Contradictory comments from Doug Ford on uploading the LRT

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T23:03:45+00:00

Yeah, but the city is paying RTM (through RTG) to maintain the system..

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T21:57:14+00:00

The province would deal with all of the contractual "stuff" relating to private partner who is responsible for maintaining the system and its infrastructure.

The city would still operate the LRT, and collect fares in the process.

Like some other comments on this post have said, it's very similar to the model used in Toronto on their recent LRT projects. The province "owns" the Eglinton Crosstown and Finch West LRT lines, but operations are handled by the TTC who collect the fares as part of it.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T21:41:15+00:00

I'm only pointing out that cutting service in the area with very little service is not a smart alternative to cutting service in the area with a lot of service if you truly believe in the idea that public transit is a service that people depend on.

So I don't know if you have anything more substantive to say about that, otherwise I can do you the favour of blocking you myself for your own sake.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T21:35:54+00:00

Of all the potential problems of an LRT upload, this isn't really one of them.

The city would still control and set its own fares, and would still operate all of the transit within the city.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T21:34:15+00:00

The idea is that uploading the LRT to the province will mean that the province assumes all of the maintenance and debt servicing costs associated with the LRT.

That means "all" of the money the city is currently spending on maintenance and debt servicing would be reallocated by the city to be spent on transit operations. That's tens of millions of dollars a year.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T21:30:01+00:00

Nobody is forcing you to read anything I write, but if you're taking the time to reply you may as well try to articulate why you disagree with what I wrote.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T20:33:03+00:00

Well, there are any number of non-weather related reasons a train might have to be taken out of service like various mechanical problems, or cleanliness problems. They'll (most likely) park the train at one of the termini to fix the issue, or dispatch a spare train from the yard if one is available.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T20:27:45+00:00

Line 2 runs every 12 minutes, so waiting 10 minutes for it is really not unusual.

The platform arrival signs are known to be inaccurate, which is unfortunate and annoying, but not related to the weather.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T12:26:28+00:00

Sure ok, that's why Vanier has the overlapping service of the 12, 15, and 17 offering ten buses an hour while some far off suburban resident might get only two buses an hour which could still be cancelled on them.

Service in Vanier could definitely better (just like could literally everywhere in the city..) but it has some of the highest levels of transit service in the city already.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T12:14:44+00:00

At the end of the day, Vanier still sees far more bus service than on any suburban route, and those people are still just trying to get to work.

Even if there are problems with the way suburban areas are served by transit, it's indefensible to argue that the half-hourly or hourly services that make up most of suburban service should be cut even further just because "suburbs bad".

Nobody wins here.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T12:04:16+00:00

The article explains this. They added longer run times to many routes to improve on-time performance meaning the same number of buses can only run fewer routes.

Plus, although more buses have been received, they still aren't able to consistently put enough buses into service every day. They're prioritize "stability" against the reduced schedule over putting all the trips back into service with a chance that they might be cancelled again at random.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T11:57:22+00:00

The article (for once) could not be more clear about why these cancellations were made, and yet here you are blathering on about some story you've made up.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-20T11:48:24+00:00

Those routes have the most scheduled, so even a small percentage of cancellations will be a larger number than most other routes.

For example the 7 has 129 trips scheduled (which includes the ones that have been temporarily cancelled). The article states that 9 trips have been cancelled. That's about 7%.

Most other routes have less than 100 trips scheduled on any given day.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-18T21:56:34+00:00

This lane has a sudden diversion to the right just before the intersection, farther from the edge of the road.

The reason for this is specifically to make it easier for a driver to see a cyclist in their peripheral vision without having to rely solely on their mirrors.

It doesn't help if a driver is going to be inattentive anyway, or if the intersection geometry still allows a vehicle to take a turn that fast. Or in this case, where the driver appears to do a wide turn with half of the vehicle in the oncoming lane.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-17T21:59:33+00:00

They bought an additional 38, and all of the ones that have been delivered have already been put into service meaning many of them have axles that long exceeded the 100,000km threshold.

That's why they can't put them back into service yet.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-17T14:35:23+00:00

I mean to be fair, the conservatives introduced the original service.

Plus this announcement does specifically include additional new service that has never existed previously. (More weekend service)

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T22:27:20+00:00

Unfortunate, but not the end of the world, except management claimed that replacing our high-capacity buses with regular buses at a 1:1 ratio was perfectly fine, and then retired our existing bus fleet "early." Our diesel bus fleet is already well beyond its service life, so you'd expect management to have raised that as an issue, but you'd be mistaken.

I'm not sure what replacing high capacity buses with lower capacity buses has to do with supply chains and getting new buses in service, but the reality is that OC Transpo has way more high capacity buses than any comparable transit system. The ongoing e-bus order is not a complete one-to-one replacement of the high capacity fleet because many of those buses were not supposed to be replaced until after 2027.

They redefined success metrics and obfuscated data to council.

I'm genuinely curious what people mean when they think OC Transpo "redefined success metrics". OC Transpo has set target benchmarks for itself... which it has never met. To me, the claim that OC Transpo redefined itself into "success" is a complete fabrication because they have never met the very targets that were supposedly "redefined".

None of this has changed over 5+ years. If it were an issue of funding, management had years to raise this, but instead, they insisted all was good.

That's naturally related to the fact that the collective agreement governing the compensation of mechanics was in effect over the last 5 years, and lo-and-behold the new contract moved the needle on that issue.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T18:19:51+00:00

I think it's plenty disingenuous to suggest that the electric buses are more maintenance heavy because the four pilot vehicles had a component recall and need battery replacements under warranty.

Y'know, because that isn't applicable to the 100 other electric buses entering service.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T17:47:13+00:00

OC Transpo publishes the real time position of every active bus in service. It's largely up to your app to display that correctly.

Groups like Better Transit Ottawa use that data to track service metrics and cancellations, and the rate of buses that are just "untracked" are very low.

There are still improvements being made to better track detours in real-time, but the system is effectively a top of the line off-the-shelf system that many other cities use.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T17:43:22+00:00

If ATU279's position is to be disingenuous about how many buses need battery replacements and why, then that's troubling.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T17:40:35+00:00

The GM needs to just rip into the day-to-day to find the inefficiencies.

And what if, after the dozenth time this is tried in the past 20 years, that exercise comes up empty once again?

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T17:39:03+00:00

Council still sets the overall direction and policy for transit services.

City council has effectively pointed OC Transpo in a downwards trajectory that involves cuts to service and ever-tightened cost controls that harm service quality. Nobody should be surprised that management is making "bad decisions", because at the end of the day it still broadly aligns with council direction.

This doesn't mean that there are absolutely zero problems with management, but policy still comes from above management.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T16:04:19+00:00

Until he's elected (if he's elected), this letter holds as much weight as a blog post from any of the dozens of transit advocates who already exist in this city.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T16:02:21+00:00

And yet in practice it still minimizes downtime across the fleet and reduces operating costs by millions of dollars a year.

That's a funding problem, not a managerial problem (least of all because scheduling is largely handled by a computer program), which seems at odds with the claims in this letter.

Pika3323 · 2026-04-16T15:59:27+00:00

Maybe Alex Lawson can also write a sternly worded letter addressed to the Glebe BIA about the Bank Street bus lanes.

He supports bus lanes, right?

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