if they are reducing service frequency?
 
Only Ottawa would introduce a new rail service and reduce service on many connecting bus routes at the same time. Don't they understand that ridership does not grow if they are reducing service frequency?

When the Bloor-Danforth (now Line 2) opened in 1966, the TTC reduced service on the KING (now 504), DUNDAS (now 505), and CARLTON (now 506) streetcar routes, because it was assumed everyone would use the subway. They had to quickly increase service on the streetcar lines.
 
Let the users prove the planners wrong. I read what the armchair quarterbacks post here, and what the 'educated/trained' planners say and I can't wait to see what surprises await us when new lines open. The only certainty is that we will be surprised.
 
They should have done a month-long "soft" opening. Open up for users BEFORE the official date, to let them find the "bugs" or "problems".

They pretty much did. The thing is the system is running tikety-boo in all other time periods. It's fairly magical, which is why people were ooing and aahing during the first few weeks. It's only failing at.the peak of the peak period, which in Ottawa is between 7:30 and 8:30 as that's when the majority of federal employees start their day. I'm in the private sector, and later in the rush hour when I go to work it's also running peachy.

They acceptance tested the system fine, and it runs fine under most conditions, but what they didn't do in computer jargon is load test it, which is where you throw more and more load until you find the point where it breaks down, and then you decide what you can do to either improve our mitigate.
 
@Kyle Campbell -- speaking of software development.
Somebody said that a person pushed the door button after the doors had closed. This caused the doors to re-open and go into fault. The problem here is that this happened at Bayview Station where the interconnection is with Line 2. On Line 2, you have to push the button to open the doors. If the story is true, this is not abuse by a user but a technical problem with the door design.
If the door firmware is faulty, perhaps the instantaneous press of the button at the instant moment the outside door closed, may have triggered some kind of bug, race condition, counter mis-increment, counter mis-decrement, incorrect setting of a flag, or some other common bug.

They need to do button-mash tests at the most inopportune times, to see if the door firmware crashes. They probably did not do "weird-timed" door-open tests that during QA testing.

Armchair Recommendation Of Additional QA Test Cases
  • Press button at the instant door starts closing
  • Press button after door starts closing
  • Press button at the instant door finishes closing
  • Press button after door closed but before LRT vehicle starts moving
  • Press button at the instant LRT vehicle starts moving
  • Press button at moment after LRT vehicle starts moving
  • Press button twice, once right before door starts closing and once right after door has already started closing
  • Press button twice, once right before door finished closing and once right after door has already finished closing
  • Press button while simultaneously interrupting IR beam during door closing, at varoius stages of door closing
  • Repeat all above, but with a random panic button-mash instead of a simple press.
    (pretend you're a commuter that's about to lose job if you don't catch that goddamn train)
  • Repeat all above, for the opposite button (inside vehicle versus outside vehicle)
During beta-testing, there's not much pressure to panic-mash-push a button at such inopportune times.

If lrt's friend is correct, there theoretically might be a firmware / microcontroller software bug that didn't account for a specific situation.
Putting a door into a fault mode because of a bug as ɃǾrrked as the one that caused the 1990 telephone network collapse of the century.
 
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Just saw that thanksgiving spam message too with worldwide delivery of questionable stuff.
Any moderators around to remove mr spammy spam?
It is thanksgiving :(

For now, execute the Monty Python SPAM recipie:

208889
 
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Found this online, the first few minutes shows the looong descent into Rideau station. I'm kind of in two minds about deep stations. It's neat to go down so far, but it really makes it too inconvenient to hop on a train to travel to a different part of downtown like in Toronto or Montreal. There are deep stations in Montreal and Toronto too of course, but that aren't the busiest ones. The byward market exit not shown here is particularly dizzying, as you have to go up four sets of escalators with 3 intermediate levels between the concourse and surface.

Rideau pretty much had to be that deep because of the canal. I'm actually now glad they didn't go with the original tunnel plan where the stations would have been more than twice as deep as they are now

 
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Found this online, the first few minutes shows the looong descent into Rideau station. I'm kind of in two minds about deep stations. It's neat to go down so far, but it really makes it too inconvenient to hop on a train to travel to a different part of downtown like in Toronto or Montreal. There are deep stations in Montreal and Toronto too of course, but that aren't the busiest ones. The byward market exit not shown here is particularly dizzying, as you have to go up four sets of escalators with 3 intermediate levels between the concourse and surface.

Rideau pretty much had to be that deep because of the canal. I'm actually now glad they didn't go with the original tunnel plan where the stations would have been more than twice as deep as they are now


Note that outside of Ontario (and maybe Canada) they call it a "subway".
 
Found this online, the first few minutes shows the looong descent into Rideau station. I'm kind of in two minds about deep stations. It's neat to go down so far, but it really makes it too inconvenient to hop on a train to travel to a different part of downtown like in Toronto or Montreal. There are deep stations in Montreal and Toronto too of course, but that aren't the busiest ones. The byward market exit not shown here is particularly dizzying, as you have to go up four sets of escalators with 3 intermediate levels between the concourse and surface.

Rideau pretty much had to be that deep because of the canal. I'm actually now glad they didn't go with the original tunnel plan where the stations would have been more than twice as deep as they are now

The biggest sin in that video is standing on the left side of the escalator.
 

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