Ottawa transit boss ‘very comfortable’ new city plan will handle return-to-office traffic

Ottawa city council unanimously passed a 48-point transit plan ahead of an anticipated increase in traffic this fall.

Ottawa’s transit boss says he feels “very comfortable” with OC Transpo’s ability to handle an anticipated influx of traffic this fall, driven largely by the latest federal return-to-office mandate. “With the arrangements and the new structure that the team has put together, I am very comfortable,” Rick Leary said at an Ottawa city council meeting on Wednesday, July 15. At the lengthy meeting that stretched late into Wednesday afternoon, councillors unanimously approved a city plan to implement 48 “transportation, mobility, and operational enhancements” by the end of August in preparation for an anticipated spike in public transit ridership this fall.

Although the increase is driven largely by federal workers commuting into downtown offices, it will also be influenced by students returning to school and employees of all kinds coming back from summer vacation. The city’s plan includes a mix of measures targeting specific federal workplaces, as well as general interventions to improve traffic flow and support for transit riders across the city. All told, items in the plan will cost around $30 million, with the city looking to recoup much of the expense from the feds.

The costliest item, with a price tag of $20.1 million, seeks to accelerate the expansion of the Bowesville LRT park-and-ride, doubling its capacity by adding between 800 and 1,000 new spots. Bowesville, located south of the Ottawa airport along O-Train Line 2, is the park-and-ride site in Ottawa with the tightest capacity constraints, city staff said Wednesday. Another big-ticket item, a proposed 1.5 kilometre sidewalk connecting the new Moodie LRT station and DND’s Carling Campus, will only go ahead if federal funding is secured.

With the LRT east extension to Moodie not yet operational — and no opening date confirmed — the city is also pursuing the more immediate intervention of deploying express buses to help get DND employees to the campus. Those buses will be in addition to several other new express routes and added service on existing routes from park-and-rides and other key locations across the city, such as Barrhaven Centre, Place d’Orléans, Kanata and South Keys. O-Train Line 1 will also operate more frequently this fall, with two-car trains running every four minutes (down from five) during peak periods.

Meanwhile, O-Train Line 2 will start earlier in the morning to accommodate commuters. Fines for no-stopping and no-parking violations will increase by half, and the city will allow rec centres and places of worship to “offer or lease surplus parking spaces to the general public” if they’re located close to rapid transit in the downtown core. The plan draws on employee postal code data shared with the city by Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), the federal department responsible for pay administration and real property.

City staff said the new routes are based on where most public servants live. The city’s goal is to implement all measures by September 1 and keep them in effect until March 31, 2027. LRT eastern extension not a ‘separate conversation’ City councillors were broadly supportive of the plan, but some questioned why similar solutions weren’t implemented sooner, given widespread complaints from transit riders about a lack of reliable service.

Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper, who is running for mayor in this fall’s municipal election, previously told the Ottawa Citizen the plan amounted to “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.” “The clearest answer would be don’t send those workers back to work nearly as many days,” he said.

“I don’t know that there is an ideal plan for trying to mitigate the kind of congestion that we can anticipate.” At the meeting Wednesday, east-end councillors noted the lack of attention paid to the LRT’s eastern extension. “If the federal government is requiring tens of thousand of employees to return to the office four days a week, and the city is implementing 48 separate actions to manage the resulting congestion, then opening the largest transportation investment ever made in the east-end cannot be treated as a separate conversation,” said Orléans East-Cumberland Coun.

Matthew Luloff. Asked by Luloff when the extension will open, Leary declined to give a date, though he said OC Transpo expects to have a more detailed update for the city’s transit committee in September. The city also earmarked funding for a communications strategy and paid marketing campaign with the goal of informing commuters about transit options and encouraging public servants to stick around downtown after work to ease homebound traffic.

In a media availability after the council meeting, Leary said ensuring reliable service will help build confidence in the system. “We have new service routes, the park-and-ride, the express routes — we’re providing something that the public has been asking for for a long time,” he said. “So now we’re providing that, and we’re going to advertise that.”