ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

Not much there we didn't already know, I think.

That's true; but I thought it might be of interest.

Could someone explain this statement to me? I have obviously missed something along the way.

1. Rapid Transit team said "We're going to do a pull-through test on Thursday"

2. Thursday arrives, nothing happens

3. Media crucifies LRT

4. Politicians decide "That's it, we're not telling anything to anyone anymore"

They took the wrong lesson. Instead of “never say anything”, it should have been “say more”.

I think the problem is that they were never really forthcoming. Without digging through history, I’ll just take the above events as an example. When did they find out they weren’t going to do a pull-through test on Thursday? If they had said so at the time and explained briefly why, people wouldn’t have been surprised. Even now, I don’t think anybody expects the LRT team to know exactly when the testing will actually start — it would be fine for them to say, “right now we’re thinking Monday, but we need to … … … first so we’ll see.”

Part of the issue might be that they’re used to doing official news releases. But actually right now, nobody has an actual requirement to know what is going on — the only thing we actually need to know is when service will start, and that it has started. Everything else is internal to the LRT team and doesn’t affect the rest of us, except that crossing arms and LRT road signals will start being activated at some point. But we do have legitimate curiosity that for some people goes well beyond what is directly visible. So I think they should have (and should have had all along) an official blogger who would post a brief daily post on what is happening, with occasional longer articles going more in-depth on various aspects of the work that is going on. It would be a great educational resource, would pre-emptively answer most of the questions that we’ve had, and would show a commitment to transparency that we haven’t had with this project.

To summarize, the project should act more like a normal person and less like an official organization whose primary goal is to avoid embarrassment. This means sometimes issuing tentative information and being unafraid to modify it as things change.

I understand why some government organizations don’t do this: there may be security or negotiating implications from releasing excess information (in addition to the bogus embarrassment issue). But short of leaking an access token to one or more of the LRT systems, there is no significant security implication to any release of information about the LRT system, and there is no negotiation happening right now that could be negatively affected by being more open about their internal discussions about construction and operation.