Among the unintended benefits of taking public transit in Ottawa is that it gives you time to think.
Lots of time.
Unfortunately, most of that time is spent thinking ABOUT public transit — a sure sign that things aren’t working as they should. In a perfect city, buses and trains would run so smoothly that riders wouldn’t give them a second thought. We would simply get on, get off, and get on with our lives.
Alas, this is not that city. OC Transpo routinely fails to reach its regularity and punctuality goals while promising “incremental” improvements that, if they exist at all, are glacial. I’m still trying to process the recent news that OC cancelled
nearly 800 bus trips
in a single day. Honestly, I have greater faith in the second coming of Christ than I do in OC’s online travel planner — unless He’s planning on coming by bus, that is.
More recently, we learned that
two-thirds of the fleet
of Confederation Line LRT trains were taken out or service because of
“spalling” issues
. When I first read about it, I thought it was a typo that should have read “appalling” issues. Both versions work. At a recent press conference, OC Transpo’s general manager, Troy Charter, repeated the mantra that customer safety was the transit authority’s top priority, but I’m not sure he’s including customers freezing to death while waiting for a cancelled bus as among the safety concerns worth considering.
On a recent Saturday evening, OC Transpo gifted me an unexpected extension while I waited in the cold for a No. 10 bus that had apparently decided to explore other options. Some of that time I spent wondering what had become of the man who had been sharing the Bronson Avenue bus shelter with me. At some point during our unscheduled thinking time, he checked his watch and left.
He didn’t head off in the direction the bus would be coming from, nor in the direction it would subsequently head. Instead, he went off in an altogether different direction. Had he abandoned his plans and headed home? Had he decided to try his luck on Bank Street? Or — and this is what too much waiting and thinking can do to a person — had he decided to steal a car?
I realize this sounds ridiculous. But long waits have a habit of sending the mind wandering. Besides, despite Ottawa police figures showing a 21 per cent reduction in vehicle thefts from 2023 to 2024, auto theft remains much higher than it was before the pandemic. Something has to account for it — could it be poor public transit?
Either way, it’s a roundabout way of saying that when transit isn’t working properly, it costs riders more than just their patience. It costs them time, and right now, riders are the only ones paying for it.
But must it always be thus?
In Toronto, city council is looking into whether transit riders should be compensated when service falls below a basic standard — a money-back guarantee if a trip is delayed by 15 minutes or more, barring mitigating weather events.
The region’s GO Transit system already has such a policy in effect, as do transit systems in London, Singapore and Washington, D.C., according to the notice of motion filed last week by Beaches-East York councillor Brad Bradford.
“Riders are willing to pay for good service,” his motion read in part, “but they should not be expected to bear the costs of arriving late to work, appointments and important events. Implementing a refund system would demonstrate that both the Toronto Transit Commission and City Council respect customers’ time and money.”
The motion, however, which called on the Toronto Transit Commission to implement such a refund policy, was amended from under Bradford’s feet. Instead of voting to implement such a plan, council, by a 19-4 margin, instructed staff to “evaluate and consider” the “feasibility of implementing” such a plan. “They’ve punted it into the bureaucratic abyss,” a disappointed Bradford said afterward.
Punted or not, though, the fact that Toronto council is even seriously discussing the issue is a positive sign. Hopefully, Ottawa council will pick up a similar torch and carry it further, and show that both it and OC Transpo respect customers’ time and money. It might only be a matter of time before it has to. Bradford’s motion, after all, came when general discourse about poor public transit has turned from the long-heard angry grievances to full-on mockery.
In Toronto, a man recently outran the new Finch West LRT, completing the 10.3-km route 18 minutes faster than the train. (By way of comparison, according to Natural History Magazine, the 62 minutes it took the train to complete the route puts it a smidge slower than a domestic pig, but slightly faster than a chicken).
Meanwhile, Pizza Pizza made advertising hay lately with its 40-minutes-or-it’s-free delivery campaign, parking a digital billboard outside construction-plagued Eglinton Crosstown LRT stations with the message “They should have ordered the LRT from us.”
In Ottawa, this stage is easy to recognize: when riders stop filing complaints, begin sharing survival tips, and then abandon all hope entirely. Mockery may be fun, but it isn’t unserious — far from it; it’s what frustration sounds like just before it gives up.
It’s also the final stop for OC Transpo and council to pay attention and do something — not to simply acknowledge the failures of Ottawa’s public transit, but attach a consequence to them, and recognize that riders’ time has value. And let us think about other things for a change.
