The 2026 draft Ottawa budget announces further delays to the Carling Avenue bus lane project, estimating the completion time for a bus lane project at 2035. This project was started in 2016 with designs released in 2017, which would make this be a 19 year long project just to install simple interim bus lanes.

To put this in perspective, the O-Train Line 1 project took 7 years to build an entire train system, even after the excessive delays of that project.

This is not a complicated BRT project, this is meant as an interim solution until a real BRT is complete.

The initial project design released in 2017 suggests the project is almost all relabeling existing lanes from mixed traffic to bus-only to give priority to buses on the busy corridor or Carling Avenue.

Projects like these are the easy and cheap projects that need to be prioritized as much as possible. Not only will this improve travel times and reliability of one of the top bus corridors in the city, but this also allows us to use our limited bus fleet as efficiently as possible. Ottawa faces a severe bus shortage, which means we must make sure every bus is used as efficiently as possible. When a bus sits in traffic, it can’t be used to serve other important routes.

Carling Avenue is also facing intense redevelopment with new apartments with very limited parking. That means many new transit-using residents need to cross the corridor.

We urge city council to determine what is making this project take so long and speed up easy and cheap transit projects like this to get our city moving.

- Better Transit Ottawa