OttawaOttawa city council will vote on a plan to make OC Transpo free for riders age 18 and under on weekends and holidays, while extending the transfer window to save commuters from paying twice for a single trip.Committee votes to keep OC Transpo fare hike at 2.5% as transit union warns budget repeats mistakesListen to this articleEstimated 4 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.Unreliable transit service at Tunney’s Pasture station, pictured here, leads to long commutes that sometimes force riders to pay twice for a single journey, Coun. David Hill said Monday. He said a longer transfer window addresses the symptom, not the cause. (Stu Mills/CBC)Ottawa city council will vote on a plan to make OC Transpo free for riders age 18 and under on weekends and holidays, while extending the transfer window to save commuters from paying twice for a single trip.Both proposals got a hearing at transit committee on Monday, but ran into a procedural hurdle and were simply referred to council for a vote next month.They came in a motion from transit committee vice-chair Steve Desroches. According to the motion, free service for riders 18 and under on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays would cost $240,000 per year.Desroches also asked staff to explore the “technical feasibility” of free fares after 5 p.m. for those same young riders, estimated to cost another $190,000 per year.The same motion addresses a major irritant for Barrhaven West Coun. David Hill, who has complained that some of his residents face commutes so long that their last transfer falls outside the 90-minute transfer window, forcing them to pay twice for a single journey.If it passes at council, Desroches’s motion would increase the window on weekdays from 90 minutes to 105 minutes between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. The measure would only last until the LRT extension to Algonquin and Moodie stations opens. Cyril Rogers, the city’s chief financial officer, said he hadn’t yet found a funding source for the measures, so the committee couldn’t pass them. Council will consider them Dec. 10.Change expected next yearHill said the 15-minute transfer extension should be enough, and said the sunset clause makes sense.”Addressing this issue is important, but it’s only addressing the symptom. The (root cause) is the reliability out of Tunney’s, and a big part of that is the construction that’s going on right now for Stage 2,” Hill said at committee on Monday.”Once we get that sunset for the LRT, we’ll see substantial reductions for that commute time.”River ward Coun. Riley Brockington said Barrhaven commuters aren’t the only ones facing such lengthy trips. He said students at Brookfield High School are dealing with the same headaches.”They were paying double,” he said. “They were paying $8 a ride. I said, ‘Hey, we can address this.'”Transfers are already valid for 105 minutes early in the morning and in the evenings, though not during peak weekday rush hours.In a memo last week, OC Transpo pegged the cost of boosting the transfer window to 105 minutes at all times at $330,000 per year. But Troy Charter, interim general manager of transit services, said staff now support Desroches’s motion.It asks OC Transpo staff to make the changes “as early as practical” next year. Transit union pans budgetAt the same meeting on Monday, the committee voted for a transit budget that boosts fares by 2.5 per cent, sending it on to council for a final vote.The budget also includes an eight per cent increase to a levy on property taxes that fund OC Transpo. Noah Vineberg, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union local 279 that represents OC Transpo operators, urged the committee to increase the levy still further, while scaling back the fare hike to give riders a break.He said the budget asks riders to “pay more for the same unreliable service.””This budget continues in a direction that is clearly not working. The people who rely on bus and rail networks and the workers who deliver it live this every single day,” he said. “OC Transpo continues to set targets that are impossible to meet.”Vineberg said OC Transpo is cancelling hundreds of trips daily and consistently misses its reliability targets. The latest data showed 97.8 per cent of trips were delivered over the past 12 months, below the target of 99.5 per cent.Vineberg said improvement will only come with more operating dollars.”We absolutely need to improve the service,” he said. “We have less people riding our bus or trains because when they’ve gone to use it, it hasn’t been there. It has let them down. You can’t afford to do that.”ABOUT THE AUTHORArthur White-Crummey is a reporter at CBC Ottawa. He has previously worked as a reporter in Saskatchewan covering the courts, city hall and the provincial legislature. You can reach him at arthur.white-crummey@cbc.ca.
Council to vote on free fare days for minors, longer transfer window
