Le français viendra sous peu.
City staff presented the draft 2026 OC Transpo budget to the Transit Committee on Monday November 25th. We delegated in order to highlight several major issues with the budget, which was ultimately passed by the committee by 8-1. Several promising provisions were deferred to City Council’s December 10th meeting.
Please read our delegation below, or watch it here!
Our Climate Change Organizer Nick Grover addresses the Transit Committee about the 2026 draft budget.
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Our Official Plan commits to increasing the mode share of sustainable transportation to 50% by 2046. It’s, once again, unclear how this will be achieved with a transit budget like this.
It’s good to see we’re electrifying our transit system via transition to light rail and e-buses. But there are four main issues I see with this budget limiting the success of that system as something most or even many people are able to actually use:
- Higher fares. It’s hard to square the budget’s stated theme of affordability with yet another fare increase. Indeed, everyone is paying into OC Transpo without a clear sense of what they get out of it. For the transit rider, the service remains unreliable, infrequent, and inconsistent. For the suburban homeowner seeing their levy increase, transit remains by and large unusable. A public good is meant to serve the public; our transit system has so much potential but has sadly come to be seen as a burden.
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“Historic investments.” Yes, this is a very large operating budget, over $900M. But let’s be clear – we are now running three train lines with another opening soon. This is expensive. But a good transit network needs good bus service too, to connect to those train lines and serve people who don’t have access to LRT at all. On that front we have been disinvesting. New Ways to Bus saw a reduction in service hours and many commutes that have become longer, less convenient, and with more transfers.
It’s also concerning that one line item for $245M is so vague: “Transfers/Grants/Financial charges.” I had to send an inquiry to the budget team who clarified this refers to several things, primarily debt service payments for the LRT. The fact that our transit system has a very expensive backbone does not equate to a general investment in quality of service. It would be like if I served you dinner on a solid gold plate, but the food was undercooked, unseasoned, there were no utensils and the table was breaking apart. It’s not likely an experience you’d ever agree to again despite my historic investments in it. - New buses but too few. The shift to electric buses is welcome as part of the city’s corporate emissions reduction efforts, but the replacement rate is concerning. We have already seen delays in receiving what we’ve ordered to date, while the aging fleet fails to deliver. Out of 735 buses only 520 are on the road at a given time. New Ways to Bus requires 540, but the kind of frequent, convenient, dependable bus service needed to attract new riders requires far more. Community emissions reduction, that is the vast majority of them of which transportation comprises the largest portion, requires viable alternatives to driving.
- $47M gap. Uploading the LRT to Metrolinx will save the city money, but the mayor himself says the negotiations will take a “long time” – “these things can take a year, a year and a half, two years to complete.” So why are we budgeting for money we haven’t saved yet?
In all, this budget continues to avoid a fundamental issue: how do we make transit service so good, so reliable, so consistent and frequent that we grow ridership well beyond what it was pre-pandemic, rather than languishing well below it. Reducing emissions means fewer cars on the road; affordability means real alternatives to car ownership. Low taxes do not come anywhere close to saving people what they are being forced to spend on private vehicles as a direct result of poor transit.
We can’t neglect bus service and put all our eggs in the LRT. We need more buses and investments in transit priority – like traffic signal upgrades along main arteries like Carling, Bank St, Rideau and Montreal, to give buses earlier or longer green lights when they are approaching an intersection. This alone can speed up the bus by 6-15%, and far more when paired with dedicated bus lanes.
Our population is growing. Our Official Plan commits to making suburbs transit ready, but we aren’t. Is it too hard to do? We heard a comment just now about how “all cities are struggling with transit.” Not the ones investing in service, like Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Brampton. Suburban Brampton responded to its own imminent population growth by investing in bus service twenty years ago. Now their ridership is up 30% what it was before the pandemic. If you build it they will come – we must apply this logic to our public transit system rather than, as we have been, road widening and greenfield sprawl.
