Last Thursday, the City of Ottawa transit committee met to discuss the ongoing delays and cancellations faced by OC Transpo riders in recent weeks. Representatives from OC Transpo were also present to respond to questions and concerns.
“I want to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our customers,” said Interim General Manager of Transit Services Troy Charter. “Not here to make excuses, it’s a time for action. We are confident that our customers will see improvements as we progress through the next few weeks and months.”
Coun. Wilson Lo reminded OC Transpo of the commitment to deliver 235 electric buses by the end of the year, and asked how likely they were to achieve this goal.
“The target still holds,” answered Charter. “The last update that I had is that we’re receiving a lot of the buses that were promised, and I believe about 110 are expected by April.”
Coun. Marty Carr noted the repeated patterns of delays and cancellations on specific routes, and asked how OC Transpo works to actively address such repetitive issues.
“We do have weekly meetings where we analyze the service data from the previous week,” responded Charter. “Those metrics are fed back to our planning and scheduling departments for future service changes.”
Charter acknowledged, however, that they have had to do away with some of their more structured processes in recent weeks. “Currently, obviously with the bus shortage situation, it’s a little bit more of a fluid situation that’s changing… It’s not really our normal process that we would follow… Right now we’re unfortunately in a situation where we’re largely focused on filling cancelled trips.”
Coun. David Hill wanted to know why representatives from Rideau Transit Group (RTG), the service provider of Ottawa’s light rail, were not present to answer councillors’ questions directly.
“They have indicated that they likely would be willing to come and speak to you directly,” said an OC Transpo representative. “But they just want to advance their work with regards to the solutions.”
Coun. Rawlson King detailed the phenomenon of “ghost buses,” whereby riders can see in the transit app that a bus is coming in five minutes, but then the bus never comes, and the app reconfigures to state that the bus is now coming in 40 minutes.
“Earlier this week I had a meeting with OC Transpo management and we were told that ‘ghost bus’ issues were not occurring,” said King. “My office was advised that the real time information systems were updated months ago and that scenarios where buses appear as arriving and then disappear in the transit app should no longer be happening.”
“However despite these assurances, we continue to receive multiple detailed route-specific accounts from residents who are sending us snapshots of their phones, describing exactly this behaviour from the app, across different days, locations, and routes.”
King wanted to know what was happening operationally when the “ghost bus” phenomenon occurred, but OC Transpo didn’t have a clear response to King’s question. A similar question was asked by Coun. Ariel Troster at Wednesday’s City Council meeting.
“What we’re dealing with right now is largely related to the sheer volume of undelivered trips that we’re able to provide,” explained OC Transpo. “Our control centre staff, our supervisors, and even our operators, we’re filling gaps, and we’re trying to fill the gaps with priority trips as best we can.”
“If there are ever any technical problems where buses that are shown as being tracked in real time are later not tracked in real time, we’d very much like to look into those to make sure that our system is working as well as it can.”
