Brother, can you spare a bus?

I've been away for awhile, but I've been trying to keep up-to-date on the Confederation Line's continuing drama. 

And that drama seems to be best summarized by this CBC news item: All options are on the table to fix the LRT mess. 

It looks like to deal with the immediate problem of unreliable service from the LRT the city is bringing back a number of bus routes - and buses - to run parallel to the LRT over a number of routes. It's not completely clear where the buses will come from, or what all the routes are that will be reinstated. Hopefully this won't take too long to resolve as maybe this is a harbinger of things to come: some hardy commuters are simply giving up on public transit and the LRT in particular, Done with LRT, these commuters have found their own ways forward.

It's important to try to restore some sort of transit normalcy for commuters even if takes buses to do it, but things seem strangely quiet on what the Rideau Transit Group is doing to fix all the problems with the systems that are causing these delays. Does the city have any levers to pull on RTG other than withholding monthly payments? Is there a master list of problems that includes problem descriptions, when they'll be fixed, who's responsible for fixing them, and what work-arounds should be applied until things are fixed? Is the city micro-managing it? Is the list being worked on all-hands-on-deck style? Who knows? Now, I don't have any information to corroborate this assertion with, but it looks like there seems to be a lack of engineering rigour being applied to resolving all these problems. I hope I'm wrong. Without any information on what's being done to fix these problems, who knows how long the bus work-around will be required, and how much all this will ultimately cost.

Speaking of buses, I had a small revelation when I rode that Cobus 3000 at Toronto's Pearson airport from one gate to another. It's extra wide, has curb-level low-step-up access, and plenty of space inside for riders. It's likely not street-legal, but could it be used on a bus transitway? As a dyed-in-the-wool streetcar and rail-transit guy it pains me to say this, but maybe instead of an LRT we should have simply had a new bus transitway that used these sorts of buses. Ah, 20/20 hindsight is wonderful :-)