Monday’s election showed us that public transit matters to the Ottawa electorate. Every candidate, whether for Mayor or Councillor campaigned to make better transit in Ottawa. Even residents who don’t ride transit understand the importance of making sure this important part of their tax dollars is spent on a system that actually works. Now it’s time to hold our elected leaders to account to their promises.
We need to show we all care about these promises happening, by presenting at City Council meetings, and by letting Councillors and the Mayor know our disagreements. Consider joining us either by signing up on our form or joining our discord. We need to make sure to show how many people care about transit starting from the first Transit Committee meeting in November.
Mayor Mark Sutcliffe has made some ambitious and specific transit promises that we want to see started right away.
Transit Priority: Mark Sutcliffe has committed to many Bus Rapid Transit projects such as the Baseline BRT, Kanata North Transitway, and super simple things like bus lanes on Carling Avenue. All the plans for Carling Avenue bus lanes are complete and have been sitting there waiting for many years. There is no parking to be removed, and there is no reason to delay. This now 10 year old project needs to be started right away. Easy and cheap projects like this get our buses moving, increase reliability and save us money in operating costs.
Accountability: Mark Sutcliffe has committed to creating a Transit Network Working Group which consists of members of council, OC Transpo staff and union members to identify problems at OC Transpo. This has been promised before and never ended up happening. If this is a true commitment, we need to see this get started right as Council starts back up.
Communications: People have lost trust in OC Transpo, and Mark Sutcliffe is committing to a full review of OC Transpo communications. At the moment, when the train is temporarily suspended, we get delayed and generic reasons with no timelines on when things will be resolved. This is not how most agencies handle these situations, and this is not the way to make riders trust your system. This will be important in getting people to believe OC Transpo and the city actually do care to improve things, and we hope to see action on this right away.
Bus shortage: Mark Sutcliffe has promised to hire 250 new drivers and mechanics, and order 200 more buses. This is incredibly important, and we need to ensure we have a proper long term procurement plan to ensure we never end up in a bus shortage again. However, we need to see more bus purchases than this. The current plan has us having less buses one year from now than today, and with most of those buses being lower capacity than today. With Stage 2 West extension getting further delayed by the Canada Day floods, we are going to still need lots of buses for a lot longer.
LRT Upload: Many of these financial commitments rely on the O-Train being uploaded to the province. It is vital that this upload process ensures we still have local accountability and local control over the O-Train. Uploading it doesn’t automatically solve the technical problems with the train, and we need to still be able to push for improvements to get the O-Train system to be the convenient, reliable and safe system we all want it to be.
Funding: Mark Sutcliffe is promising to negotiate a Major Employer Pass Program and get OC Transpo’s unused park and rides converted to Transit Oriented Development, with the funds going to OC Transpo. We want to see a timeline on when this Major Employer Pass is implemented so we can get more funding into the system right away.
Now our job is to be there to keep the Mayor and the new Council to account. We will continue showing up to Transit Committee meetings, we will continue showing up to consultations and keep expressing to our Councilors when we think they are doing well and when they are not.
OC Transpo needs to get the basics right:
- We need enough buses, drivers and mechanics to deliver the system we want
- We need to complete our cheap and easy transit priority projects to get our buses moving quicker and be efficient with our operating dollars.
- We need riders to be able to trust the system, with transparency and accountability
If you think all of these things are important, we encourage you to join us at Better Transit Ottawa in holding the Mayor and Council to account.
Joining our discord
- Better Transit Ottawa