OC Transpo

[Truenorth00]

Does anybody have any idea what the requirement would be post-Confederation East? If Confed East opens in say July, does that help close their gap from say 50 buses to 30 buses? Maybe between that and BEBs coming in Q2 maybe, they'll have a shot at meeting the schedule by Canada Day and improved reliability continuously through till the end of the year.

[lrt's friend]

I am not surprised by the response especially given that 6 years has past. But, it does also agree with Richard's point that we were not giving ourselves enough leeway at the time which quickly percolated into a crisis that has not been resolved in the last 6 years.

A well run transit system not only has to have enough buses and operators to cover all the runs but a reasonable number of spares to cover normal levels of daily breakdowns and operator absences.

[Truenorth00]

Read the article. This is fundamentally an issue of an aging fleet, lack of mechanics (due to them under paying) and delayed replacements.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/inside-the-bus-cancellation-crisis-at-oc-transpo-9.7049649

Delays can happen. In this case they got screwed because of COVID era supply chain problems. But at the point they ordered all those BEBs (2021), the articulated fleet was already past the 15 year target life. They didn't order enough buses in the late 2010s. And we're all paying for it now.

Worse, council hasn't learned a thing. They ordered 50 articulated diesels for next year. They probably need 100-150 articulated buses delivered over the next 3 years.

[OCCheetos]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Delays can happen. In this case they got screwed because of COVID era supply chain problems. But at the point they ordered all those BEBs (2021), the articulated fleet was already past the 15 year target life. They didn't order enough buses in the late 2010s. And we're all paying for it now.

Worse, council hasn't learned a thing. They ordered 50 articulated diesels for next year. They probably need 100-150 articulated buses delivered over the next 3 years.

The vast majority of the articulated buses in the fleet would have been ~10-11 years old in 2021. They've only gone past their expected service lives in the past year.

There are a few dozen older ones, but a number of them received structural rebuilds heading into 2020.

[rocketphish]

Community group rolls out vision for free off-peak service on OC Transpo

By Shaun Vardon, CTV News
Published: January 20, 2026 at 7:06AM EST

A community organization called Free Transit Ottawa is looking for a few volunteers to help make their vision of transit in the capital a reality, which includes free transit during off-peak hours and on weekends and buying more buses.

The group held a launch party at Irene’s Pub in the Glebe on Monday night; it was an opportunity to connect and spread the word.

One of the organizers, Donald Swartz, was excited by the turnout, and he is hoping at least a few of those attending will step up to help them realize their vision.

“The top demand is to make buses free in off-peak hours and the second is to buy more buses,” Swartz said. “Those that are on the buses say it’s too expensive, it’s too unreliable. I think as we get the word out, we will have more and more support.”

They say they have consulted widely, have developed a costed plan and a proposal to pay for the changes for the city and residents to consider. Their vision includes:

• Make OC Transpo free during off-peak hours (9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m. – 6:00 a.m. and on weekends)
• Add 150 buses to improve service in peak and off-peak hours
• Add 50 local/neighbourhood buses in underserviced areas
• Add 25 vehicles to Para Transpo and provide same day booking
• Expand dedicated bus-only lanes, starting with the most unreliable routes
• Democratize the Transit Committee by replacing six of the 12 councillors with four members who are directly elected by the citizens of Ottawa and two members selected by ATU Local 279

The group says the annual cost of free transit in off-peak hours and boosting service would be $125 million, with $50 million to cover free transit and $52.5 million to buy 150 electric buses. The group says the election of four citizen transit commissioners could cost $250,000.

Free Transit Ottawa has proposed various ways to finance the changes, without an increase in property taxes, saying their approach centres on ‘progressive’ measures that also discourage the use of private cars. Their plan includes:

• $50 million reallocated from the city’s road widening budget
• $10 million from raising parking rates to $6 an hour, including paid parking on Sundays and in all commercial areas
• $15 million by increasing the Uber/Lyft accessibility surcharge from $0.10 per ride to $0.50 per ride
• $21 million by increasing development charges on single-family homes by 25 per cent
• $14 million from the elimination of the Main Streets and Brownfield Site tax rebates
• $15 million in savings by adopting bus-only lanes

Several city councillors attended the launch, including transit committee member Jeff Leiper. He thought parts of the plan are worth pursuing, as the city is expected to grow by 400,000 residents in the next couple of decades.

“The future of this city has to be a public transit future. We cannot accommodate the hundreds of thousands of cars that are going to be on our roads if we don’t have a functioning transit system,” Leiper said. “There are a lot of things that we can do without necessarily going down the path of free transit in the immediate new term to make public transit a first instead of a last choice for residents.”

https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/co...for-free-off-peak-service-on-oc-transpo/

[Truenorth00]

Crazy plan. And insists on young families buying new homes pay for it. Also just flat out wrong. Like when they say 150 BEBs would cost $52.5M.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by OCCheetos

The vast majority of the articulated buses in the fleet would have been ~10-11 years old in 2021. They've only gone past their expected service lives in the past year.

