In her “Soapbox” column in your Oct. 26 issue, Corinne Smith fudged her research a bit, and it shows.
Trying to prove that Ottawans “are not used to innovation and imagination” in urban planning — in mass transit in particular — Ms. Smith wrote: “With streetcars gone, bus service eventually took to the road.”
Streetcars and buses co-existed here for several years in the 1950s.
Streetcars were the old technology, buses the innovation: streetcars were inflexible and of limited range, while buses could haul people all the way from the city’s growing suburbs into the downtown core.
The streetcar system had a lot of problems, but Ottawa transit users’ strong preference for new, fast, quiet buses (one contemporary writer compared the racket of unevenly worn streetcar wheels on metal tracks to cannonfire) was what finally killed it.
Getting the history right would have had a mixed effect on Ms. Smith’s argument. On the one hand, the streetcar-bus experience shows that if the O-Train works better than buses, Ottawans will use it. On the other, the transit company’s early attempt to use buses to feed the streetcar lines was a dismal failure because riders simply hated transferring — which the O-Train is going to ask them to do quite a lot.
David Reevely
Bank Street