City councillor Jeff Leiper is promising to improve Ottawa’s transit performance if elected mayor this October. Councillor Leiper says his transit plan has five points and would focus on increased accountability, restoring budget cuts and include building dedicated bus lanes.
“Ottawa is a world-class capital city. We deserve a transit system that reflects that, and we can build it,” Leiper wrote in a media release.
An audit from the Auditor General of Ottawa published in June found that the city’s “New Ways to Bus” plan led to reduced services for transit in the capital region, due to prioritizing cost-saving, as well as the use of outdated data. Leiper repeated the AG’s finding that the changes in the bus plan reduced transit service by 70,000 hours.
A May survey commissioned by The Ottawa Compass and iPolitics through Liaison Strategies found that 64 per cent of respondents disapprove of the City of Ottawa’s transit system.
Councillor Leiper argues that the broad shift back to working in office will only make the city’s congestion crunch worse.
“Ottawa families are already paying for transit,” Leiper said. “They shouldn’t have to budget an extra hour for their commute or call an Uber because Mark Sutcliffe’s cuts mean their bus is late again.”
The five-point transit plan would include:
- Restoring a citizen seat on the Transit Commission. City Council voted away citizen seats in 2022.
- Publishing information about on-time performance numbers for transit so that riders can plan ahead.
- Reversing changes made in the “New Ways to Bus” plan.
- Building dedicated bus lanes across the city.
- Creating a long-term fleet replacement and vehicle maintenance plan for OC Transpo.
Mayor Sutcliffe has defended his record on transit in the past few months, saying that Ottawa has spent more than usual on transit during the years of his tenure and that any savings council manages to find can be reinvested to reduce the transit system’s deficit.
Interested in who is running to be Ottawa’s mayor in the fall, and what they’re each promising? Follow along with iPolitics’ candidate profile panoply, starting with an exclusive interview of Councillor Jeff Leiper here.
