We now have a bus cancellation tracker available at bettertransitottawa.ca/tracker/canc...

This dashboard lets you view the cancellations on each route for each day and see the gaps in service that get created by each cancellation. You can also see the percentage of cancelled trips per route.

Having sufficient buses to respond to problems with our train is essential.

Instead, because of a newly discovered issue with our trains, we are stuck dealing with both a bus shortage and a train shortage at the same time with no ability to roll out supplemental buses.

300 high capacity buses like this one are reaching 16 years of age this year, which is past the expected lifetime of a bus. Another 40 buses will be turning 18.

We can't expect to replace them with just 50 new high capacity buses, and we can't expect shorter electric buses to replace them 1 for 1

Last week, there were days where 41% of scheduled trips were missing from the roads

OC Transpo is now cutting some trips to be more honest, but we're still seeing a significant number of delays and cancellations — and there aren’t enough buses on order to fill the gap.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Yesterday, Ottawa City Council approved the 2026 budget.

Councillors were good about pointing out the fundamental problems with our bus reliability, but they still voted in support of a budget that will not solve the bus shortage.

Our full response: bettertransitottawa.ca/blog/budget-...

The 53 consistently sees back-to-back cancellations around this time. Each of the screenshots below is a day further in the past

The times in the middle are service gaps between buses, and yes, there was a 2 and a half hour gap yesterday at 15:09

The trips with blank columns did not run

We have nice new fancy colour screens in our new Line 2 stations that just say "Every 12 minutes" because the project to get real-time train locations in the central database keeps being deferred.

So, these screens we spent money on are now useless.

Despite some opposition, transit committee voted YES to re-open the door to more high capacity buses at transit commission yesterday following our support

We welcome this first step, while still pushing council to buy more buses sooner, instead of delaying our next order until 2027

Transit commission day

Another normal day for Ottawa's bus shortage where council still is insistent that increasing the size of our bus orders is not necessary

This is what we call 97% trip delivery

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.

The next three 7s are cancelled at the start of evening rush. This is an every day occurrence due to the lack of working buses to run the schedule we need.

OC Transpo needs to order more buses to replace the over 15 year old fleet and hire enough mechanics to get the existing buses in service.

OC Transpo is discussing potentially cutting off-peak Line 2 and 4 service to as low as every 30 minutes in response to council asking Line 2 and 4 to start at 5 AM.

Let your councilor know so we can avoid a repeat of last year’s Line 1 cuts and not fall down the public transit death spiral.

BTO is fighting for a transit system that is useful and reliable by focusing on smaller scale projects and changes to internal operations. We support bus lanes on corridors such as Bank St and Carling Ave, and we are working on solving the bus shortage.

Want to know more? Have ideas? Contact us!