A new website from a volunteer transit advocacy group shows why Ottawa’s official bus reliability numbers don’t match the experience of most riders.
Ajay Ramachandran, of Better Transit Ottawa, pointed to cancellation numbers from the afternoon peak period on Feb. 5 as an example.
“Route 6 has a cancellation rate of 15 per cent, and Route 99 has a cancellation rate of 22 per cent. This is just an arbitrary day I picked last week,” said Ramachandran during a Transit committee meeting, referring to a dashboard created by his group.
“It’s like this almost every day this past month. This is in contrast to the published OC Transpo number of 96 per cent delivery, as they’re able to average it out with off-peak times. But the reality is, most people experience the system during peak, and to them, the 22 per cent cancellation rate is what they actually experienced.”
Barrhaven East Coun. Wilson Lo agreed that the official on-time metrics don’t provide the full picture.
“The information [from OC Transpo] might be accurate, right? But the way it’s presented is not reflective of passenger experience,” Lo said.
“For example, some days, to the people who live in my ward, it’s a 50 per cent trip delivery because every other trip is cancelled or late to a point where it seems like it’s canceled.”
Lo says he finds the Better Transit Ottawa dashboard very helpful for understanding the full picture.
Better Transit Ottawa’s website displays graphs that show bus availability, tracks cancellations, and shows the status of all routes. Ramachandran said the website retrieves bus locations every minute from OC Transpo’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and stores it in a database. The group is then able to look at how the buses move through the day and display it on their website in real time.
“We’ve been working on this since November and got the first prototype at the beginning of January,” said Ramachandran. “Over the past few weeks, we’ve been slowly adding more dashboards based on different ideas people have suggested.”
Earlier in the meeting, OC Transpo staff addressed some bus concerns, including the chronic shortage of mechanics.
Troy Charter, the OC Transpo interim general manager, said that while the number of mechanics is low, they are making progress on hiring mechanics with the latest recruitment plan.
“We’ve had previous recruitment campaigns where we netted zero applicants,” Charter said. “We are still relatively early in the program, but we have 17 applicants. It may not seem like a huge number, but if we could hire 10 mechanics from that pool, that combined with the apprentice program … we would be in a much better state.”
Charter further explained OC Transpo has more intense advertising for mechanic jobs with job postings on LinkedIn, a feature in Ottawa.ca, ads on buses, radio, Spotify and participation in seven upcoming career fairs.
Sam Hersh, with Horizon Ottawa, reminded the committee the city is still far behind in replacing its aging bus fleet. He said that, while Ottawa used to have around 1,000 buses, its current fleet is now around 730 to 760.
“An excuse I often hear from some to justify the small fleet for such a large population is that the LRT is in service. That buses were removed to reduce redundancy in service,” Hersh said. “I can get how that argument makes sense, and I suspect in some small cases it may be true. But when we look at cities with similar-sized populations with light rail, the situation is completely different.”
He said that Edmonton and Calgary have 995 and 1,100 buses respectively, alongside light rail systems. Hersh told the committee he believes Ottawa should have similar numbers of buses.
Charter told the CBC in January that the transit system is struggling with bus replacement, in part because of supply-chain issues that date back to the pandemic.
“The electric fleet is expected to grow to 110 by the end of March and 234 in total by the end of the year,” he says.