There are a few dozen older ones, but a number of them received structural rebuilds heading into 2020.

Sure. But why weren't they ordering artic replacements to be delivered in 2025 when they were going to hit 15 years?

I can understand that the D40i replacement for screwed by the BEB delays. But even after the BEB they still need another 100 artics on order at least. May be 150. But they only ordered 50 last year. They could have easily had 150 on order delivering in '25, '26 and '27.

[YOWetal]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Crazy plan. And insists on young families buying new homes pay for it. Also just flat out wrong. Like when they say 150 BEBs would cost $52.5M.

Well not only young familes to be fair. They will also use imaginary savings from things like savings from bus lanes. I guess their claim is the wasted lanes of traffic being converted to bus lanes will speed up trips and save money.

Congestion charge is the only answer both in terms of revenue and actually lowering the amount of cars that allow for pie in the sky cuts to the road budget. Or do increase the SFH charge by 100% and really force everyone to live in commie blocks we only allow near LRT stations.

[J.OT13]

I'm for congestion charges where cities have fantastic transit. Montreal is the only city in Canada today that has a transit system today that could take on the extra load from drivers trying to avoid a congestion charge. Toronto might be ready when the Ontario Line (and all other u/c project) opens. Vancouver when Broadway Subway is extended to UBC.

Ottawa' transit is terrible, and even the full Stage 2 buildout is very skeletal of a system. You'd need full buildouts of Baseline and Carling BRTs and a solution for Bank and Montreal Road, along with the STO tram and loop, before congestion charge is implemented in Ottawa.

I'm not supportive of free transit, however I would support half fares off peak and group passes evenings and weekends.

To increase revenues, OC should try to work with employers, and the Feds particularly for discounted fares for their employees. They could do the same with developers building new towers near transit, the uPass model rolled out to more institutions and corporations.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by J.OT13

I'm not supportive of free transit, however I would support half fares off peak and group passes evenings and weekends.

Discounts are stupid. Even seniors discounts are stupid. The only people who need free transit are children. And I would include high schoolers here. They can't really earn. And their mobility becomes limited as a result. Everybody else has income. And can and should pay to support the system. Especially in a city where they refuse to support the system adequately through taxes.

The reason to give time based discounts is usually to shift usage. Ottawa doesn't really have a problem with peak crowding to the point that demand shifting is necessary. What we have a problem with is system reliability. Something that actually gets worse if you shift usage to less reliable off-peak periods.

Originally Posted by J.OT13

Ottawa' transit is terrible, and even the full Stage 2 buildout is very skeletal of a system. You'd need full buildouts of Baseline and Carling BRTs and a solution for Bank and Montreal Road, along with the STO tram and loop, before congestion charge is implemented in Ottawa.

Ottawa's transit problem is not really a lack of higher order transit. Especially after Stage 2. It's the utterly crap bus service that fails to even meet the currently planned mediocre schedule. Post Confederation Line East maybe they drop down to needing 500 buses per day. And presumably they will meet that with all the new buses coming. But that's still with many routes running at 30 min headways. Sometimes 30 min headways even during peak. They can build all the higher order transit they want. Nothing will get fixed till they resource the bus system to allow a service that is half decent. By that I say most off-peak routes at 20 mins headways. Most routes at 15 mins during peak. Major avenue routes running at 10 min headways or better.

Originally Posted by J.OT13

To increase revenues, OC should try to work with employers, and the Feds particularly for discounted fares for their employees. They could do the same with developers building new towers near transit, the uPass model rolled out to more institutions and corporations.

This ship has sailed with Presto and Credit card payments. Also, the problem here is usually service, not cost. My own experience. When NDHQ was downtown most people took transit. I knew one person out of maybe two dozen colleagues who drove. Now, working out of Carling, it's the exact opposite. And no amount of discounts is going to change that. I pay $75/mo for parking and spend maybe $180/mo in gas. I could get free transit and it wouldn't compel me to spend over 3.5 hrs on transit to get to/from home to work.

It kinda sucks when even transit advocates in this city don't understand what the problem is. And think just more free rides will solve the problem.

[J.OT13]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Discounts are stupid. Even seniors discounts are stupid. The only people who need free transit are children. And I would include high schoolers here. They can't really earn. And their mobility becomes limited as a result. Everybody else has income. And can and should pay to support the system. Especially in a city where they refuse to support the system adequately through taxes.

