The news this week wasn’t good. Thousands of bus trips cancelled again in February. LRT down to one train for the foreseeable future. When it comes to Ottawa’s public transit, it seems there’s never good news.
Even the announcement of progress on the LRT East project was met with cynicism, given that the trains that Line 1 uses continue to have “spalling” issues with the wheel assembly.
When will it end? And what am I – one of the members of OC Transpo’s governance body – going to do about it?
Since 2022, I’ve been wrestling with myself over a feeling of powerlessness about OC Transpo, in conflict with my ability as a decision maker to affect change.
I have residents who are suffering immeasurably from a lack of service. Algonquin College students have the biggest uptake of the U-pass of all of Ottawa’s post-secondary institutions, but they can’t get to and from classes reliably. Bells Corners’ routes were cut during the pandemic, and the subsequent elimination of the 200 series through the New Ways to Bus changes have completely isolated that community from transit.
Algonquin College has been hard hit financially on two fronts: an 11 year tuition freeze and a sharp reduction in the number of foreign student visas. Both of these factors have made Algonquin's finances untenable, and the college's response has been to cut some of their most successful programs: