Transpo Ridership Not Transparent: STANKOVIC

OC Transpo has been the subject of several posts at The Bulldog, most of them critical of the city’s transit operations and management. Just this month alone, there have been six posts, not including mine.

The last article, OC Transpo Fares Poorly In Ridership from Ken Gray looked briefly at OC Transpo’s performance in ridership quoting numbers from Capital Current’s analysis (Capital Current covers community news in Ottawa and is published by the Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication).

In reading the Capital Current’s article, two things jumped out.

First, the article states that the source of the ridership numbers came from Statistics Canada’s Consumer Price Index which is inaccurate as the CPI is an indicator of changes in price of a fixed “basket of goods and services” and does not publish passenger statistics for public transit agencies.

Second, the analysis by Capital Current only looked at ridership trends between 2019 and 2023 focussing on the COVID pandemic period.

In view of the present high level of interest in OC Transpo’s performance levels, I decided to search out more current ridership trends, thinking that such data would be readily available as they represent one of the Key Performance Indicators of probably all public transit authorities. It turns out that my common-sense thinking was completely off base at least in the case of OC Transpo.

The first place I searched was Statistics Canada and found that the federal agency does publish monthly data on “passenger bus and urban transit statistics by urban transit agency” starting from January 2023 (there is about a two month lag between the published and the last reported months).

Statistics Canada’s data covers urban transit agencies ranging from Yellowknife Transit to the Toronto Transit Commission as well as Metrolinx serving the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area but, for some unknown reason, OC Transpo, which represents at least the Ontario side of the Nation’s Capital, is not part of the urban list. It’s not because Statistics Canada overlooked OC Transpo since it is included in the Canadian Public Transit Network Database which provides a detailed list of stops, routes, trips, stop times and service schedules.

Oddly, I did find some pretty good ridership data for OC Transpo from the Washington D.C. based American Public Transportation Association. Statistics are provided for several Canadian urban centres on a quarterly basis. Moreover, the data is quite detailed in that it provides the number of trips for bus, light rail and demand response. A deeper review would be needed to see how closely APTA’s numbers match up with OC Transpo’s figures. APTA’s methodology does state that the statistics come from public transportation agency participants which raises the question why OC Transpo is not included in the Statistics Canada reports.

The next source I looked for is from OC Transpo’s latest update presented to the transit committee on April 10, 2025 . A part of the presentation included a brief summary of OC Transpo’s KPIs with staff indicating that their website also publishes performance measures.

So, I went to the OC Transpo website to look for more ridership data with a particular interest in finding trend-related statistics. However, there is no obvious link to the ridership performance measures. The only way I found them is through their online search engine using the key words of “performance measure”.

I did find monthly numbers of customer trips from origin to final destination or what is called “total linked trips” for bus and O-train ridership combined. The data started from January 2019 but went only up to December 2022 – 3.5 years out of
date. There was also a link to view the latest report to Transit Committee which took the site visitor to an over three-year-old performance report for the period ending December 2021. Most if not all municipal transit agencies in Canada (and the United States) have been struggling to return to at least pre-pandemic ridership levels.

This is one of the key challenges facing OC Transpo. One key consideration for measuring performance that is missing, however, in its data presentations, as does the organization compare to other cities in terms of returning to pre-pandemic ridership levels.

OC Transpo claims that “we are dedicated to providing up-to-date factual information and data” as part of the organization’s Commitment to Transparency. Based on my review here, one can only conclude that this commitment does not apply when it comes to presenting ridership performance measures to the public.

Dan Stankovic is an Ottawa consultant and former municipal public servant in economic development and housing.

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