Imagine your car is more than 15 years old.
You’ve had to pay to replace its engine or transmission once or twice. When you bring it in for maintenance, the shop tells you it needs 30 or 40 hours of service. Maybe it suffers from something called “advanced structural deterioration.”
Yet you keep it on the road and drive it around the city for hours and hours a day.
Now picture you own 330 of these vehicles, and they’re actually articulated city buses with a red-and-white OC Transpo logo on the side.
No wonder Ottawa’s transit riders have been complaining about waiting at stops for their buses, only to learn they’ve been cancelled.
As passengers returned from the holiday break, they found themselves waiting much longer. Typically, OC Transpo cancels one out of every 40 buses, already much worse than its target of one in 200.
But on Monday, Jan. 5, the number was one in 10.
Those aren’t simply late buses, though there are plenty of those too. They’re buses that never set off on their routes in the first place. The problem got so bad that last week that OC Transpo erased hundreds of trips from its schedules and apologized to passengers.
Bus reliability has been a persistent problem for Ottawa. In 2019, the causes included a driver shortage and an unreliable LRT that forced OC Transpo to keep buses on standby to provide replacement service.
In the years since, OC Transpo has hired more drivers. Train service has improved. Yet the buses still aren’t showing up.
Month after month, transit officials show up at committee to tell council they’ve missed their target again.
Often, they blame traffic or construction detours as the leading causes. Those have ripple effects, they say, since drivers stuck in gridlock won’t be ready in time to start their next route.
But with cancellations surging early this month, OC Transpo has drawn attention to a different issue. Its diesel buses are aging — and the electric buses it ordered to replace them haven’t shown up.
“While we have those delays, that means we’re running our diesel buses for longer, much longer than their lifespan,” said Coun. Glen Gower, who chairs the transit committee.
“That means when they break down, the issues are more complex, and it takes longer to repair those. So we have fewer buses on the road than we need.”
OC Transpo has 738 buses. It needs to put 520 in operation to keep up with its regular schedule during peak periods. Over the first week after the holidays, there were only 467 available on the average weekday.
Noah Vineberg, president of Amalgamated Transit Union 279, which represents most drivers and mechanics, said OC Transpo has overpromised and underdelivered.
“We really are in a situation where everything’s coming to a head at once,” he said. “As much as we would like to be able to come up with a quick solution, it’s just not possible. The resources aren’t available.”
So just how old are the buses?
It depends on the model. Most of the fleet has a 15-year useful life. OC Transpo has 330 articulated buses, and all of them are beyond that point. The 44 non-articulated D40i-model buses are even older, nearing an average of 20 years of service.
A legacy of bulk orders means they’re all aging out at the same time.
Old buses suffer from a long list of problems. According to OC Transpo, one issue is the corrosion and environmental degradation caused by Ottawa’s severe climate — conditions that can make electrical issues and engine-related faults more likely.
“The oldest buses are now experiencing advanced structural deterioration, often requiring extensive repairs that can exceed 30 days,” OC Transpo said in an emailed statement.
Buses typically need major components like engines or transmissions replaced once or twice over their lifetime, according to OC Transpo.
But that becomes much more common after the 15-year mark, and those repairs are both labour intensive and time consuming.
Even routine defects are more frequent as buses age, the statement said. That adds to the workload of mechanics doing preventative inspections. In some cases, follow-up repairs can mean dozens or even hundreds of hours of work.
“You have piles of preventative maintenance that need to get done, [plus] the street breakdowns. It’s all sorts of issues, even in the door systems, the hydraulics, the brakes [that] need to be maintained,” said Vineberg.
“It really is critical age.”
OC Transpo simply doesn’t have enough skilled workers to keep up with the workload. It needs 180 licensed mechanics, but only has 140 working right now.
Vineberg said those mechanics were underpaid for too long and retention became a serious problem.
“We lost mechanics going to other companies, other jobs,” he said. “We’ve even lost mechanics from OC going to other internal city jobs, because even those paid better.”
A new collective agreement has meant more competitive wages, and OC Transpo has a recruitment campaign to find more mechanics. But it isn’t the only transit agency desperate to hire them.
“There’s a competition out there to get employees, absolutely,” said Vineberg.
OC Transpo needs new, reliable buses that won’t spend so much time in the garage. But it hasn’t had an easy time getting them.
In 2021, it announced a nearly $1 billion plan to buy 450 zero-emission buses by 2027, a big step on the way to reaching an all-electric fleet by 2036. That number was later cut to 350, though the cost remained the same.
But deliveries have faced repeated delays. OC Transpo was initially expecting to get 182 electric buses by the end of 2024.
Today, there are only 41 in service.
Gower said suppliers have been dealing with supply chain bottlenecks that trace back to COVID-era disruptions.
“I think we’re still seeing the aftereffects of the pandemic,” he said. “Some of the ripples or the echoes from that are still affecting the industry.”
The backlogs were still an issue as recently as September, when OC Transpo revealed that an order for 80 buses expected early this year was delayed by two months.
Transit officials have put some of the blame on the tariff war with the U.S., which has driven up costs and made it harder for firms to source parts.
“Everything has come into a perfect storm, if you will, and puts us all in a position where everybody is scrambling to get buses,” Vineberg said.
OC Transpo ordered 11 used diesel buses to plug gaps, and it’s hoping to receive 50 new diesel buses later this year and into early 2027.
But Vineberg doesn’t think that’s enough. In his view, OC Transpo gambled too much on electrification and was caught without a backup plan.
“When they put all their money and all their eggs into the electric basket, we really did get into trouble,” he said.
“The government wanted to go green [which is a] good idea. Did we maybe jump too far ahead in the early stages? I think so.”
Charter said bus reliability should get better, bit by bit.
The numbers did improve after the surge of cancellations on Jan. 5. That day, 800 buses were cancelled. By that Friday, it was 400.
OC Transpo did not release data for last week despite a CBC request.
Charter is confident that the replacement buses are finally on the way, with the electric fleet expected to grow to 110 by the end of March and 234 in total by the end of the year.
“As we on-board more of these electric buses, as we are able to recruit more mechanics and train them on the electric buses, it all will incrementally improve our ability to get more buses on the road — and ultimately deliver the service that we’ve been advertising,” Charter said in an interview earlier this month.
He’s expecting some short-term pain, though. As mechanics go for training on the new electric fleet, there will be even fewer available to repair the existing diesel buses.
“I think that this winter is going to be particularly challenging for our customers,” he said. “My target is looking at that spring, early summer, to see some significant improvement in the service.”
Asked if more money would help him tackle the bus reliability problem, Charter said it’s not so simple.
“It’s not a dollars issue. If we were to procure more buses now, we wouldn’t see those buses for another two years, so the decisions have been made already,” he said.
“The big actions that will improve the reliability just take time to implement. I know it’s hard on our customers … but we need to stay the course.”