The reason to give time based discounts is usually to shift usage. Ottawa doesn't really have a problem with peak crowding to the point that demand shifting is necessary. What we have a problem with is system reliability. Something that actually gets worse if you shift usage to less reliable off-peak periods.

The idea is to just get more people on transit. People will take transit to commute to avoid traffic congestion and steep parking costs downtown. Off peak, driving is always the cheaper option. Some Federal and Provincial funding is based on ridership. Getting more people on transit, even if it doesn't provide much more fare revenue, will give you more leverage to demand upper level Government funding.

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

This ship has sailed with Presto and Credit card payments. Also, the problem here is usually service, not cost. My own experience. When NDHQ was downtown most people took transit. I knew one person out of maybe two dozen colleagues who drove. Now, working out of Carling, it's the exact opposite. And no amount of discounts is going to change that. I pay $75/mo for parking and spend maybe $180/mo in gas. I could get free transit and it wouldn't compel me to spend over 3.5 hrs on transit to get to/from home to work.

It kinda sucks when even transit advocates in this city don't understand what the problem is. And think just more free rides will solve the problem.

The idea here IS to increase revenue for OC Transpo so they can improve their transit service. It might also convince some people who live and/or work near decent transit to get out of their cars since they already have a transit pass.

[lrt's friend]

What we need to build public confidence.

1 reliability
2 improved frequency on key routes at least.
3 Design faster bus routes
4 Create a few crosstown express routes. Whatever happened to old Route 99 that ran along the Queensway? Not everyone benefits by being forced into rail that has to stop at every station going across the city.
5 I spoke about this starting around 2018. We need more redundancy. We need an every day parallel frequent and semi-express bus route that more or less follows Line 1 that is not a replacement bus. It runs regularly.

We have chopped up too many bus routes to make too many have to use the train that has created too many unreliable transfers. This has sometimes increased travel times by 50 % or more.

[Dengler Avenue]

^ The city needs to realize that a bus needs to come at least every 15 minutes between 8 am and 8 pm everyday (not just every weekday) to be considered frequent.

[Truenorth00]

Am I misreading the fleet numbers?

End of 2027 they should have:

~350 BEBs
~151 Double deckers
~249 Nova LFS diesels bought in 2019
~50 new diesel artics

That's about 800 buses. But with Stage 2 complete, they should need less than 500 buses to deliver their schedule. So are they planning on retiring all the Nova LFS Diesels early? I would think they should try to sell those and get an additional 100 artics instead. The fleet would shrink to 650. But they would have a much newer fleet and a lot more higher capacity buses. And even with 650, they should be able to run a bit more service than they do today.

[OCCheetos]

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Am I misreading the fleet numbers?

End of 2027 they should have:

~350 BEBs
~151 Double deckers
~249 Nova LFS diesels bought in 2019
~50 new diesel artics

That's about 800 buses. But with Stage 2 complete, they should need less than 500 buses to deliver their schedule. So are they planning on retiring all the Nova LFS Diesels early? I would think they should try to sell those and get an additional 100 artics instead. The fleet would shrink to 650. But they would have a much newer fleet and a lot more higher capacity buses. And even with 650, they should be able to run a bit more service than they do today.

OC Transpo only has about 79 double deckers. 75 of them were retired a couple of years ago.

[Truenorth00]

Originally Posted by OCCheetos

OC Transpo only has about 79 double deckers. 75 of them were retired a couple of years ago.

That would put them at ~725 buses by the end of 2027.

They say that the current schedule requires 520 buses at peak. Presumably, post Stage 2, they shouldn't need anywhere close to 500 buses. If we assume a 30% sparing ratio, that would be 650 buses in the barn to deliver the schedule. Presumably, they should have the room to improve both service and reliability.

It would be nice to see them have a target fleet size that could then drive an appropriate level of service. Say 700 buses.

[lrt's friend]

This is a catastrophic lack of redundancy that I began speaking about in 2018. We cut everything to the bone, spent billions that delivered worse service for a good portion of the customer base and then put all our eggs into new technologies. What a massive screw up. Can OC ever recover?

[DarthVader_1961]

Originally Posted by lrt's friend

This is a catastrophic lack of redundancy that I began speaking about in 2018. We cut everything to the bone, spent billions that delivered worse service for a good portion of the customer base and then put all our eggs into new technologies. What a massive screw up. Can OC ever recover?

OC will need a large infusion of cash, I mean hundreds of millions…. They will also need leadership with vision.

There are many issues to resolve and the city will have a part to play by banning on street parking on major bus routes

[Truenorth00]

I am seeing more BEBs on the road. I wonder if the bus crunch is starting to ease a bit.

