Public transit is shaping up to be the #1 issue for October's municipal election, as transit users are fed up with service that gets more expensive and less reliable every year. Horizon Ottawa has been canvassing door-to-door across the city collecting signatures on our petition calling on the city to restore the bus fleet, and the folks we meet at the door overwhelmingly agree with this idea.
If you don't need any more convincing, head to our petition page to add your signature and sign up for a volunteer shift to help us spread the word!
If you want to learn a bit more first and see how we came up with this "40 buses per year" number, read on:
This winter, transit riders in Ottawa faced one of the worst stretches of cancellations in recent memory thanks to a confluence of issues. There was already a maintenance backlog caused by a lack of mechanics and a fleet of buses long past their prime. The oldest of these buses should have been retired already, but their replacements’ arrival was delayed due to supply chain issues. Winter storms had left road conditions in a rough state and they were packed with traffic thanks to return-to-office mandates.
Any one of these issues can contribute to cancelled trips; when they all happen at once it’s a disaster. The weather is out of the city’s control, but there are ways of preventing this from happening, and we can draw a clear line from the decisions made by our past two Mayors to this crisis.
We think that population is a valid metric for scrutinizing the capacity of the bus fleet, since increased density on existing transit routes demands more frequent buses and more flexible routes and sprawling development will create a demand for new routes.
In 2010, Mayor Watson inherited a transit system with over 1000 buses. By the end of his term, this had shrunk by around 10%, despite the population growing by 26%.
Thanks in large part to Mayor Sutcliffe's decision to eliminate 117 buses in 2023 as a “budget efficiency” exercise, the fleet has shrunk by another 15%. Over his term, the population has likely grown by another 8.5%.
Critics of transit spending may claim that the installation of two new light rail lines provides more than enough service to compensate for the decrease in buses. If you ask transit riders, however, they’ll overwhelmingly tell you that their experience was far better back in 2010 than it is today, even when the train is running at full capacity (which really can’t be counted on).
We looked into OC Transpo’s public data and couldn’t find anything to help us estimate how much service the trains are providing compared to buses, so we had to pick out some numbers and do the math ourselves to find out approximately how many buses’ worth of service are provided by light rail.
Public data is quite limited, so we were only able to estimate values for 2025. We chose to look at the ridership breakdown between trains and buses for this comparison, since we are trying to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the LRT compensates for the decrease in bus service. This hypothesis can only be true if the trips that could have been provided by the buses we’ve lost over the years have been replaced by a greater number of trips on the train.
We started with the total ridership for both rail and bus: 70.6 million. At a transit committee meeting, staff said the current share of trips by bus is around 70%, giving us roughly 49.4 million trips by bus and 21.2 million by train.
OC Transpo reported that 4.7 million trips were taken on lines 2 and 4 in 2025. We subtract this from the 21.2 million total train trips to get an estimate of 16.5 million trips on line 1.
We can now plug these numbers into some equations:
bus ridership (49.4 M)
–––––––––––––––––– = Trips provided per bus (65,893)
# of buses (750)
Train ridership (21.2 M)
–––––––––––––––––––––––––– = Buses worth of trips provided by all trains (321)
Trips provided per bus (65,893)
Therefore, we can estimate the total train service was around 321 buses worth, with 78% on Line 1 (~250) and the rest on lines 2 and 4 (~71).
If we include these approximations for the years these lines were open, our chart looks a little bit better, but we can still notice a growing gap between service and population:
We were approaching 2010 service levels when Line 1 opened, but since it coincided with a global pandemic, riders didn’t really get to experience what could have been a return to form.
Since they’re using different units and scales, the proximity of these lines does not tell us that much, but the relative distance between them growing indicates a decline in service per person. We need to increase the modal share of transit, but we’re moving in the opposite direction and service levels are certainly a factor contributing to this failure.
If we want to instead look at a single line that provides an overall estimate of the service we’ve had over the past few terms, we can simply factor in population growth and show how many buses (or the equivalent in train service) the city has for every 1000 residents:
If the goal is to reverse the damage done by Watson and Sutcliffe, we should aim to reach around 1.2 for this value.
To maintain consistent service relative to growth, we need to purchase 24 buses per year. To recover, this needs to be higher. To recover to 2010 levels over the same number of years we’ve declined (by 2040), we need 40 buses per year.
New LRT lines can also reduce the number of new buses that need to be procured each year. On this final chart, you can see there is a projected upward trend for the next few years – this is an estimate for what will be provided by the Line 1 extensions. After that, the “status quo” represents maintaining the same number of buses and “our plan” shows what procuring 40 buses per year could do:
While we believe that this analysis is based on sound reasoning, it lacks the consistent public data required for it to be entirely accurate. We hope that as new data becomes available either by OC Transpo themselves, or other organizations and individuals doing transit research, these estimates can be made more accurate and useful for developing transit budgets. Ridership data broken down by mode and more accurate / confirmed bus fleet numbers for 2010 onwards are most needed to really back up this plan.
