Yesterday, Ottawa City Council approved the 2026 budget. In the budget deliberations, councillors were good about pointing out the fundamental problems with our bus reliability, but they still voted in support of a budget that doesn’t promise to address the fundamental issues that were discussed.

OC Transpo has been experiencing a bus shortage ever since the launch of O-Train Line 1 when we decommissioned a large number of buses in coordination with the line's launch. This has been causing bus route cancellations and unreliability issues ever since.

While City Council discussed the bus shortage, they still approved a budget that funds zero additional bus orders. They are instead relying solely on the delayed orders made in previous years which are intended only as a 1:1 replacement of our current fleet; moreover, these replacements trade high capacity buses for low capacity ones. All the while ridership is growing (as we all want). OC Transpo has far fewer buses than they had six years ago. They decommissioned approximately 150 buses during the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to what was already decommissioned when Line 1 opened. Now we expect OC Transpo to handle post-COVID ridership recovery and growth without any increase to the overall bus count. That is an impossible task.

This budget passed a new motion to encourage youth to ride transit by making it free after 17:00, on weekends, and in the summer. We support this motion and are happy with any motions that entice more people to ride OC Transpo; however, City Council has provided no plan to expand our bus fleet or expand off-peak service to accommodate the new riders, with off-peak service having been cut significantly as a part of the “New Ways To Bus” April 2025 bus changes.

With our current bus procurement schedule, reliability is not improving, and it will not be able to improve.

Councillor Brockington summarized the stagnant nature of Ottawa’s approach to fixing its transit system well, “The metrics over the last year that we received at [Transit Committee] is that we continue having a challenge just making progress. They are more or less flat.”

In this meeting, councillors are repeatedly making the claim that more money will not help with our bus reliability, but there are several key ways funding would help fix our bus reliability problem:

• Order more high-capacity buses to properly expand and replace our aging fleet
• Increase funding for transit priority measures on corridors such as Bank St, Carling Ave, and Baseline Rd to use our limited buses as efficiently as possible
• Hire and retain additional mechanics with improved pay and working conditions in order to keep our existing buses in service

We are very much in support of the motion to increase the frequency of O-Train Line 1; it’s the spine of our system. Higher frequency means fewer chances of missing your infrequent and unreliable bus transfer. However, weekend service and evening frequencies are still inadequate. This is a great step in the right direction, but we are not where Ottawa deserves to be.

Ottawa must ensure its buses are reliable and frequent, not just its trains, and that means addressing the problems head-on. We can’t expect 1:1 bus replacements, certainly not orders that replace high capacity buses with low capacity ones, to adequately handle a system with growing ridership and ongoing bus shortage. OC Transpo needs the resources to make a reliable and frequent service that the citizens of Ottawa deserve.

- Better Transit Ottawa