On the 24th of November, Transit Committee met for its sixth and final meeting of the year. The meeting link, for those interested, was uploaded to YouTube here.
As the last Transit Committee meeting of the year, discussion centered around the budget. It includes $47 million in funding from the provincial government that may or not materialize, a small fare increase, and "savings and efficiencies." There was also some discussion around a David Hill inquiry on standardizing the transfer window following reports that commuters were paying double fares for a single trip and a Wilson Lo motion to staff to procure articulated diesel buses.
Over twenty delegates appeared before the Committee on the budget, and a few delegated on a Wilson Lo motion to allow diesel bus procurement in the coming years.
I have posted the documents for this update below.
- 2026 Draft Operating and Capital Budget
- Multi-Year Budget
- Response to Inquiry: Central Park High School Routes
- Response to Inquiry: Line 1 and 2 Regulatory Oversight
- Inquiries and Motions ending 13 November, 2025
- Motion - 2026 Bus Procurement
Ultimately, the budget passed 8-1, with only Riley Brockington voting against and Marty Carr dissenting on the fare schedule.
Update
This segment begins at 5:00.
Oliver Monahan has been appointed as Associate General Manager. Prior to joining OC Transpo, he worked at Arriva and Transport for London.
Work continues on Stage 2 East. There remain several items that need work before Substantial Completion; this the same step that the project was on as of the last update, although one hopes that they are further along in this step than they were in September.
When Substantial Completion is complete, OC Transpo will hold a technical briefing to discuss the trial running step. Currently, Stage 2 East is anticipated to open in early 2026; staff said it was "achievable" in Q1 in 2026.
OC Transpo has developed an accessibility subpage on their website, which describes accessibility measures taken by the agency.
Sabrina Pasian, chief safety officer, presented the Public Safety Strategy. This takes the form of eight planks: the annual safety plan, visibility, technology, community collaboration, communication, environment, staffing and training, and a partnership with the Ottawa Police Service.
The annual safety plan outlines OC Transpo's priorities while improving transparency; Pasian indicated that there will be new KPIs presented to Council in the New Year, as well as progress on measures recommended by the Westboro crash inquest.
In the Safety Strategy, the communication plank aims to improve public awareness of safety measures on transit; staffing and training aims to improve the quality of training; the presentation highlighted hate-related incidents; visibility aims to increase the presence of uniformed officers on transit, with a new deployment launching in Q2 of 2026. OC Transpo has a team to monitor new technologies, and this aims to leverage those technologies to improve safety - staff cited a new crime reporting app aiming to launch next year and the potential use of AI on CCTV. This includes environmental design through lighting and CCTV, which OC Transpo says is reviewed every three years. Finally, collaboration with other agencies and stakeholders, which includes consultations with communities and groups to help homeless people on transit.
Relative to last year, employee occurrences increased 3%, much of which comes from the February snowfall. The most common incidents are harmful environmental stress events, struck/caught [sic ...?], and motor vehicle incidents. Meanwhile, speed camera violations fell 35% and red light violations fell 12%. Given the province's new ban on speed cameras, OC Transpo plans to review how they track speeding violations.
The customer injury rate is below the target rate at 1.03 injuries per million trips, but has increased year-over-year. The largest contributors are hard brake applications and collisions. The preventable collision frequency has also increased, sitting at 1.05 per 100,000 km driven.
This section begins at 38:05 in the video upload.
12-month ridership, between November 2024 and October 2025, was 70.6 million. This is 3.9% higher than the equivalent figure a year ago. October ridership was 7.8 million, a 16% increase compared to 2024; September ridership was 7.4 million, a 6% increase from 2024's 7.0 million. OC Transpo has passed 80% of pre-pandemic ridership, but still falling short of the budgeted ridership of 7.9 million in September and 8.1 million in October.
Of the 28% of trips that were not on-time, 11% were more than one minute early and 17% were more than five minutes late.
The chart of cancelled trips is always included in the presentation, but since the removal of % figures on the chart, it has become functionally useless for anything more than filling space.
"About" 5% trips were not delivered due to lack of buses, "just over" 40% of trips not delivered were from on-street adjustments, about 33% of trips cancelled were to lack of operator availability, and "just under" 20% of all trips were not delivered due to mechanical breakdowns.
The large proportion of cancellations (about 1% of all trips) attributable to on-street adjustments shows how scheduling remains an issue on the bus network.
