Ottawa city council has unanimously approved a $30-million, 48-point plan to get OC Transpo ready for a surge of riders this fall, when tens of thousands of federal public servants will be back in their downtown offices four days a week.
City staff expect about 65,000 additional transit trips each week starting in September, driven mainly by the federal return-to-office mandate that took effect July 6, but also by students heading back to school and workers returning from summer holidays.
Transit general manager Rick Leary said he is confident the system can handle it. "With the arrangements and the new structure that the team has put together, I am very comfortable," Leary told council on Wednesday, July 15, according to Yahoo News Canada.
Parks, express buses and faster trains
The plan's single biggest expense is $20.1 million to speed up the expansion of the Bowesville park-and-ride, south of the Ottawa airport on O-Train Line 2, adding between 800 and 1,000 spots to roughly double its capacity. City staff told council it is the most cramped park-and-ride in Ottawa.
The city also wants to build a 1.5-kilometre sidewalk linking the new Moodie LRT station to the Department of National Defence's Carling Campus, where staff have outnumbered parking spots by about two to one for years. That project will only proceed if federal funding comes through.
Because the LRT west extension to Moodie has no confirmed opening date, OC Transpo will run express buses to carry DND employees to the campus in the meantime. Other new express routes and added service are planned from park-and-rides and hubs including Barrhaven Centre, Place d'Orléans, Kanata and South Keys.
O-Train Line 1 trains will run every four minutes instead of five during peak periods this fall, and Line 2 will begin service earlier in the morning.
Fines for no-stopping and no-parking violations will rise by 50 per cent, and rec centres and places of worship near downtown rapid transit will be allowed to lease surplus parking to the public.
The routes were designed using postal code data on where public servants live, shared by Public Services and Procurement Canada.
Council questions timing and eastern LRT
The measures are to be in place by Sept. 1 and remain in effect until March 31, 2027. The city intends to recover much of the cost from the federal government.
Councillors largely backed the plan, but some asked why it took a federal mandate to improve service after years of rider complaints. Kitchissippi Coun. Jeff Leiper, a mayoral candidate this fall, told council the better fix would be fewer office days. "The clearest answer would be don't send those workers back to work nearly as many days," he said, adding he doubts any plan can fully ease the expected congestion.
Orléans East-Cumberland Coun. Matthew Luloff pressed for attention to the stalled eastern LRT 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," Luloff said.
Leary declined to give an opening date for the eastern extension, but said OC Transpo expects to bring a more detailed update to the transit committee in September.
The plan also funds a marketing campaign encouraging commuters to use transit and to stay downtown after work to spread out the evening rush. "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," Leary said after the meeting. "So now we're providing that, and we're going to advertise that."