This analysis of online engagement metrics for an article tracking the Ottawa Police Services Board reveals a 39.7% like ratio, mirroring historical voter turnout in Rideau-Rockcliffe (Ward 13). This consistent participation rate highlights a structural reliance on a minority mandate for local municipal governance. For further reading on the candidates in Ward 13, visit CTV News. [1, 2]
An online sentiment check on an article breaking down the Ottawa Police Services Board reveals a striking metric: 216 likes to 327 dislikes. That works out to exactly a 39.7% approval ratio.
If that 39% number sounds familiar, it should. It is almost the exact percentage of neighbors who bother to show up and vote in Rideau-Rockcliffe municipal elections.
Look at the history for Ward 13:
2019 By-election: Turnout was a city-low 37.15%.
2018 Municipal Election: Turnout hit that exact same wall at 37.15%.
What we are looking at is the "39% Solution"—a structural reality where our local governance, board representation, and municipal mandate rely entirely on a minority participation rate. When the upcoming municipal election lands on October 26, 2026, the real question is whether Ward 13 will finally break past this 39% benchmark, or if we will keep letting a fraction of the ward dictate accountability for the rest of us.
The 40-Seat Club: A Subscription Coach From Orléans to Moodie
Ottawa transit essay
The 40-Seat Club: A Subscription Coach From Orléans to Moodie
A for-profit, reserved-seat highway service for 40 riders — or multiples of 40 — on the city’s weakest transit axis.
Ottawa already has ride-share. It is called a car with one person in it, crawling Highway 417 while empty Park & Ride lots sit in Kanata and Barrhaven. What it does not have is a reserved, highway-running seat that you pay for like a gym membership and that shows up whether OC Transpo’s transfers cooperate or not.
Call it the 40-Seat Club. One coach. Forty guaranteed seats. Orléans to Moodie Drive and back. Subscription only. Multiples of 40 when demand justifies a second or third bus.
The gap it fills
East-to-west across Ottawa is the trip the official network was not built for. Driving from Orléans to the Moodie / Kanata edge is roughly 35–45 kilometres and about 30–45 minutes off-peak.1 On transit it is still a transfer sandwich: Orléans to Blair, Line 1 through the core, then another bus west to Moodie — often 90 to 120 minutes or more.2 When Line 1 east to Trim and Line 3 west to Moodie are both open, the trip improves and remains long. Line 3’s Moodie terminus is still planned as part of the west extension, not as a service that exists today.3
Plenty of people who live in Orléans and work near Moodie, Bayshore, or the Carling campus have already decided the train-plus-bus combo is not worth it. They drive. Early September 2026 Park & Ride occupancy made the same point: rail-connected lots in the east were busy; large bus-oriented lots in the west were not.4
Sources: City of Ottawa Mobility Dashboard figures reported by CTV News Ottawa, 13 Sept. 2026; lot capacities from City of Ottawa / OC Transpo Park & Ride listings.45
A 40-seat coach does not try to be a city bus. It tries to be a moving reserved parking space that happens to carry 39 other people.
How the subscription works
You buy a seat, not a single-ride ticket.
Table 2. Service rules
Element
Rule
Vehicle
40-seat coach; add another 40-seat coach only when the first is sold out
Limited opposite-direction or off-peak seats if a second run exists
Pickup
Place d’Orléans and/or Trim Park & Ride
Drop
Moodie station, with at most one extra west-end stop if loads justify it
Routing
Highway 174 / 417. No downtown stop. No local collection.
Reservation
App check-in; seat held if confirmed the night before
No-show rule
More than two no-shows in a month returns the seat to the pool
Forty people is the point. Small enough that the bus feels like a product, not a lottery. Large enough that the cost per seat can undercut two cars and still pay a driver, insurance, and a coach that does not break down every other week. When 40 fills, you add another 40. You do not add a 12-seat van and call it scale.
What it costs, roughly
A serious operator would need a fare that covers full cost plus margin. OC Transpo cannot do that; most of its trips are subsidized, and system ridership in early 2026 was still around 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels against a budget assumption of 82 percent.6
Table 3. Illustrative monthly pricing (not a live offer)
Subscription figures are planning ranges, not advertised fares. They exist to show the gap between a fully costed private coach and a subsidized municipal ride.
