Ottawa’s transit woes continue, ridership drops despite investments

It didn’t feel like the glory days at the time, climbing onto a crowded bus and pushing into the crush of bodies, riders sweating into their wool coats and parkas.

But despite the cramped rides and the occasional backpack to the face, April Lesnick said those days in the early 2000s were the ones when she felt she could most rely on the transit system in Canada’s capital city.

These days, she often finds herself alone in a snowbank next to a stop, bundled up against the cold wind, waiting for a bus that never comes at all.

“Sometimes it shows, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s notifications on the app, sometimes there’s not,” Lesnick said.

She started taking the bus at just nine years old, but this year, at age 45, the lifelong transit user said she’s had enough and is planning to buy a car for the first time.

“I am done,” she said.

For years, students, public servants and other workers boarded packed buses that would rumble along corridors separated from the rest of Ottawa’s log-jammed traffic.

Cities from all over North America once looked to Canada’s capital as a beacon of transit success and innovation, and ridership climbed steadily for the first 10 years of the millennium.

That came crashing down when the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on Ottawa’s bus service, as it did for countless others across the world.

But transit advocates and critics in Ottawa say the problems didn’t start with COVID-19, and some even argue the system may have become the victim of its own success.

“Ottawa’s system was so successful, it started running into those capacity issues where buses were bumper to bumper,” said Ottawa transit advocate Peter Raaymakers.

These days, after a massive $6.8-billion investment to replace much of that dedicated corridor with a new cross-city LRT service, the transit system serves as something of a cautionary tale.

Ottawa was the first city in the world to transition from a bus rapid transit system to light rail in response to bumper-to-bumper buses, the transit service’s acting general manager Richard Holder said in a statement. It was a move that was contemplated during the initial design of the bus transitway over 50 years ago.

Brian Taylor, the director of the institute of transportation studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, remembers attending a lecture about Ottawa’s innovative transit ideas in the 1980s as a student at Berkeley. Now he teaches a similar course at UCLA.

“Ottawa and Adelaide, Australia, were sort of the poster children for looking at a more cost-effective way to provide the metro-like service, but with less-expensive buses,” Taylor said.

The key was the transitway, which allowed buses to run on designated roads without having to contend with traffic.

In Ottawa, it worked particularly well because so many people work and study in a concentrated area downtown.

When Taylor Googled Ottawa’s system in December, the headlines were far less flattering than his old syllabus.

This year, a dearth of riders left Ottawa’s transit service, OC Transpo, with a $50-million budget gap. The city plans to fill that by raising fares, cutting service, laying off staff and dipping into reserves.

The change started in 2011, when ridership hit a peak with 103.5 million rides in a year. The following year, the city voted to replace much of the transitway with trains, starting with a tunnel through the downtown core.

Ridership began to slide downward after that, a trend that city staff at the time blamed largely on changes to downtown employment. Raaymakers said temporary detours and other effects of LRT construction likely also played a role.

Things derailed somewhat from there.

During construction, a sinkhole opened up on one of Ottawa’s busiest downtown streets near the historic ByWard Market, swallowing three lanes of traffic and a minivan.

Despite continued LRT breakdowns and construction detours, riders are slowly returning to the system. In November, ridership was at 71 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

But the work-from-home culture that developed since the pandemic means the number of public servants and other workers commuting downtown may never be the same as before.

Holder said Ottawa’s knowledge-based workforce has meant the city’s ridership recovery is lower than cities whose economy is geared to manufacturing, industrial or commercial sectors.

Globally, the systems that have rebounded well from the pandemic tend to be ones that cater to communities rather than commuters, Taylor said.