Community organizations, workers and residents are raising concerns over a pattern of service cuts after OC Transpo announced its plan to reduce LRT frequency during off-peak hours and accusing the city of ruining Ottawa’s public transit system.
OC Transpo says, starting Aug. 26, Line 1 will run every 10 minutes at stations between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays while peak-period service will continue at every five minutes.
The adjustment is to begin days before thousands of university students return for the fall semester and public servants are back in the office a minimum of three days a week.
OC Transpo also says the change is being done “to better reflect current demand and travel patterns.” The agency adds that if traffic demands it can increase frequency.
Nick Grover, an executive member of Free Transit Ottawa, told Capital Current that the city is doing is the opposite of what it should be doing.
“They talk about it as though ridership is an independent variable. like, well, we are going to save some money now, but once ridership magically comes back on its own, we will adjust service. That is not how public transit works,” Grover
“It is a very basic concept that if you build it, they will come. If you make it crappy, they won’t.”
Grover highlighted that the cuts of recent years have hurt public transit service but also residents’ confidence and patience.
In early 2023, the city’s transit commission voted to cut $47 million from the capital budget of OC Transpo, including taking out of service — without replacement — 117 buses in poor condition.
Later last year, OC Transpo said it would cut 74,000 hours of bus service in 2024, a 3.5 per cent reduction in bus service.
Cutting the budget and decreasing bus service has been justified OC Transpo by ridership volumes, Grover said, instead of investing in the system to encourage more riders to use it.
Grover also pointed out that university students, workers and residents use public transit at all times as work and class schedules vary. He added that setting the system based on federal employees’ working hours is not efficient.
“The only reasonable conclusion we can make at this point is that they perhaps don’t actually want people to come back, and the only important thing is to maintain service within these stringent budget parameters,” he said.
“They may want to make the service bad enough that they can justify privatizing it.”
In February this year, OC Transpo cut 35 jobs citing lower ridership that has remained well below pre-pandemic levels.
OC Transpo reported a $6.2 million deficit in the first quarter of 2024, while forecasting a $49.8 million deficit for 2024, almost 70 per cent more than the reported $29.3 million deficit in 2023.
“We have a bad public transit trend in the city because of policy decisions, not because it is just a natural cause,” said Sam Hersh of Horizon Ottawa.
“If you decrease service, fewer people are going to take the system because it is going to get worse. It is a vicious cycle.”
Hersh says cities such as Montreal, Edmonton, and Toronto improved public transit by investing in the system, adding that the city’s miscalculation is going to force more people to drive.
He highlighted that the change ignores many office workers who work from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and neglects thousands of students and people who have different commutes between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.
“If by the end of the day, we are only saving $1.6 million on this out of a $4.5 billion budget, that is nothing,” said Hersh
“We are putting a lot of short-term gain for a lot of long-term pain.”
In a statement to Horizon Ottawa, the President of ATU 279, Ottawa’s transit union, Noah Vineberg said the new change will make it harder for transit workers to provide the services that the public needs.
Nathan Prier, President of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE) which represents over 25,000 workers, told Horizon Ottawa that a reduction in LRT frequency is not a solution to get riders back, but the opposite.