The three routes with the highest cancellation rates are Route 6, 12, and 7, with 7.7%, 7.5%, and 6% cancellations respectively. The figure for Route 7 is fairly close to what I found in an analysis of that route.
O-Train Line 1's cancellation rate was 0.5% in October with a 12-month average of 0.7%; the cancellation rate on Lines 2/4 was 2.4%, the same as the 12-month average.
Para Transpo October ridership was 81,100 trips, a 12-month total of 878,400. On-time reliability was 92.7% in October, with a 12-month average of 93%.
The Budget
This section begins at 2:10:55 in the video.
I covered the budget in a previous article.
As a reminder, the operating budget for 2026 is $938 million, which is a 10% increase from the $856 million budget for this year. The capital budget is $177 million, which is a large decrease from last year mostly stemming from last year's large E-bus allocation. The budget includes what I see as an unrealistic expectation of a $47 million subsidy from the provincial government, as well as an ambitious fare revenue target.
The capital budget is almost all for renewal or "service enhancement/regulatory" (read: regulations made us do it). This kind of graphic raises the question of what kind of transit service we want OC Transpo to be - a status quo operation, or one that continuously improves and becomes the best choice for transportation and mobility in Ottawa.
Staff cited $14 million in cost reductions from "efficiencies", of which $9.0 million in diesel fuel and $2.2 million in hydro rates is a result of the end of the carbon tax. This is certainly not an "efficiency" at the municipal level, and it is insulting to taxpayers that the City thinks it can fool us into believing it.
$1.2 million comes from "bus operator guarantee and standby hours" savings, which staff said would not have any service impacts and was simply "doing service smarter." However, it was not made clear what this actually entails, and based on the wording, it could affect service reliability (a hidden cost in the city's "efficiencies") in the coming years.
There was an interesting slide on fixed and variable costs. This year, $612 million is being directly spent on operations. Of $408 million for buses, $305 million is in variable costs and only $103 million is in fixed costs; for the O-Train's $164 million, $136 million is overhead and only $28 million is marginal costs; and for Para Transpo, $5 million is in fixed costs and $35 million of costs is for variable costs. $206 million was in debt service and capital reserves.
Next year, of $419 million allocated for bus operations, $309 million will be in variable costs; of $200 million for O-Train operations, $166 million will be in fixed costs; and of $42 million for Para Transpo, $36 million will be marginal costs. The capital cost sits at $245 million.
This confirms that most of the O-Train costs are fixed, and that increasing service on the O-Train is a very good value proposition, especially while Line 1 service sits at every 10 minutes off-peak.
Of the $92 million increase in the budget, $24 million comes from inflation; $27 million is for capital reserves; $25 million is for 6 months of Stage 2 East costs, which represents a $50 million annual operating cost in the P3 contract with Rideau Transit Group (a great argument against P3s); and $12 million in new debt service.
Fares will rise by 2.5%, which is the city's anticipated annual increase in the Long-Range Financial Plan. EquiPass, Access Pass, and Community Pass holders will not see a fare increase, their fares having been frozen since 2019.
The largest capital line items in the budget are the $30 million for Stage 2 transition, $22 million for bus refurbishments, $20 million for bus replacements, $11 million for operation systems, and $9 million in radio and security systems upgrades.
In operating "efficiencies," the city plans to introduce on-demand service in 2026, and does not plan any service increases on either the bus network or Para Transpo.
In capital projects cancelled or cut ... erm, "efficiencies," there are shelter redesigns at Blair and Tunney's Pasture, "multimodal improvements" at Rideau and Tremblay, station improvements at Eagleson, real time information screens, GTFS support for the O-Train, and a new content management system for the OC Transpo website.
It would be nice, and dangerously transparent, to see the cost of these delayed projects - "efficiencies," excuse me. Excluding that may be the point, since the savings are likely to be miniscule and only generate press coverage of municipal government, which might enable a public discussion around transit quality.
The budget is ever-growing thanks to path dependencies from the O-Train's P3 model. But that is not this Council's project, and they are determined to spend as little as possible within that framework.
Council, and the Mayor especially, need to ask themselves this question: what role do we want public transit to play in Ottawa? If they want a "robust" system which supports their stated mobility, equity, and environmental goals, they must exercise their power to consider service improvements with a rate of investment lens, and oversight must be exercised to ensure a reliable system for riders.