That monthly price sounds high until it is stacked against downtown or office-area parking, wear on a car, and the time tax of a 90-minute transit trip. Split across two people in a household it starts to look like a second car you do not have to own. It will never be as cheap as an OC Transpo pass. It is not trying to be. It is trying to be cheaper than driving alone and more reliable than the current crosstown scramble.
The whole product is the promise of a seat that exists
Who it serves
Anyone with a car
Anyone on the network
People making the same long crosstown trip on a schedule
Why this is not Uber with extra steps
Uber-style private transportation companies in Ottawa are licensed for pre-arranged app rides. They cannot street-hail, and they are not a scheduled bus line.9 A 40-seat subscription optimizes for the same 40 people making the same trip at the same time, five days a week. The vehicle is a coach, not a Civic. The schedule is a promise, not a hope. The fare does not triple because it is raining.
It is also not “better OC Transpo.” OC Transpo has to serve every neighbourhood and every ward. Bus on-time performance was about 76 percent in August 2026, still short of the 85 percent target, and cancelled trips remain part of the product.8 This service would serve one corridor and one customer: the person who will otherwise just stay in the car.
The hard parts
Ottawa’s Transit By-law is not written to welcome a private scheduled bus that looks like transit. Operating a passenger transportation system inside the city generally requires authorization from the Director. Limited exceptions exist for things such as school buses or a private employee shuttle that is not advertised as an alternative to City transit.10 A company that advertised “Orléans–Moodie express, $X a month, open to the public” would walk into that rule. The realistic paths are a City contract, a tightly limited commuter club, or a political fight.
Demand is real but thin. Crosstown commuters exist; they are not the majority. Hybrid work means some of those 40 seats will be empty on Wednesdays. Empty backhauls kill the math unless both directions sell. And reliability has to be better than the thing it is replacing. One breakdown and the pitch — “this is the trip you can count on” — collapses.
Table 5. What would have to be true for the club to work
Condition
Why it matters
Legal permission
Without a City authorization or contract, a public scheduled service is likely blocked
40 peak seats sold
Below that, the coach is a charity with diesel bills
Usable backhaul or cheap layover
Morning westbound empties have to be paid for somehow
Spare vehicle discipline
A reserved-seat product cannot miss the trip
Faster than the transfer chain
If it is not close to driving time, members keep driving
Why bother anyway
Because the official network is still organized around getting people downtown, and a lot of the city’s jobs and houses are no longer organized that way. Because the empty asphalt at Eagleson and Fallowfield is a daily vote against the current bus product.4 Because a full 40-seat coach is 39 cars that do not need to be on the 417 at 7:45 a.m.
The 40-Seat Club is not a replacement for OC Transpo. It is a pressure test. If 40 people — or 80, or 120 — will pay for a reserved highway seat from Orléans to Moodie, the City learns something useful about what suburban riders will actually buy. If they will not, that is useful too. Either way, it is more honest than another round of hoping the next LRT extension and the next schedule tweak will make a crosstown trip feel like a single decision.
Forty seats. One corridor. A subscription. That is the whole idea. The rest is permission, pavement, and whether Ottawa is willing to let someone else run a bus that only does one thing well.
References
Driving distances and times between Orléans / Place d’Orléans and Kanata / west-end points are commonly reported in the 25–45 km and roughly 30–45 minute off-peak range. See e.g. Rome2Rio, “Orléans to Kanata,” https://www.rome2rio.com/s/Orléans-ON-Canada/Kanata.
Typical Orléans-to-core transit times via bus and Line 1 are in the 35–50 minute range before the extra westbound bus to Moodie. See Moovit and Rome2Rio itineraries from Place d’Orléans / Orléans Park & Ride toward downtown stations, and OC Transpo trip planning for Moodie connections. Moodie remains a Transitway station until Line 3 opens. OC Transpo, “Moodie,” https://www.octranspo.com/en/our-services/stations-2/moodie1.
Moodie is planned as the western terminus of O-Train Line 3 as part of Stage 2 West. OC Transpo, “Moodie”; Wikipedia, “Line 3 (O-Train),” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_3_(O-Train).
Hire the operator. Listen to him. Fund the timetable.
Peter Karwacki — Ward 13, Rideau-Rockcliffe
14 September 2026
King recently, blew hard about directing OCTranspo. Wrong. Transit is again the mayoral race’s favourite costume too. Candidates have service guarantees, fare cuts, 90-day reviews, and $1 rides. Well meaning, most of them. Operational know-how? Almost none of it.
