Dreams, Deception and Delusion: The Derailing of Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit Plans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the authors examine the failed City of Ottawa’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) project as a case study. While the LRT was trumpeted by local politicians and bureaucrats as a symbol of the city’s coming of age, the project was fraught with problems. The article explores these problems and points out that the way in which the project was managed is a cautionary tale in how not to promote large-scale public infrastructure projects. The authors point to the dangers that occur when those who make decisions about the expenditure of public funds become promoters of a project. There are serious risks when political commitments are made early on in a project’s development and appraisal stage. Rather than remaining focused on achieving levels of service within costs that are acceptable to those who pay for these services, decision makers can fall into the trap of ‘boosterism’that puts ego and status ahead of public interest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".