More than 1,500 OC Transpo bus trip cancellations last week; no change in O-Train Line 1 service

An OC Transpo bus pulls up to a transit stop in the winter. (CTV News Ottawa)

OC Transpo says there were more than 1,500 bus trip cancellations in the third week of February.

New data released Friday shows there were 1,527 bus trip cancellations for the week of Feb. 15 to 21, accounting for 3.4 per cent of all planned trips that week. Nearly 400 trips were not delivered on Feb. 20, when 11.6 cm of snow fell.

This is lower than the week prior, which saw more than 2,000 trip cancellations, but is part of an ongoing pattern of bus service delivery falling below OC Transpo’s own reliability targets.

• 3 OC Transpo routes see highest number of trip cancellations in February

The most recent data shows there have been nearly 5,200 undelivered bus trips in the first three weeks of February, or 3.8 per cent of all planned trips.

These figures do not account for the 255 daily trips that have been temporarily removed from the planned trip schedule because of a lack of available buses.

A lack of available buses was cited as the reason for 409 of the 1,527 bus trip cancellations in the week of Feb. 15. OC Transpo says 448 trip cancellations were due to a lack of available drivers, 405 were because of issues on the roads, such as collisions, customer incidents, or traffic, and 265 were because of mechanical breakdowns.

Interim general manager of Transit Services Troy Charter said two more electric buses have entered service. The fleet now has 55 electric buses, approximately half of what the city expects to have by the end of March.

O-Train Line 1 service remains unchanged

Charter says there has been no meaningful change in service on O-Train Line 1.

The line has been running at reduced capacity since the spalling issue on some of the vehicles’ axles was discovered in January.

“Twenty-one vehicles continue to have mileage below 100,000 kilometres as per the requirements of the safety order. Due to other ongoing maintenance requirements, the number of trains available for revenue service will continue to fluctuate. OC Transpo expects to maintain the increased frequency of trains during peak periods,” Charter said.

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Trains are running at a frequency of every three to four minutes during peak periods, but service is only on single train cars. Peak service normally requires 26 light rail vehicles, running every five minutes as 13 double-car trains.

“Technical meetings between OC Transpo and RTG are ongoing, with a focus on validation and verification of RTG’s proposed containment and monitoring systems. The review of technical information is also being conducted by independent experts, including Transportation Resources Associations (TRA).”

Why is it taking so long?

There has been no change in the number of train vehicles that OC Transpo says are available for service on Line 1 in three weeks, and no anticipated change next week.

When asked why it seems to be taking so long, Charter told reporters there is a lot of information that is being shared that must be validated by the city.

“There are a number of containment measures and mitigations that RTG and Alstom have proposed that would allow us to increase the service and get back to that full capacity that we’ve seen before. The city is doing their due diligence and going through that because we have to make sure that their systems, their tools, their processes that they’re using will catch if there’s spalling on a bearing so that we can remove that vehicle from service without incident,” he said.

Charter said progress is being made in those discussions, but it’s highly technical work that cannot be rushed.

“We just need to make sure that the processes and the mitigations they’ve put in place give us that high degree of confidence and ensure that the fleet continues to be safe. It’s highly technical and given that it’s a safety feature of the vehicles, we need to be very, very cautious in our approach.”