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I have received staff reports that Hurdman working better today. Tell me your experience, good, bad or indifferent. Thanks for your patience — Jim Watson (@JimWatsonOttawa) September 9, 2015

City of Ottawa officials knew that in closing the Transitway east of downtown for light-rail construction and putting buses on Highway 417, “some disruption is unavoidable.”

What they didn’t appear to foresee, however, was the capital’s usual post-Labour Day back-to-school, back-to-work traffic boost that, combined with changes at Hurdman Station, would bring long lines of buses to a standstill Tuesday morning and delay some fuming commuters by an hour or more.

While passengers vented on Twitter, transit officials, their faces as red as the back of a 53-seat New Flyer, apologized repeatedly and promised immediate measures to avoid a repeat. Among them:

• Posting “multiple” special constables at Hurdman — the epicentre of Tuesday’s bus bottleneck — to direct traffic.

• Reopening of a closed temporary road at the station.

• Reassigning bus stop assignments at Hurdman to better manage flow.

• Removal of an obstruction at the station that is getting in the way of articulated buses.

Photo by Darren Brown / Ottawa Citizen

The city, however, was unprepared to admit that it failed to anticipate the post-holiday return to the roads.

“We are reviewing all that information to determine what caused this morning’s issues and how to correct things,” John Manconi, general manager, transit services, said in a prepared statement Tuesday afternoon.

A portion of the Transitway has been shut down since June 28, but a new platform at Hurdman was not in place until this weekend. Manconi noted that the reconfiguration worked well up to 7:30 a.m. when bus volumes started to build, causing the system to back up in all directions.