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OC Transpo's tragic failure is a lack of imagination | Opinion

Brigitte Pellerin: Why do we keep running half-empty buses on fixed routes through sparsely populated areas?

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OC Transpo has, sadly, become the best argument for car ownership.

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Imagine a Kanata North resident who works at CHEO, which takes a 90-minute bus-LRT-bus commute — when it would take less than half that time driving. Meanwhile, someone in Britannia Heights working an afternoon shift at the South Keys Walmart spends about three times longer on public transit than they would behind a wheel.

This won’t do, and continuing to do things the same way will not help. It’s time to think outside the articulated bus.

The problem isn’t just broken trains or cancelled buses. It’s a tragic failure of imagination. We keep running expensive big buses on fixed routes through sparsely populated areas where they crawl along half-empty, while the rest of the world leapfrogs ahead to better and more sustainable solutions.

ODT (on-demand transit) uses small-capacity vehicles, minivans or shuttle buses, running like Uber for short-distance trips in low-density areas or suburbs outside peak hours. You request a ride through an app or by phone, and a vehicle picks you up at your nearest stop within a reasonable window of time and connects you to the nearest high-frequency hub. It costs less to operate than conventional fixed-route service and, critically, it actually gets people where they’re going.

The evidence isn’t speculative. Over 2,200 on-demand transit services have launched globally since 2012, with nearly 1,450 currently active, according to shared mobility expert Lukas Foljanty. In Hamburg (which already has excellent public transit) electric, autonomous, barrier-free mini-shuttles are being integrated to fill the few remaining service gaps. Dubbed HOLON, the 15-passenger vehicles reach 60 km/h and improve mobility and sustainability for a city that, clearly, has decided good enough isn’t good enough.

Houston, meanwhile, completely overhauled its downtown-oriented transit system over a decade ago into a grid that covers the whole city and reaches every major employment centre, at no additional cost to taxpayers. Planners used the resources they had, distributed them differently, and ridership went up. Happiness, too.

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I wrote about a pilot project in the Montreal suburb of Terrebonne almost two years ago. And we’ve actually experimented with ODT here, too. Blackburn Hamlet hosted a pilot in early 2024, using Para-Transpo minibuses (not that they have any to spare, but never mind that for now) to provide on-demand service on weekends. It was declared a success. Ten dedicated minibuses were ordered in the summer of 2024 for ODT in Ottawa. They’re expected to be onboarded later in the fall.

See? We can do good things. But over two years to scale up a successful pilot? Ten buses? For a city of Ottawa’s size and geographic sprawl? That’s nowhere near good enough.

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Ottawa is a hybrid city: urban core, mid-density suburbs, greenbelt villages, rural areas, all within the same municipal boundary. It is precisely the kind of place where a layered transit model makes sense. That means high-frequency and reliable LRT along with protected bus lanes as the spine, plus a mix of regular buses and ODT feeders everywhere else. What we have instead is the same buses covering slow, milk-run routes that haven’t been fundamentally rethought since the era before smartphones.

The Houston model caught the attention of many transit enthusiasts not just because it worked but because of how it worked: planners stopped asking themselves how to defend doing things the way they’d always been done and shifted to asking what people actually needed to get to where they’re going.

Ottawa can do it, too. Small, inexpensive shuttle-type vehicles are easy to acquire, operate and maintain. ODT software exists and works. The transit hubs to connect them are there. What we lack is not technology, money, or evidence. It’s the courage and willingness to move from timid pilots to bold and smart transformation.

Go ahead, OC Transpo. Think big and move us.

Brigitte Pellerin (they/them) is an Ottawa writer.

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