Ottawa mayor says some improvements made to OC Transpo bus availability

OC Transpo riders squeeze into a Route 6 bus along Bank Street. This route is one of the worst routes in the city for cancellations.

Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe says public transit has been an “incredibly frustrating file” for him, as the system deals with issues affecting buses and the light-rail line.

Speaking on Newstalk 580 CFRA’s The Morning Rush with Bill Carroll on Friday, Sutcliffe said it’s been disappointing and frustrating for riders as well.

“They’ve been through a lot. The users of public transit have suffered a great deal over the last five or six years in our city,” he said. “Some of the decisions that were made in the past, we’re still living with the consequences of those decisions.”

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Sutcliffe ran on a platform of improving transit reliability in the 2022 municipal election, arguing against his main opponent, former councillor Catherine McKenney, whose promise was to eliminate fares for riders.

Sutcliffe had also promised more transparency and regular updates on transit ridership and performance, and OC Transpo now publishes and updates its key performance indicators on its website. Since January, interim general manager of Transit Services Troy Charter has been providing weekly updates on bus and O-Train performance, as the system struggles with a high degree of bus trip cancellations and hampered service on O-Train Line 1 due to problems with the trains’ axles.

Sutcliffe said on Friday that there are signs of improvement, when it comes to bus service.

“We are receiving more and more of the electric buses that we ordered. It took a little longer to receive them. That’s not unusual, but we are getting more and more of them,” he said.

According to OC Transpo’s website, there are 78 zero-emission buses in its fleet, with 64 currently in service, as of March 25.

Sutcliffe said that OC Transpo had more buses than it needed to provide service this week.

“Yesterday and the day before (Wednesday and Thursday), we had about 530 buses. We need 520 to serve all the different routes. The previous week and the week before that, we’d been anywhere between 485 and 510 buses. Now, we’re at 530 because we’ve received some of these new electric buses,” he said.

OC Transpo does typically require 520 available buses per day to provide service, but in mid-January, while dealing with a backlog of maintenance requirements, the transit service temporarily lowered that threshold to 500 buses by removing 255 bus trips per day from the schedule. Charter has said in the past that those trips would be restored when the average number of available buses rises and remains stable.

In a Friday afternoon memo, OC Transpo said there were 804 undelivered trips between March 15 and March 21. During that period, an average of 514 buses were available every weekday, exceeding the temporary requirement of 500 buses.

OC Transpo expects to have nearly 160 electric buses by the end of June.

Line 1 remains ‘incredibly frustrating’

Progress on restoring regular service on O-Train Line 1 has been “incredibly frustrating,” according to the mayor.

“I get daily updates about this… and it’s a frustrating process and I’ll be honest, it’s a challenge working with large, international companies. We’re a small player in the light rail game across the world,” he said. “That’s why the upload is so important because if our LRT system was being maintained by Metrolinx, they’re a much bigger player in that world. Not only do they have more staff and experts, they also have more leverage with these big companies.”

He said there are solutions being developed, analyzed and tested by experts to deal with the spalling issue that was discovered on Line 1 vehicles in January. The city instituted a strict, 100,000-kilometre mileage limit on light rail vehicles before maintenance is required, which has limited the number of available trains for service. For weeks, Line 1 has been running with single-car trains, as opposed to the double-car service it normally offers. Train frequency was increased to help alleviate crowding on trains and platforms, but there has been no movement on adding new vehicles to service.

According to OC Transpo’s memo, 21 light rail vehicles on Line 1 remain below the 100,000-kilometre mileage threshold.

Charter has previously said OC Transpo is now focused on restoring regular service entirely as opposed to adding small numbers of vehicles back to the fleet.

Sutcliffe added that the system is focused on medium-term and long-term goals.

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“In the coming days, I’m hoping we’ll be able to present to the community a path towards restoring service to the level that it was before,” he said.

“It’s about having the measures in place to detect any issues… Those kinds of things have been worked on now for several weeks… So, I am frustrated, but I remain hopeful. We just want to have the right measures in place to be able to detect a problem before it happens so that we are protecting the safety of the public. It’s a little bit like having a smoke detector in your house.”

The lack of available train cars is also delaying the start of trial running on the Line 1 east extension to Orléans. The extension achieved substantial completion earlier this month, but the critical test requiring 21 days of problem-free operation cannot begin until more trains are available.