Vineberg and Larkin: OC Transpo is in bad need of a boost

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Every day, workers at OC Transpo drive the buses and trains, maintain the fleets, oversee scheduling and dispatch, and do hundreds of other jobs while making sure that 340,000 daily riders can get to work, school and appointments. Now, however, OC Transpo is in the midst of a crisis — and is failing both its riders and its workers.

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This crisis will not be resolved until serious steps are taken to fund this service by all levels of government: federal, provincial and municipal.

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​In 2023, OC Transpo reduced service by 74,000 hours — and this year riders and workers have been paying the price, with riders facing late buses and hundreds of cancelled trips per day while operators are stretched to the limit working as much as 13 hours on shift.

The crisis has become so severe that beyond the reduced service hours, OC Transpo has to cancel more than 1,000 trips per week because operator schedules are created to be impossibly tight.

Normally, a bus operator should have five to eight minutes at the end of each run to provide extra padding, allowing for traffic or unexpected delays. Instead of providing that extra time — which is vital to ensuring on-time service — OC Transpo has cut out that recovery time. As a result, delays have cascading effects, where instead of just one bus being slightly late, hundreds of trips per day are missed entirely.

OC Transpo has also let go of eight customer service employees and is eliminating after-hour customer service, so members of the public will be left to fend for themselves if they require assistance. With the opening of Lines 2 and 4, potential customers arriving at the airport will have to navigate our transit system blindly. We need to bring back customers, not push them away.

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We need to bring back customers, not push them away.

In addition to the tight schedules, fleet maintenance has enormous challenges with a consistent backlog of buses requiring service. At any given time, there are nearly 200 buses — 26 per cent of the entire fleet — sitting in the garage waiting to be serviced. OC Transpo mechanics work tirelessly to make sure that all vehicles they service are safe, but they often need to re-service vehicles that are unsafe after having been subcontracted out for repairs. The lack of comparable skilled-trade industry pay is a huge issue that has forced many employees to leave OC Transpo. Employee retention can be achieved by paying comparable wages; it’s that simple.

​The worst aspect of this crisis is that it was completely predictable. OC Transpo is well aware of these problems and should have planned for them — and more importantly, senior levels of government must fix the broken funding model that caused this crisis in the first place.

For years, transit advocates around Canada have been ringing the alarm about the public transit “death spiral” that our cities are facing, and Ottawa is no different. Our city’s future depends on public transit: traffic congestion will only worsen. Safe, reliable and affordable public transit is a matter of equity.

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The only solution is for provincial and federal governments to invest in public transit. As things currently stand, Toronto receives more than five times the amount of transit subsidies per resident from the province as Ottawa does. Last year, the Toronto Transit Commission was facing a similar crisis, but Mayor Olivia Chow was able to work with provincial and federal leaders to secure enough funding. We can’t continue to let our capital city fall behind; Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and other decision-makers must do everything in their power in concert with senior levels of government to save OC Transpo.

We ride together. Nous roulons ensemble.

Noah Vineberg and Jamie Larkin are the presidents of Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 279 and 1760, the unions that represent more than 3,000 OC Transpo workers.

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