There were 11 bus collisions at Westboro Station in the five years before the deadly crash of OC Transpo Bus 8155 in January 2019, an inquest has heard.
The revelation was contained in a 2021 report by Intus Road Safety Engineering, a company hired by the City of Ottawa to review an independent safety audit of the Transitway. None of the earlier crashes were caused by ice or snow on the road, the report said.
Inquest counsel Peter Napier asked Intus president Gerry Forbes, author of the report, if he considered 11 crashes to be a significant number of incidents on a roadway dedicated to buses.
“In my opinion, yes, that’s a significant number of collisions — more than two per year — on a dedicated transitway,” he said.
OC Transpo, Forbes said, did not provide any more information about the cause of the collisions.
The inquest heard Wednesday it was Forbes’ job to review a safety audit of Westboro Station that highlighted 22 issues, including the canopy of its passenger shelter.
The audit was conducted in the aftermath of the 2019 Westboro bus crash.
Civil engineer John Morrall, the lead safety auditor, told the inquest the passenger shelter’s canopy was “by far” the most significant safety issue he identified because it was dangerously close to the curb of the Transitway.
The height of that curb was also an issue because it was only half the size of what it should have been, Morrall said. Curbs have to be at least 15 centimetres high, he testified, to deflect a bus moving at less than 40 km/h.
Morrall told the inquest the passenger shelter’s canopy was half a metre from the Transitway’s curb, well within the “clear zone” demanded by road design standards.
A clear zone free of hazards allows errant drivers some room to recover the road.
Such buffer zones should be three metres in size in an area where traffic moves at 60 km/h, the inquest heard.
In his safety audit, Morrall recommended that OC Transpo either remove the canopy entirely or reduce the speed within Westboro Station to 20 km/h.
Intus’ Forbes, however, rejected Morrall’s recommendation about the canopy based on a cost-benefit analysis. For similar reasons, he rejected Morrall’s call to increase the height of the curbs.
Using predictive statistical models, Forbes estimated that a bus would collide with the station’s canopy only once every 250 years.
“Such a low risk does not yield a favourable benefit-cost ratio,” his report concluded.
Forbes instead recommended the City of Ottawa place yellow and black warning stripes on the side of the canopy and bus shelter to alert drivers to the potential danger.
His report did not estimate the cost of removing the canopies. Forbes said he considered that step unnecessary given that there was such a “very low risk” of a bus hitting a canopy.
In his report, Forbes also rejected the idea that Westboro Station’s speed limit should be reduced to 20 km/h. He said such a speed limit was “unreasonably low” and unlikely to be complied with by drivers.
Inquest counsel Peter Napier noted that a single-decker OC Transpo bus collided with another passenger shelter canopy in July 2003 at Lees Station. He asked Forbes if that information would change his estimate about the likelihood of a bus hitting another Transitway shelter.
Forbes said it would not.
Presiding officer Dr. Louise McNaughton-Filion asked Forbes how his model could predict a bus would hit Westboro’s canopy only once every 250 years when there had been 11 collisions in the five years before January 2019.
Forbes said his estimate examined the likelihood of a bus leaving the road and hitting the station. Those other accidents, he said, likely involved on-street collisions.
Forbes said his report was provided as information to OC Transpo, which had to make the final determination about what safety measures to implement.
Westboro Station and its steel awning were torn down in October 2022 to make way for the LRT — one year after the city made minor changes to improve the station’s safety. It did not rebuild the low curbs or remove the awning.
What’s more, the inquest jury heard that seven Transitway stations still have passenger shelter canopies similar to those at Westboro Station.
Andrew Smith, a City of Ottawa infrastructure renewal program manager, said similar canopies were in place at Billings Bridge, Greenboro, Lincoln Fields, Place D’Orléans, Queensway, South Keys and St. Laurent stations.
Three passengers died and 17 were seriously injured when Bus 8155, a double-decker, slammed into Westboro Station on Jan. 11, 2019. The rigid steel awning sliced into the second floor of the bus, crushing nine rows of seats.
Andrew Duffy is a National Newspaper Award-winning reporter and long-form feature writer based in Ottawa. To support his work, including exclusive content for subscribers only, sign up here: ottawacitizen.com/subscribe
