Faster boarding, higher ridership, fewer driver assaults - and less time and bureaucracy wasted punishing fare evaders!
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/o...
13.02.2026 18:21
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Faster boarding, higher ridership, fewer driver assaults - and less time and bureaucracy wasted punishing fare evaders!
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/o...
Full text of remarks by Noah Vineberg, President of the union representing transit workers in Ottawa (ATU Local 279) to Transit Committee. He rightly notes many of those sitting on the committee are responsible for the crisis they are now decrying.
freetransitottawa.ca/atu-to-city-...
Ottawa needs more buses. We also need more dedicated lanes - to keep buses out of traffic and on schedule.
Bus lanes can cut trip times in half and are badly needed on arteries like Bank, Carling, Baseline, Richmond and Rideau to speed up key routes like the 6, 7, 11, 85 and 88.
Ottawa is set to grow by 500,000 people in the next two decades. Will we provide good enough transit for all of them to get around, or sit by while tens of thousands of cars are added to our roads?
www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...
Sutcliffe says this is a no-go because it would mean less money to invest in reliability, which they are also not doing.
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
We need emergency bus lane and transit priority measures enacted on key corridors to ensure our working buses are used as efficiently as possible. We can't have our limited bus fleet standing still in traffic.
Great coverage of the Launch of our New Vision for Transit last night! Fabulous turnout of many fabulous people.
Fun, community, and optimism brings people together!
www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic....
I love a good community event about an important municipal policy issue (public transit) featuring local musical talent 🚌🎶💛
@freetransitottawa.bsky.social
“It was haphazard to put all of the eggs in the electric bus basket. More buses are the only way we’re going to be able to offer the service that’s been posted and promised. But we are at a bit of a standstill with getting buses into the system.”
www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...
Join us at Irene’s Pub on Monday January 19th for an evening of music, speakers, and community!
It's time to build a movement around a set of bold ideas to deliver the transit we deserve – without barriers and which provides a real alternative to high emissions private vehicles.
To overcome many years of neglect, we must urgently tackle the fundamental issues with bus service — not in baby steps over the years and decades to come.
A city focused on affordability, climate action, and good services is waiting. Let's fight for it, together.
We did it- 18 and Under Youth Pass is coming to #Ottawa as of July 1st, 2026. It will bring free transit for youth on weekends, holidays, after 5pm on weekdays and all day every day in the summer (July and August)!
Good news re transit priority funding. Do we know what exactly it will be used for, and on which roads?
Free Transit: Iowa did it, Ottawa can too
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c...
Those fuel savings are all over the budget, all the result of external policy changes from another level of government. The City of Ottawa has no right to claim that as an achievement. The only action the City took was not to re-invest those transit savings back into improved transit service. 5/
The 2026 transit budget includes $47M in savings from uploading the LRT to Metrolinx... a deal the mayor admits won't be finalized for up to two years.
Why are we claiming money we haven't saved yet?
This creative accounting allows the City to appear spending while doing austerity.
"Pairing free buses with paid parking says we value people in motion more than cars at rest. Some drivers will denounce this as a cash grab. But for decades, the city has handed out billions in free public real estate to a small minority of residents."
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/o...
In case anyone needed a better visual to show why the bus lane is "empty" and the car lane is "filled".
It's pretty simple. Cars are realllyyyy bad at moving large amounts of people.
They're definitely great for specific uses! But to rely on them for every single trip is where we have failed.
"The budget asks riders to pay more for the same unreliable service. The people who rely on it and the workers who deliver it live this every single day. We have less people riding our bus or trains because when they’ve gone to use it... it has let them down."
-- Noah Vineberg, ATU 279 president
Bathurst Street #RapidTO at Queen Street. We love to see a better Toronto being built one bucket of paint at a time. #topoli
Plante roughly saying 'everyone's in the same boat with Transit having trouble' and that she couldn't find any cities that are successfully recovering.
15 second Google.
globalnews.ca/news/9477981...
Cars Cars as far as the eye can see. We could replace pretty much every vehicle in this picture with two more buses.
City of Ottawa 2026 draft capital budget item for Carling Avenue showing a year of completion of 2035
Blog post about this delay The 2026 draft Ottawa budget announces further delays to the Carling Avenue bus lane project, estimating the completion time for a bus lane project at 2035. This project was started in 2016 with designs released in 2017, which would make this be a 19 year long project just to install simple interim bus lanes. To put this in perspective, the O-Train Line 1 project took 7 years to build an entire train system, even after the excessive delays of that project. This is not a complicated BRT project, this is meant as an interim solution until a real BRT is complete. The initial project design (https://ottawa.ca/en/parking-roads-and-travel/transportation-planning/environmental-assessment-completed-projects/carling-avenue-transit-priority-measures) released in 2017 suggests the project is almost all relabeling existing lanes from mixed traffic to bus-only to give priority to buses on the busy corridor or Carling Avenue. Projects like these are the easy and cheap projects that need to be prioritized as much as possible. Not only will this improve travel times and reliability of one of the top bus corridors in the city, but this also allows us to use our limited bus fleet as efficiently as possible. Ottawa faces a severe bus shortage, which means we must make sure every bus is used as efficiently as possible. When a bus sits in traffic, it can’t be used to serve other important routes. Carling Avenue is also facing intense redevelopment with new apartments with very limited parking. That means many new transit-using residents need to cross the corridor. We urge city council to determine what is making this project take so long and speed up easy and cheap transit projects like this to get our city moving. \- Better Transit Ottawa
The 2026 draft Ottawa budget announces further delays to the Carling bus lane project, estimating the completion time for a bus lane project at 2035. This project was started in 2016 with designs released in 2017, which would make this be a 19 year long project just to install interim bus lanes.
"Ridership has surpassed pre-pandemic levels by 18%. Bus drivers say they’re navigating less congested streets. People drove 1.8 million fewer miles and emissions dropped by 24,000 metric tons a year - the equivalent of taking 5,200 vehicles off the roads."
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/c...
When transit sucks, many parents and seniors need to own a car -- maybe even two. This costs a household about $16,000 a year. Failing to invest in transit is a huge financial burden on everyone.
Even worse, the city scrapped the Youth Pass and raised the senior bus fare last year.
Mayor conflates low taxes with "affordability." But when public services like transit remain unusable for most people, that becomes incredibly expensive. Saddling people with car payments, Uber/Lyft costs, air pollution and climate change is not affordable.
www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/artic...
Can you elaborate on why they had to? We are digging into this context presently!
"The Brampton case clearly shows there is no such thing as tailoring service to demand — demand is not fixed. The phenomenon of induced demand is as real for transit as it is for highways: If you provide a more attractive service, more people will use it. If you cut service, riders will disappear."
"Quite simply, Brampton provides service that is good enough to make getting around by transit reasonable for people who have other options as well as for people with no other choice."
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
