Ottawa has long been seen as one of the leaders in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) technology. It has built a network of segregated rights-of-way served by fleets of buses.

Now there are plans to replace this with light rail.

The reason is that the segregated routes - Transitways - run to, but not through, the city centre. There, buses have to share roads with traffic - and there are too many of them! Daily ridership is nearly a quarter of a million: this needs 2600 buses on the streets each day. Within 15 years the system will have run out of capacity.

Solution? Light rail - and light rail in tunnel through the city centre, because a segregated right of way is an absolute necessity.

In 2001, a demonstration project, the O Train, opened in the city's suburbs.

This was called light rail, although in any European city it would have been regarded as a perfectly normal train service operated by ordinary diesel multiple units (which are virtually unknown in North America).

The main defect of the service was that it went from almost no-where to nearly no-where - although, on the way, it did serve a local college and a shopping mall.

It terminated - frustratingly - a couple of kilometres short of the airport. Even more frustratingly, the little-used freight tracks on which the train ran continued on virtually to the terminal: it was difficult to see exactly where they did go, because they were so covered with weeds!

Let us hope that, in the creation of the new light rail system, the city's airport is included in the network.