As the parent of two children, Katy de Sousa worries about how they will explore their independence.
Her youngest child is 11, the age when he would start taking some transit trips on his own and exploring Ottawa, but
OC Transpo
’s cancellation of the youth fare pass will make that journey more difficult.
OC Transpo will eliminate the discounted youth monthly transit pass as of Sept. 1, and those aged 11 to 19 will, from that point on, be charged the same price as adults. Fare hikes of five per cent took place in January 2025,
due to a $120-million transit shortfall
.
De Sousa’s family only has one car, which her husband uses to travel to work every day. She says they’ve scheduled their lives around having one vehicle and she often bikes or uses transit to commute around the city.
But De Sousa says public transit is not convenient enough anymore because of longer routes (which she credits to the
New Ways to Bus system
) and the financial aspect, such as increased fares and the youth fare cancellation.
“It’s definitely going to have a financial impact on us as a family, having to pay more,” she said. “If they don’t have access to transit to get places … It’s going to eat into my time to take them places.
“It also doesn’t foster their own independence in being able to move around their city.”
De Sousa says her oldest child, who is 19, has had to turn down job prospects because of the fare changes. Previously they used public transit twice a day to get to and from school.
“There’s just no transit available for them to get to in a reasonable time and for a reasonable amount of money to get to the job,” she said.
Katrina Camposarcone-Stubbs, a public information officer with the City of Ottawa, said in an Aug. 5 statement to the Citizen that some youths would be eligible to receive a Student Transit Pass through their school boards instead of acquiring youth passes.
“During the winter 2024 semester, over 85 per cent of Youth Passes were sold to school boards and not to individual customers,” she wrote. “In early 2025, fewer than 100 individual customers purchased the Youth Pass themselves each month.”
Coun. Sean Devine, representing Knoxdale-Merivale ward, said he didn’t support the transit budget or its various elements, including elimination of the youth fare. OC Transpo’s 2024 gross operating budget was $768 million. The budget for 2025 is $856 million.
Ottawa will now be charging youths aged 11 years old $4 per transit ride. In other Canadian cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria, 11-year-olds have free transit, while Calgary charges $2 for youths aged six to 12, and in Winnipeg it’s $2.15.
Currently, the monthly youth pass in Ottawa costs $104 a month and a monthly adult pass costs $135.
“We are now definitely at the top when it comes to how much we charge (children) aged 11 or 12 to ride the bus,” Devine said.
Devine said minimal adjustments to the transit levy would alleviate a lot of Ottawa’s budget pressures, but it had focused on short-term pressures while other Canadian municipalities had seen free transit for youth as a “strategic investment in long-term ridership growth.”
“When it comes to any long-term vision for the viability of OC Transpo, I don’t see how this plays in our long-term favour,” he said, adding this decision would only “disincentivize” transit riders.
“It’s another day, another cut,” said Tom Ledgley, a co-ordinator with the grassroots organization Horizon Ottawa.
Ledgley also said it was shocking to see another “controversial” transit decision being made. He remembers when
OC Transpo originally tried to increase senior passes by 120 per cent
and traces all these issues back to the city’s transit budget in November 2024.
More people will opt to buy vehicles instead of using public transportation, and car usage could go up in the city if OC Transpo continues down this path, Ledgley said, adding that will lead to more traffic and vehicle-related collisions.
Those who can’t afford other modes of transportation will be stuck paying for OC Transpo’s service for themselves and their children, de Sousa said, which will only add to the overall cost of living crisis.
“You’re asking people who are already struggling to make ends meet to pay even more,” de Sousa said. “That’s what you get when you don’t put enough money into transit.”
If Ottawa wants to increase ridership numbers, it’s going about it the wrong way, Ledgley said, because limiting young people’s access to public transportation only shows them that this is not a service they can rely on.
Public transportation is a benefit for the environment and for “social cohesion,” Ledgley said, and “conditions people to be more social with their community.”
“It’s not acceptable to everyone, so a lot of people, at the end of the day, if their passes get cut, they’re just not going to be able to go places,” he said. “They’re going to have to stay at home more, not have a social life, not have access to grocery stores and other essential things.”
While Ledgley says OC Transpo constantly refers to working on ridership rates, he says this move will only lower those numbers, especially if a large section of Ottawa’s population isn’t willing to spend the extra money on transit.
“If Ottawa has this goal of increasing ridership, they should be doing the opposite of what they’re doing right now,” he said.
Devine also said he couldn’t see this decision improving ridership rates, and he said it would only stretch transit budgets for low-income families. He also said parents wouldn’t be able to teach their children how to be comfortable and safe on public transit.
“Who is going to say, ‘Hey, great, it’s now more expensive for me to take my family on transit?’ This only hurts us, it hurts people that need transit the most.”
Devine said he believed city council would revisit this issue when 2026 budget discussions begin this fall and was hoping the city could come up with better solutions when it came to transit and regaining ridership rates.
“If they haven’t, then it’ll come to council, myself included and hopefully others (will) try to, once again, stop the city from shooting itself in the foot when it comes to transit and building a ridership.”
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