The city’s bus drivers rarely use French when calling out stops and conversing with passengers, a deficiency that came to light after Ottawa resident Michel Thibodeau complained to the city in November over a lack of French-talking OC Transpo drivers.
Without a doubt, Thibodeau has the right to say the city is failing to meet its own standards by not serving people in French, an official language with equal status to English under a 2001 bylaw.
According to news coverage last month, Thibodeau is suggesting the city should pay to train existing drivers how to speak French and make bilingualism a requirement for new drivers.
However, this approach is flawed and ignores a larger issue: the lack of accessibility for communities other than French speakers, such as the deaf and blind.
First, Thibodeau’s complaint that bus drivers don’t chat enough in French is irrelevant. Chatting about the weather is not a driver’s job or function. Driving is. Second, it is foolish to think Francophones can’t grasp what a driver means by saying Bank Street, rather than Rue Bank, for example. And drivers rarely even go that far – often, they simply shout out the name and make no mention of a street.
Far too often, drivers fail to call anything, in any language, a significant hurdle for blind and visually impaired commuters.
Even after a tribunal ruling last summer resulted in making it mandatory for drivers to call out major and requested stops, city statistics suggest this is happening only about 20 per cent of the time – a far cry from the 90-per-cent target.
And changing job criteria for drivers will ultimately affect who gets hired, which will, no doubt, preclude hiring some Anglophones – but that’s a whole other mess. What will the city do to make sure they aren’t discriminating against monolingual Anglophones, anyway?
So, forcing drivers to change their habits would likely be futile and a waste of cash. What is needed is an approach that takes the driver’s behaviour out of the equation.
Sadly, Ottawa passed up this solution last summer. In July, the city rejected an $8-million plan to install special audio-visual systems on buses that would automatically call out stops and provide a digital display to inform riders where they were.
The systems are based on geographical positioning technology and have been used in cities such as Toronto to improve accessibility.
Not only would this prevent grumblings from Thibodeau – the systems would use bilingual recordings – but would have been a welcome and needed move for Ottawa’s deaf people, who have little to no geographical aids when commuting. Especially in winter when the windows are snowy and frosted, knowing where you are in a bus can be nearly impossible without a visual helper.
The city is completing a review on its bilingual services and is expected to address this issue when the report is made public.
Perhaps revisiting an old idea will put this issue to rest for good. Council should rethink buying the automated systems it passed up last year. This would be a practical way to make public transportation more accessible for all.