What happened to make Ottawa transit commutes worse? | Opinion

Shadows of the LRT train stop and walkers at the corner of Sussex Drive and Rideau Street in Ottawa. Photo by JEAN LEVAC /POSTMEDIA

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Six years and $7 billion later, what do we have to show for our transit investment? If you’re using it regularly, you know it’s bad. But exactly how bad is it and where?

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On average across the city, transit times are longer by 10 minutes. But some places are seeing results much worse than that in a sobering report that analyzed how we move on the map and at what pathetic speed.

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Martin McGarry, President and Chief Data Scientist at Bronson.AI, is a transit and data enthusiast who decided, in 2019, to look at how our old pre-LRT transit system worked and how it compared to private cars for business-hours downtown commuting. His intention was to quantify the benefits of transit.

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Being a math guy, he proceeded to divide the city into 97 separate, 500m x 500m squares, and did the comparisons for each little square. Using Google’s API, he crunched data until he was able to show how long the average trip to the World Exchange Plaza took. Let’s take Katimavik-Hazeldean: Using pre-LRT transit, that would have taken you on average 51 minutes. Once the first phase of LRT was in place, that went down to 47 minutes. (Woohoo!) After the second phase of LRT became operational, that trip went back up to 54 minutes. (Not-so-woohoo.) Meanwhile, the same trip by car would have taken you 24 minutes in 2019 and 22 minutes in 2025.

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So far, so not amazing.

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What happened to make things worse? The answer depends on where you live and on that reorganization of the bus routes from last year. The data shows that some neighbourhoods east of Bank Street are doing better in 2025 than in 2019 because they are closer to the LRT spine than areas to the west — Kanata, Stittsville, Barrhaven — that are still a long bus ride away from Tunney’s Pasture.

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Overall, only a paltry 18 percent of the 97 neighbourhoods saw transit improvement. By painful if predictable contrast, 60 neighbourhoods got faster by car, 17 got slower and 20 saw no meaningful change. I’ll say that again: 62 percent of Ottawa neighbourhoods got faster by car between 2019 and 2025, compared to 18 percent that got faster by transit. We spent $7 billion for the privilege. Are you seeing OC Transpo red yet?

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The Bronson.AI report says we should resist judging the entire system too quickly. “Ottawa didn’t get a uniform outcome,” it reads. “It got a geographic reshuffling of who wins and who loses. Some neighbourhoods gained direct access to rapid transit. Others traded their functional bus routes for longer commutes with less frequent routes. Understanding why that happened matters more than tallying wins and losses.”

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McGarry is convinced that when the third phase of LRT becomes operational, we’ll finally see better numbers. He wants us to keep going with the plan. And when the LRT goes west to Kanata or wherever, he’ll crunch the numbers again.

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But after six years, $7 billion and a fleet’s worth of operational data, the people who run OC Transpo ought to take a deeper plunge into data and analytics and figure out how to make transit better for more than just 18 percent of us.

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

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