Most of those man-hours are paid for by RTG et. al, not on taxpayer dime. Lost productivity is harder to quantify, but both that and the diesel and bus operator hours are drops in the bucket compared to the transitway days. It is easy to find pictures of the bumper to bumper bus pileups on Albert and Slater.

I may remind you that the city paid an unprecedented amount of this project out of pocket. Doing it right (Automated light metro, like the SkyTrain or REM) wasn't an option, especially for a project with as tenuous support as the LRT had.

It's easy to criticize, but in many ways, Watson had no other choice than to stay the course, at least if he wanted the project to go ahead and to stay in office. As imperfect and inept as he was, he had a vision for the city, not something that can be said of many Ottawa mayors.

Fun fact: As it is now, zero major changes would be needed to run the trains at GoA4 (full automation with no driver onboard), just changing the settings on the onboard computer (VOBC).