[Richard Eade]

I encourage everyone who has an interest in OC Transpo’s operations to visit the new Bus Service Delivery Action Plan Website: https://www.octranspo.com/en/news/articl...:text=Reason%20for%20Undelivered%20Trips

Although it is very short on any ‘Action Plan’, it does provide some information about the bus fleet’s availability; and what is causing the HUGE number of canceled bus trips. Here is their graph showing the percentage of service that was delivered:



Of course, the information provided by OC Transpo can look a bit better than how it actually ‘feels’ for a transit rider. The graph of ‘Daily Bus Service Delivered, for example gives the idea that, during January (4th to the 31st), that about 95% of trips were delivered – and that is true. But because the bus cancelations are not evenly distributed, some routes had much less service delivered.

From Josh Pringle, writing for CTVNews: https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/th...celled-oc-transpo-bus-routes-in-january/

Here are the routes with the highest number of trips not delivered between Jan. 4 and 31.

• Route 12: 401 trips not delivered (3,950 trips planned). OC Transpo says 90 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 6: 373 trips not delivered (2,998 trips planned). OC Transpo says 88 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 7: 327 trips not delivered (3,404 trips planned). OC Transpo says 90 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 88: 320 trips not delivered (4,353 trips planned). OC Transpo says 93 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 11: 298 trips not delivered (3,006 trips planned). OC Transpo says 90 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 5: 286 trips not delivered (3,034 trips planned). OC Transpo says 91 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 75: 278 trips not delivered (4,682 trips planned). OC Transpo says 94 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 98: 268 trips not delivered (3,256 trips planned). OC Transpo says 92 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 41: 266 trips not delivered (3,155 trips planned). OC Transpo says 93 per cent of trips delivered as planned.
• Route 25: 220 trips not delivered (2,993 trips planned). OC Transpo says 93 per cent of trips delivered as planned.

I had the ‘opportunity’ to stand and wait for a #6 bus during that period. There was a small crowd at the stop by the time a #6 finally showed up. It was one of the new 40-foot electric buses. Most – but not all – of the crowd was able to squeeze in, via both the front and rear doors. Many could not reach a stanchion, but we were so packed in – including on the upper area, right to the rear seat – that no-one could fall. Which is good, because the e-bus had strong acceleration, and strong regenerative deceleration, which kept the mass pitching to and fro. It was not a comfortable ride. The only chance to really inhale deeply was at each stop, when a number of people had to temporarily disembark so that those leaving the bus could worm their way out. We left people standing at most stops so that they could continue their ‘wait for the next bus’. When ever that would arrive. According to those ‘fortunate’ enough to be on that bus, this was not unusual anymore.

From Ted Raymond’s article on CTVNews: https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/oc...-in-bus-cancellations-at-end-of-january/

The reasons for trip cancellations in the final week of January differ from the first week, however. During the week of Jan. 4, nearly half of all trip cancellations were due to a lack of available buses, but that reason accounted for 22 per cent of trip cancellations during the week of Jan. 25.

A lack of available drivers accounted for 34 per cent of cancellations in the final week of January, mechanical breakdowns represented 13 per cent of cancelled trips, and on-street adjustments — things like collisions or customer incidents — represented 31 per cent of cancellations.

But let’s look at a little more of the data:



It seems that, as the availability of buses creeps up, more and more runs are getting canceled because of a lack of bus operators. I have to wonder if this is because the roster was set out, at the last booking, for the number of operators needed to drive the few buses that were expected to be available. As more buses come on-line, there are no extra operators to drive them.

During January, 2026, the e-bus fleet that was in revenue service grew as follows:
Bus # 2127 entered service Jan. 13, 2026
Bus # 2130 entered service Jan. 05, 2026
Bus # 2132 entered service Jan. 13, 2026
Bus # 2133 entered service Jan. 13, 2026
Bus # 2134 entered service Jan. 13, 2026
Bus # 2136 entered service Jan. 16, 2026
Bus # 2137 entered service Jan. 29, 2026
Bus # 2138 entered service Jan. 29, 2026
Bus # 2139 entered service Jan. 29, 2026
Bus # 2141 entered service Jan. 28, 2026
Bus # 2142 entered service Jan. 29, 2026
Bus # 2143 entered service Jan. 29, 2026
Bus # 2154 entered service Jan. 27, 2026

That’s an extra 13 buses, but we are not seeing the available bus number climbing above about 500 – which it reached on Jan. 13. Is it that older buses are failing at about the same rate as new e-buses are arriving? Perhaps because the mechanics are concentrating on getting the e-buses out on the road? Or has OC Transpo been ‘retiring’ the old buses as new replacements arrive – content to keep the bus availability at around 500 buses? 500 buses is their new, lower, benchmark – and maybe that is all they have operators for, anyway.