How to boost OC Transpo ridership
Plus, the Ottawa school bus shortage
Transit ridership is down in most Canadian cities, and transit agencies are facing massive operating deficits. (Ottawa’s budget gap due will be upwards of $39-million this year, mostly due to lower fare revenue; Toronto was projecting a $125-million budget shortfall.) It could be years before ridership recovers to pre-pandemic levels.
In Ottawa, the key to bringing back riders isn’t fare discounts or marketing campaigns. It’s two things: 1) Energizing the downtown economy; and 2) Speeding up construction of new homes near transit stations.
***
Energizing the downtown economy
This first one is obvious.
For OC Transpo, bus ridership is at 75% of pre-pandemic levels and LRT ridership is at 43%.1 Yes, part of that is due to a lack of confidence in the reliability of buses and trains. Most of the ridership loss is because more people are working from home, and downtown is dead.
Public servants have been a core part of OC Transpo’s ridership for decades. Prior to the pandemic, OC Transpo estimated that at least 30,000-35,000 federal public servants used public transit every weekday. One in five OC Transpo customers was a federal public servant.2 For decades, much of our transit system was optimized to serve this group and others who work downtown.
So it’s no surprise that with a shift to working at home, train ridership has gone way down. Anecdotally I’m hearing that many public servants are now working 2 or 3 days per week in the office which would roughly match that 43% train ridership level.
Fewer people working in offices (especially downtown) has also meant closures and staffing reductions at shops and restaurants. This has also reduced the number of transit trips downtown.
So the sooner we can get downtown back to health, the better. But “back to office” mandates for federal public servants are not the way to do it.
What else then? Office-to-residential conversions are a good start. Some other ideas to re-purpose vacant downtown office space that might be faster and less expensive: expansion of university and college campuses; medical/hospital use; arts and culture incubators. Bonus: These are all uses that keep people downtown beyond the typical 8am-4pm office hours.
More people downtown = more people using the LRT.
***
Speeding up construction of new homes near transit stations
Ottawa’s bus Transitway opened in 1983 and has been the envy of many cities. Over fifty stations are located near major workplaces, schools, hospitals, and shopping centres.
In hindsight, it’s a bit odd that there was never a big focus on building housing close to the stations. Some stations have more housing nearby than others – Rideau, Lees, Hurdman, Bayshore, Westboro, Tunney’s, Lincoln Fields – but for the most part there is not a high concentration of homes close to transit. (And almost none at all right at the transit stations.)
Increasing housing density near transit stations has been a key to Vancouver’s success. In fact Translink has an ambitious plan to boost housing by selling air rights at its stations. If it works, it will bring more people to transit, and generate real estate revenue for the agency. Win-win.
Ottawa is already keen on transit-oriented development, and a ton of new apartments have been approved near major transit stations in the last few years. How can we encourage developers to build these quickly? I’d like to see a fast track for approvals and building permits, maybe discounts on development charges or property tax credits for the first few years. The federal government could help with HST reductions and other policies to accelerate growth near transit. Anything to get people living in these new homes in the next 2 or 3 years, rather than the next 6 or 7.
We should also look at all those big, under-used park-and-ride lots as potential sites for new homes, and consider some combination of land transfers and air rights for developers (public and private) to maximize housing near transit.
The sooner we can get people living in these buildings, the faster ridership will recover on trains and buses. We don’t have a lot of time to wait.
***
Ottawa’s school bus shortage
As of Friday, the Ottawa Student Transportation Authority (OSTA) says it has cancelled 300 yellow school bus routes due to a driver shortage. That means 7,600 kids are without transportation, mostly in the west end.
It’s an awful situation. Schools have such large catchment areas that the only alternative for most families is to drive or carpool. That’s bad for safety and the environment (more cars on the road); and it’s a hit to Ottawa’s productivity (parents needing to miss work to ferry their kids back and forth).3
How did this happen? It’s pretty clear that school boards (and the province) have underfunded student transportation. No wonder they’re having trouble recruiting drivers, when the pay is less than $20/hour for a split shift with a bus full of noisy kids.4
There’s a bigger structural/planning problem too: In North America we’ve been shifting towards larger and larger schools serving more and more students.5 That means bigger catchment areas, leading to fewer kids who can actually walk to school and more kids who have to be bused. (To make matters worse, Ontario has four school boards which means there’s a 1 in 4 chance the school in your neighbourhood is the one your kids will actually attend.)
In Stittsville, the new Shingwàkons Public School6 has a very high percentage of pedestrians/cyclists (45-50%) and a very low number of school buses. It’s not a coincidence that it’s in a neighbourhood with one of the higher residential densities in the community.
If we want more kids to walk to school, and fewer to be stuck on a school bus, we could build more small schools, and build neighbourhoods with higher density. It wouldn’t hurt to consolidate the number of school boards too.
***
In conclusion: the key to increasing OC Transpo ridership is more density. And the key to fewer kids needing yellow school buses is also more density. 🤔
The latest data is from May 2023. Total ridership was 4.8-million customer trips, an increase from 3.6-million customer trips in May 2022. In 2019, there were 7.2-million customer trips. Para Transpo ridership, at 67,000 customer-trips, reached its highest monthly level since before the pandemic.
Estimates are from OC Transpo, based on the City of Ottawa’s 2011 Origin-Destination Survey; Statistics Canada Census Data; Canadian Chamber of Commerce; and Statistics Canada reports on work travel pattenrs in Ottawa-Gatineau.
OC Transpo is working with OSTA to provide assistance and extra resources where they can. There are already about 76 buses used for school routes. As you can imagine, OC Transpo’s resources (availability of buses and drivers) is pretty tight right now, so not a lot of flexibility to shift resources to new school routes without having an impact on regular service.
Want to drive a bus? They’re recruiting at DriveYellow.ca
Recommended listening: Upzoned recently explored the link between planning and school buses in Transportation Meltdown: Children on the School Bus Till 10 p.m.
Shingwàkons means “Little Pine” in the Kitigan Zibi dialect of the Algonquin language.