After two years of consultation, recommendations, and delays (mostly delays), New Ways to Bus goes into effect today, the 27th of April.
These changes are extensive, with "changes" to nearly every route. Whether that's your frequency, routing, or travel time, OC Transpo is selling this as the biggest service change in its history. So I thought it would be a great time to deliver a stream of consciousness ... I mean, concise wrap-up of my thoughts on the new network.
If there is anything major, I will, of course, report on that as well. And I hope to return with new ridership figures at the end of this year.
What is New Ways to Bus? For anyone who somehow landed here without having heard of it, New Ways to Bus resulted from OC Transpo's Bus Route Review, with the goal of
The network will be pruned from 132 "regular" routes to 105 routes, with the extra hours going to padding, cuts, and service increases.
I am not going to tell you about the changes in depth - if you have escaped hearing about them, or seeing the new signage, I recommend going to OC Transpo's website to read about them.
Thoughts
What do I think of New Ways to Bus?
With respect to the routes, I am 50/50. There are genuine improvements: Route 5, the addition of local service into Kanata, Route 111, Route 116; there are defensible routes: Orleans, Route 24 (which is the least silly, "silly-looking" route in this package of changes), Nepean; and there are, in my eyes, questionable choices: frequency splitting in Kanata and Riverside South, the neutering of some fairly high-ridership routes but not some low-use ones, and so on.
In short, it's not what I would have come up with, in the same budget envelope, but it's fine.
I am less enthused about the frequency changes.
There are "hidden" cuts to off-peak service everywhere. Much of Orleans is seeing the latest trip shaved off the top; weekend service is cut in half on the 11 and 25, among others; and many routes advertised as frequent or local do not run frequently or seven days a week.
Here's a graphic comparing weekend frequent service:
Yikes.
Moreover, this cut is not related to the bus shortage, as the fleet needed for weekend and off-peak service is much lower than peak periods. Off-peak cuts also save less money, with overheads fixed by the peak periods, and off-peak service reducing deadheading (usually) and split shifts, which also cost money in labour and recruiting terms.
The Biglyest Service Change Yet
OC Transpo is billing New Ways to Bus as its "largest bus service change" ever. Evidently, marketing has eaten OC Transpo and spit out the bus service, all chewed up and disgusting.
The same was said of 2019 and 2011. No doubt it was also said in 1983, or 1971, or 1959, or 1950, though those were pre-Internet and pre-resources I can Google and paste here.
What kind of short-term memory do they think we have?
I do think the changes will be impactful for the majority of riders. They will see their frequency change (usually a decrease), many routes will have different travel patterns, with different destinations or travel markets (such as Route 111), and there will be new transfers and new one-seat rides for many.
While I am rather cynical about management's claim of 'improved reliability,' some routes will see more runtime. As long as this is coming from actually increased resources and not from layover time, this is an improvement. Scheduling will not be improved, and the paddles will continue to run wild as they always have.
What this is not, is the "largest bus service change" ever, or even in the last decade (that honour goes to 2020, arguably). OC Transpo is, very reasonable, playing catch-up to new travel patterns while feeling the squeeze from a council that is reluctant to expand service and/or their own incompetent scheduling regime.
2020, while deemed temporary at the time, was a watershed in our work-heavy transit system; 2019 was also the largest change since at least the start of the Transitway for reasons that are too obvious to state.
That OC Transpo is billing this as the largest service change, reflects the marketing focus at OC Transpo. While everything looks shiny, they will not advertise (or even mention) their cuts to frequency. You have to go digging for them. At the end of the year, I doubt ridership will reach the levels that we desire them to be at.
Moreover, trust in the agency is very low. I suspect the marketing is making people cynical, rather than optimistic, about the changes - that they've hidden the changes in the travel planner is not adding to my optimism. If the service reflects genuine improvement, I think ridership will increase. But I don't think that New Ways to Bus is the service improvement that we need.
I hope to be proven wrong.
Conclusion
New Ways to Bus is a genuinely large change for most transit riders in Ottawa. What it is not, is a change in thinking at OC Transpo: a turnaround in their automated scheduling system (look up "HASTUS Block Buster"), more runtime, more recovery time, and reducing frequency splitting among corridor routes.
Nor is it a pivot to a more trunk-oriented network, with high frequency, all day, on the trunks.
New Ways to Bus is the status quo, but mixed a little and marketed for dramatic effect. And this won't change as long as OC Transpo remains tethered to the City as a department rather than an independent commission.
In short, New Ways to Bus is a meaningful change, but it's no new paradigm for OC Transpo; we won't have one until the political effort appears to make it happen.
Until next time.
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