OC Transpo bus route audit called 'validation' for frustrated riders
"It's what people have been saying since New Ways to Bus first came to life."
By Aedan Helmer, Ottawa Citizen
Published Jun 19, 2026 | Last updated 5 hours ago
A scathing audit of OC Transpo’s “New Ways to Bus” has validated many of the concerns riders and councillors have expressed since the bus route overhaul was implemented last year, the audit committee heard Friday.
The report was formally tabled at the June 19 committee as councillors called the auditor general’s report “significant validation” for riders who had long complained about the overhaul that made sweeping changes to more than 100 bus routes.
The bus route overhaul was implemented in April 2025 and was designed to improve connectivity to community hubs and to align bus service with O-Train Lines 2 and 4, which launched in January 2025. At the time, OC Transpo’s then-general manager, Renée Amilcar, said the bus route redesign would give customers “a more reliable and efficient system.”
Auditor General Nathalie Gougeon and her team performed an extensive audit of the route overhaul, however, and found it was “mainly driven by budget considerations” as a cost-cutting exercise to reduce annual operating costs by $10 million — equivalent to a reduction of 70,000 bus service hours per year.
The audit also found that New Ways to Bus was based on outdated data collected in 2023 that had not accounted for Ottawa’s evolving post-pandemic traffic patterns and increased road congestion by the time it rolled out on April 27, 2025.
Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper said the audit was “very welcome.”
“Riders feel seen,” Leiper told the committee. “We undertook a cost-cutting exercise for what I think is a relatively small amount of money — $10 million in the context of the larger OC Transpo operational budget — and we cut 70,000 operation hours.
“The frequency of routes suffered, the coverage of routes suffered, and we didn’t get the reliability improvements that we were hoping to achieve from the exercise. Riders already knew that, but (this) audit is significant validation for them,” Leiper said.
“It’s what people have been saying since New Ways to Bus first came to life, and it’s nice to see it acknowledged that it was more of a cutting exercise than an improvement to the service provided,” said Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley, vice-chair of the audit committee. “It affected people’s daily commutes to work and to home right from the start, and it hasn’t gotten better.”
Rick Leary, who took over as OC Transpo general manager in March, said the audit also validated the 10-point action plan he had since implemented to improve reliability across the transit network.
“As the audit outlines, our schedules don’t reflect current traffic conditions,” Leary acknowledged. “Work to address these began early this year … We’ve already begun adding times to the schedules for seven routes and we’ve seen significant improvements to reliability.”
OC Transpo will be making adjustments by adding run time to 30 routes by September, Leary said, which will increase reliability metrics on routes used by 50 per cent of OC Transpo customers.
“We’re going to continue to review and analyze all routes based on current travel patterns, customer and councillor feedback and make adjustments to schedules to deliver the service that we advertise,” Leary told the audit committee.
“We’re better leveraging the technology to support improvements to our planning, monitoring, and reporting on the service we provide, (and) this data will help us better refine our routes and schedules to continue to drive improvements to our customer experience.”
Leary said reliable service was dependent on “realistic schedules, the right number of operators and dependable vehicles.”
OC Transpo is undertaking a “proactive” maintenance campaign this summer to prepare its aging fleet for a spike in ridership in the fall and to maintain service through harsh winter conditions. There are now 132 electric buses in service and a “fleet plan” will be presented to the transit committee in early 2027, Leary said.
Noah Vineberg, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 279, said union officials had been raising the same issues identified in the audit to management for years.
“We were told that we were wrong. We were told that it was a shortage of bus operators, leaving out the lack of bus procurement, ignoring the people that deliver the service, proper updates and analysis and any semblance of transparency,” Vineberg said.
Service cuts were “disguised with flashy PowerPoint presentations, colorful taglines like ‘route optimization’ and ‘New Ways to Bus.’
“It was misleading, it was wrong and it was insulting” to blame OC Transpo’s reliability issues on drivers, he said. When cancelled routes were blamed on driver shortages, Vineberg said it implied that drivers were calling in sick or otherwise unavailable to complete their routes.
“It is not that we are missing people and we are absolutely not missing people willing to work,” Vineberg said. “What they call driver shortage is when they need to cancel a trip because they poorly planned it.”
Trips would be cancelled because federally mandated recovery time for drivers did not allow for the next trip, Vineberg said, which would be logged as a cancelled trip due to a lack of driver availability.
“That is an excuse. It’s a scapegoat,” Vineberg said. “Our members took the public’s anger in person and online for decisions they never made and had no power to stop.”
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/oc-transpo-audit-called-validation
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