If they do not wish to meet their goals, then stop lying to the public with lofty rhetoric and centre a slogan like "the same old service on OC Transpo" instead.
Miscellaneous
After the meeting, Tim Tierney bragged on social media about his prediction that Stage 2 East would not open this year. This is transit governance in Ottawa - totally unserious, only offering rhetoric (or in this case, social media posts) to create the illusion of governance.
Staff said that they anticipate that 50 of the e-buses will be in service by the end of the year.
OC Transpo is ten buses short of what they need to operate service; as of September 2025, the peak service requirement was 520 buses. However, more and more barriers are appearing between us and reliable bus service, and staff are cautioning against high expectations. This saga appears to have more chapters to come.
A mechanic recruitment plan is ongoing; OC Transpo says that the new wage rate, negotiated this year, is part of their marketing. The collective bargaining agreement also includes greater efficiencies in staffing.
Wilson Lo asked for peak period-only reliability statistics, and staff said that the PM Peak had the greatest "challenge for our customers." Committee directed staff to present new KPIs on bus service reliability by Q2 of 2026, which was explicitly supported by Rawlson King during a later segment.
In an exchange beginning at 2:02:10, Lo also asked about the impact of "interlining, insufficient runtimes, and recovery times" on service reliability, citing "fully local routes" which interline with routes out of Tunney's Pasture and often run late.
The response was unsatisfactory. Staff talked about these "posing challenges" to service reliability. OC Transpo has been interlining "since the 1980s," and while they haven't run an analysis since the 2005 system management review, they claimed that as of that study, interlining reduced the fleet size by 40 buses and saved $25 million in annual operating costs.
Despite these miraculous savings, I am not aware of any city that uses random interlining to the extent that we do. Clearly, Ottawa must be the world's #1 transit city, with all these savings from service innovation.
They also mused about limiting interlining to geographic zones or to certain routes, which would be a great step forwards, but that is a few years away; interlining is, as far as I can tell, completely random as of current.
As for scheduled times, the target is that runtimes are in the 85th percentile of reality, and the layovers go to the 95th percentile, but that is clearly not happening; in none of my travel time analyses, as non-rigorous as they may be, have I found anything close to that level of slack.
Steve Desroches asked to time buses to Line 2, which runs every 12 minutes. Staff said that while they take the last train and last bus times into consideration in scheduling, they cannot time a half hourly bus to the train.
This is sometimes true, and changing some routes to a 24 minute headway would require increased resources. However, there are other opportunities - Route 93 - where opportunities come to mind. One wonders if we are using the "one service hour = cost" model instead of a bus allocation model.
Desroches also asked about Bowesville park-and-ride capacity, particularly in regards to snow clearing. Staff confirmed that the lot sometimes reaches 90-95% capacity, and that they have initiated design work for an expansion, but there is currently no funding slated for this.
Staff will present new KPIs for fare evasion at the next Transit Committee meeting in February.
Jeff Leiper said that he is "struggling" to support this budget, and wants a restoration of all-day 5 minute headways on Line 1. If service reliability stabilizes, he says he will focus on increasing the frequency and coverage of the bus network.
Marty Carr asked staff about reviving the Ecopass, a former employer-paid pass for federal workers. Staff said that they were exploring the option of a pilot project with private employers, but not with the federal government at this time.
While I am not a Para Transpo user, and cannot offer personal insight into the service, there were a number of delegations which highlighted the $11 rural transit fare, poor service reliability, and lack of same-day trip booking.
This budget specifies that it does not offer service increases on Para Transpo. As a quality-of-life service for some of society's most marginalized people, it is incumbent on councillors and the City to consult with users so they can get the service they deserve.
With regards to youth fares and the transfer window issues in Barrhaven, Steve Desroches's motion to recommend the implementation of free fares for under-18s after 1700 and on weekends and holidays at a cost of $430,000/year, to extend the transfer window to 105 minutes in the PM Peak at a cost of $130,000/year, and to provide four free Para Transpo trips per month to seniors at a cost of $152,000/year carried unanimously. Shawn Menard's direction to find money for free fares for under-18s in the summer months also carried unanimously.
Finally, Wilson Lo's motion to consider diesel high-capacity buses in fleet procurement carried unanimously.
Until next time.
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