OC Transpo cutting some school routes in the fall, leaving school bus authorities in ‘timeline crunch’

School bus authorities say they’re in a crunch after OC Transpo announced they would be cutting school routes this fall. CTV’s Leah Larocque reports.

School bus authorities in Ottawa say around 3,600 students in Ottawa will be swapping their red and white buses for yellow ones, as OC Transpo plans to make cuts to school routes this fall.

Transit Services general manager Rick Leary told the City of Ottawa’s audit committee last week that OC Transpo has had conversations with school boards and bus authorities.

“Staff have had a number of conversations more recently and we’re actually having 20 buses brought back into service, that will allow us to reallocate them to our service as the school board takes over taking children to school,” Leary told the committee.

“The school board will assume responsibility for routes that allow 20 buses to come back to OC Transpo, so that we can put them back into our own service to accommodate the capacity needs.”

Pat Scrimgeour, OC Transpo’s director of transit customer systems and planning, says the decision was made to allow for more buses to be available to handle a boost in federal public servants in September.

“We need to get more buses on the routes that are carrying people to federal workplaces. And this is a way… that we could do that without reducing mobility for anybody.”

Scrimgeour says OC Transpo has been collaborating with the federal government and a detailed report on how the city will support the latest round of return to office mandates will be presented to council “fairly soon.”

In a statement to Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Andrew Pinsent, Ottawa Student Transportation Authority (OSTA) general manager Jennifer Borrel-Benoit said the organization was notified of the plan in May.

“This left us with a significant timeline crunch in the middle of our peak planning season. Faced with the reality of cancelled transit routes, our absolute, non-negotiable priority had to be establishing a safe, reliable way to get every single eligible student to and from school this fall,” she wrote.

Borrel-Benoit said more than 2,100 students in Ottawa’s English public and Catholic school boards would be affected by the changes at OC Transpo. Patrick Pharand, director of the Consortium de transport scolaire d’Ottawa (CTSO), which serves Ottawa’s two French-language school boards, said around 1,500 students would be impacted.

Pharand said some of the 1,500 would be absorbed into current routes, but the consortium would need to add more routes to accommodate everyone, which means needing more buses and drivers.

“However, we have not yet completed our planning for the 26-27 school year,” Pharand noted.

The city manager Wendy Stephanson says the decision was made in consultation with the school board.

“I think what’s important is the service is still going to be there. It’s just going to be a different bus that’s going to be transporting children to school. So, the service is there. It’s just a yellow bus instead of OC.”

OC Transpo runs 73 school routes, known as 600-series routes. According to an audit of OC Transpo’s bus service planning and scheduling, this requires 81 buses, or about 15 per cent of the total number of scheduled buses each weekday, as of 2025. These buses also receive top priority for addressing trip cancellations, the audit said, which means additional buses might be pulled from general service to accommodate school trips.

“While this approach supports service delivery for school travel, it can come at the expense of other routes during unplanned service disruption,” the audit report said.

The suspension of school routes during the summer months buoys OC Transpo’s fleet availability, but figures from the audit show bus availability declines again every September and typically doesn’t improve until spring.

“We are grateful to our contracted bus companies for stepping up so willingly to secure these extra resources,” said Borrel-Benoit, who added OSTA would work with contractors on recruitment and retention efforts through the summer.

“The upcoming transition to yellow bus service is fully supported for the 2026-27 fiscal year under our current funding model, based on the projections submitted last December,” Borrel-Benoit said. “However, our long-term outlook indicates this will shift, with projections showing a deficit for the 2027-28 fiscal year. We are continuing to monitor these preliminary figures as our planning evolves.”

Students concerned about losing OC Transpo routes

The changes would affect 105 trips per day, impacting service to five schools in Ottawa’s English boards and three in the French boards.

According to OC Transpo, the affected schools are Bell High School, Cedarview Middle School, John McCrae Secondary School, AY Jackson Secondary School, Holy Trinity High School, École secondaire publique Gisèle-Lalonde, École secondaire publique Pierre-de-Blois, and Collège catholique Franco-Ouest.

Mitchell Gosson, a student at Sir Guy Carleton Secondary School, says switching from OC Transpo buses to school buses would mean longer travel times for students.

“We take the Transitway the entire way there. So, if you were to just cut that, then we’re sitting in traffic,” Gosson said.

“There’s kids that come all the way from the east side of the city, out in Orléans just to get there. And if you were to make them take a school bus, then that doesn’t work out at all.”

Sir Guy Carleton is not a school that will be impacted by these changes. But the students say they feel for the students who are impacted.

Cody Lauzon says it is “not good” to cut bus routes that help students. Lauzon says most students rely on OC Transpo for everything.

“I use it for my everyday basis to go to school, to get around the friends and other stuff like that.”

Edward Urquart says most of the buses he takes from Barrhaven to Sir Guy Carleton are “normally like the long, really long ones,” or the articulated buses. He says he also often uses double deckers.

OC Transpo, however, has been replacing many of its oldest buses with new 40-foot zero-emission buses, which have a smaller capacity than the 60-foot articulated buses. Most of the fleet’s double-decker buses are also being retired due to maintenance requirements.

A report for this month’s Transit Committee meeting said 67 double-decker buses, 13 articulated 60-foot buses and 20 of its older 40-foot buses have been retired. OC Transpo is, however, also refurbishing 30 articulated buses that are past their 15-year useful life. The refurbishment will add another three years of service life, the transit agency says.

With files from Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Andrew Pinsent and CTV News Ottawa’s Leah Larocque.

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