Safety striping installed at Lincoln Fields station amid coroner's inquest — but years late
City had planned to place markers at 7 stations in 2022 but did not, inquest hears
Safety striping that should have been placed by the end of 2022 on the canopy of a passenger shelter at OC Transpo's Lincoln Fields bus station did not get installed until earlier this week — amid an ongoing coroner's inquest into a fatal bus collision involving a similar canopy in 2019.
It's believed the work did not get done earlier because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the inquest heard on Thursday.
On Jan. 11, 2019, a packed OC Transpo double-decker slammed into a Transitway bus shelter at Westboro station. Three people — Judy Booth, Bruce Thomlinson and Anja Van Beek — died in the crash. Many others were injured, triggering a flurry of lawsuits.
While the city accepted civil responsibility for the crash, the bus driver was charged with 38 counts of dangerous driving causing death or bodily harm. She was acquitted of all of them in a judge-only trial in 2021.
The inquest has heard that 13 canopies similar to the one central to the Westboro crash are still standing at seven other stations in Ottawa.
The canopy at Westboro was problematic because, as an engineer found after the crash, it jutted into a portion of the Transitway's "clear zone" — an area outside the roadway where fixed objects can create a hazard to vehicles leaving the road.
WATCH | Looking back on the crash and its lingering impacts:
On the recommendation of another engineer, the city placed yellow and black high-visibility striping on the edge of the Westboro canopy in 2021, though the station was ultimately taken offline in June 2022 because it was being prepared as an LRT stop.
The city also planned in 2022 to place striping at all stations with similar canopy situations as Westboro by the end of 2022, as shown in a draft internal report shared during the inquest.
That work did not happen.
City transit planner Matthew Wolstenholme testified Thursday that it was only last week, early in the inquest, that the city reviewed the clear zones at the seven stations.
On Monday, striping was placed at a canopy at Lincoln Fields station, he said.
The other six stations had offsets between the curb face and canopies that were in line with what the original engineer looking at safety after the Westboro crash recommended, which was between 1.2 metres and 1.8 metres, Wolstenholme said.
At Westboro station — where the canopies were built in either the late 1970s or 1980s, or "a good long time before double-deckers were even being thought of," as the presiding coroner put it — the offset between the curb face and the canopy was between 0.5 metres and 0.7 metres.
At Lincoln Fields, where buses approach the station at a slower speed than Westboro, it measures 0.35 metres to 0.5 metres, Wolstenholme said.
"Can you help me understand why this wasn't done [earlier]?" inquest lawyer Alessandra Hollands asked of the plan to place striping at all seven stations with canopy distances similar to Westboro.
It's not that it wasn't seen as important, but other factors may have been at play, Wolstenholme said.
"For example, we were working to keep our customers and our operators safe through the pandemic and a lot of staff time and resources were allocated to that," he said.
"I think we need to go back internally and determine why that work wasn't carried out," Wolstenholme added later.
Will the driver testify?
The driver of the bus that crashed at Westboro, Aissatou Diallo, remains on the inquest's witness list and was slated to speak on Thursday.
But she has not testified, and it remains unclear if she will.
Last Friday, the inquest heard Diallo had not responded to a summons requiring her to testify and that there is reason to believe she is outside of Ontario.
"The inquest team will be fully ready to receive Ms. Diallo's evidence and assist her in every way possible to provide it should she respond to the summons," the coroner's office said via email on Thursday.
The Coroners Act does provide for a bench warrant to be issued by a judge, but that step has not been taken, the coroner's office added.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
