Winnipeg is has some pilot buses. Hopefully it goes well!

Our next goal is to push council to do yearly bus procurements, like they do in Gatineau, instead of doing large bulk purchases every few years

When high capacity battery electric buses do become available, staff still have the flexibility to switch over to them

This is the environmentally friendly choice, as every person on a bus, means one less car on the road. No one is going to ride transit if there is no room on their low capacity bus

Now, staff has the authority again to purchase diesel or hybrid buses to buy high capacity buses. However, this doesn't mean we are abandoning the battery electric bus program. This is only about our purchase of high capacity buses. Our 40-foot bus purchases will remain battery electric buses.

In 2021, council made a motion to restrict future bus purchases to battery electric buses. While this sounded nice at the time, it caused us to only be able to buy smaller 40 foot buses due to there not being a market for high capacity battery electric buses yet.

The important thing is that this is a fixable problem. But to fix it, council needs to first acknowledge the severity of the problem.

There is no way simple operational way out of this, the only solution is having enough buses to actually deliver the scheduled service

> A report for the Transit Committee shows OC Transpo saw 67.9 million passenger trips on buses and the O-Train last year, up from 64.2 million trips in 2023 and 50.3 million trips in 2022.

source: www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...

September 2025 is again a record: www.octranspo.com/en/about-us/...

Ridership is not in free-fall. It has been consistently going up since 2023

Fares provide 211 million dollars, that's a quarter of the budget. That's not nothing.

Even if an upper government was willing to give 211 million, there would be so many great ways to spend that 211 million on better service.

Construction costs aren't actually one-off, you must keep paying debt on the construction contract. To say that BRT is more expensive after 2 - 4 years is just not true. You can see how much we are spending on train maintenance and debt payments in the 2026 budget to see.

We sold off too many of our buses and laid-off too many of our drivers putting us in a bus shortage ever since the train launch in 2019. This was done just to be able to afford the operations and debt payment expenses of our train

It is true that BRT is not LRT-lite, it is a different mode of transport with pros and cons.

On a level of service cuts, trains can be cut too, as we have seen with Line 1 last September.

On a level of costs, the costs to run Line 1 have been eating into our budget ever since it launched

When built right, a BRT corridor can offer a better passenger experience than a train corridor by giving passengers one seat rides by having buses continue locally outside of the corridor. Ottawa's former Transitway is a great example of this

Trains are important when the capacity needs it, but a properly built out BRT is a very powerful tool that is cheaper to build.

It is unacceptable this interim project is still 10 years away.

We urge city council to determine what is making this project take so long and work to speed it up

More details: bettertransitottawa.ca/blog/carling...

@jleiper.bsky.social @tkavanaghbayward.bsky.social @riverwardriley.bsky.social

This is not a complicated BRT project, this is meant as an interim solution until a real BRT is complete.

Easy and cheap projects like this need to be prioritized in our city to get our buses moving and use our insufficient bus fleet as efficiently as possible.

@stephanieplante.bsky.social @rawlson.bsky.social @arieltroster.com @shawnmenard.bsky.social @octranspo.com