OC Transpo drivers, mechanics, footage to play key role at Diallo trial

Aissatou Diallo alone is now on trial at the Elgin Street courthouse, accused of dangerously driving an OC Transpo double-decker bus off the Transitway and into Westboro Station in Ottawa on a winter afternoon two years ago.

And yet, for the next eight weeks,the City of Ottawa and OC Transpo will be mentioned and city workerscalled as witnesses at every turn.

Diallo was, after all, a municipal employee, driving a city bus, on a city road driven almost exclusively by city vehicles when itleft that road and collided witha bus shelter.

• OC Transpo driver in fatal bus crash didn't brake or steer from collision course, trial told
• Westboro bus crash trial is time for long-awaited answers, victims' families say

Police had investigated and cleared the City of Ottawa itself ofcriminal wrongdoing by the summer of 2019, when they laid38 criminal charges against Diallo. She has sincepleaded not guilty tothree counts of dangerous driving causing the deaths of Judy Booth,Anja Van Beek, and Bruce Thomlinson, and 35counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm.

Two years after that crash, when many lives were changed and emergency vehicles sped to the scene,Justice Matthew Webber and the public beganhearing details this week about what could have causedthe transit tragedyand whether Diallo's drivingwas to blame.

Video footage as'silent witnesses'

The Crown, in its opening remarks Monday, laid out the case it would make.

The bus itself was well maintained by OC Transpo mechanics and ran smoothlyfor the operator on the shift before Diallo took the driver's seat, they said. Prosecutors intend to argue Diallonever once slammed on the brakes or steered back onto the road during the 15 seconds in which the bus left its lane and collided withthe bus shelter.

Assistant Crown attorney Louise Tansey said the most significant body of evidence her side would draw from would be 20 or so "silent witnesses": video footage shot by eightcameras on the double-decker,footage from Westboro Stationand from 10 other buses, including a windshield camera from the bus travelling directlybehind, as well as a data recorder on the bus.

Many city employees willalso take the witness box to provide details, and the Crown began the list Monday with two special constables whowere among the first to arrive at the scene.

Already, that firstcross-examination by Diallo's defence lawyers gave hints to some arguments theywill eventually make.

They zeroed in on the state of the Transitway and itspavement markings. Lawyer Soloman Friedman spent time showing images of construction that had taken place the summer before the crash, and how linespainted orange fora detour had seemed to re-emerge after being painted over in black after the work was done.

Training and driving conditions

In the weeks to come, court will also hear from the OC Transpo driver whose bus was closelyfollowing Diallo's, andother drivers who travelled in the area and all safely stopped during conditions Tansey said were "great" and free of snow and ice.

A mechanic, meanwhile, is to speak about how he drovebus No. 8155 from the crash site without encountering problems with its steering or brakes.

Then there are the details about how OC Transpo maintains its buses and trains its drivers. An OC Transpo official will describe its training program for new drivers, which Diallo passed. She received her C-licence allowing her to drive buses in 2018, Tansey said.

The public was alreadyintroduced to the nitty gritty of both OC Transpo's driver training and bus maintenance whenthe city's auditor-general released a pair of reports last October. Auditors foundmore than half of new OC Transpo drivers trained from 2017 to 2019 ended up in a collision of some kind. Nearly all preventable collisions weredue not tomechanical issues, meanwhile, but driver error, the second report found.

When those audits were released, the city's transportation general manager and solicitor took careto not comment or draw linkages between theirfindings and the WestboroStation collision.

Nor did city solicitor David White offeranystatementto media as the trial got underway Monday, because it's not their practice to comment on cases before the courts, he said.

Whileits employees take part in the unfolding criminal trial,the City of Ottawa also has a big roleon thecivil side of the law.The city had claimed civil responsibility for the Westboro collision a year after it happened, and has been settling millions of dollars in lawsuits filed by victims.