That is not a personality contest. It is the same gap this city has lived with for years: political copy written faster than buses can leave a garage.
What riders already know
OC Transpo missed trips spiked in the winter. Ridership in the first half of 2026 sat around 67 percent of pre-pandemic levels while the budget assumed something closer to 82 percent. Fare revenue is short. Staff are forecasting a $12.35 million deficit this year after a $52 million hole last year. A $47 million provincial placeholder for the LRT upload is still sitting in the budget, unsigned as cash.
The Auditor General already said the quiet part: schedules that do not match traffic, New Ways to Bus built on outdated data, and councillors blocking stop and route tweaks that operations staff wanted for reliability. I have written the bearing file until the words “spalling” and “cartridge assembly” feel like ward furniture. St-Laurent still has a documented soffit problem. The east extension still has no passenger opening date. Trial running is not a press conference.
Riders did not invent this. The record did.
Candidates offering solutions is not the same as running a system
A mayor or a councillor can set fares, the levy, and whether the upload happens. They can hire and fire the general manager. They should not be rewriting run times from a doorstep flyer.
Alex Lawson has said out loud that he has not run a transit system. Fair. Jeff Leiper has three terms and a “reimburse them if the bus fails” guarantee. Sutcliffe has the incumbent’s 10-point plan and a $95 monthly pass promise. Neil Saravanamuttoo wants dollar rides. Ali Shayvard at least works at OC Transpo. Experience on council is not the same as spare-ratio math, shop capacity, or what happens when one bad bearing takes a third of the rail fleet offline.
I am not a career politician. I measure programs. The question is not who can announce reliability. It is who will stop treating operations as a branding exercise.
Hire a guy like Leary — and then get out of his way
In March the city hired Rick Leary. That hire is the most serious transit decision this term has made.
He started as a train attendant at the MBTA in Boston. Union card. Then York Region Transit. Then seven years as TTC CEO — a system roughly six times OC Transpo. He is not a candidate. He is an operator.
His first moves are the unglamorous ones operators always make: add running time so the published schedule is not a fiction, run a summer maintenance campaign on the diesel fleet before winter, get two-car trains back on Line 1, treat on-time performance as the product. Missed trips came down from the winter peak. He has said he wants to be judged on whether the numbers keep moving. Good. Publish the numbers. Hold him to them.
Listening to him means three things council has historically refused:
Operational details stay operational. Run times, spare ratios, stop spacing, maintenance priority. Not ward vetoes on a stop because it looks bad on a lawn sign.
He gets the mechanics, parts, and spare buses he says the timetable needs.
He is scored on delivered trips and on-time performance, not on whoever’s latest fare-cut video.
The Auditor General already documented councillor interference in route design. That is how you keep a professional GM and still run an amateur system.
Fund the service you pretend to sell
Reliability is a budget line. If there are not enough working buses, operators, and shop hours, advertised trips vanish. Cancellations push riders off. Lost riders shrink fare revenue. The next budget starts weaker. That is the death spiral, not a mystery.
Leary’s “realistic schedules” cost operator hours. A healthy spare ratio means vehicles sitting ready instead of every bus being flogged until it fails. New e-buses only help if they are actually in service. None of that is free.
Fare cuts without a replacement dollar — higher levy, confirmed upload money, or both — make the hole larger. The upload, if it actually lands, is the only large new source on the table. Sutcliffe has put the long-term figure near $85 million a year that could go back into buses. Until the cheque clears, “required funding” is still a municipal choice: tax, reserves, or cuts.
Do not cut fares as a substitute for spare buses. Do not announce frequency you cannot staff. Do not budget ridership you have not earned back.
What I would do from Ward 13
I do not run OC Transpo. Neither does any other councillor. What a councillor can do is refuse to be the person who blocks a reliability tweak, refuse to wave through a schedule that the auditor already called fiction, and insist the trial-running criteria for the east extension are public before the test starts — not after, the way 2019 was handled.
I have said this on the east extension before. Hold the line on testing. Publish pass/fail in advance. Do not lower the bar mid-trial because an opening date is politically convenient.
Same standard for buses. If staff say a stop consolidation or added run time improves reliability for half the ridership, the local councillor’s job is not to veto it for applause. The job is to explain the tradeoff and measure the result.
Outputs versus outcomes. Announced service versus delivered trips. That is the whole file.
The short version
Well-meaning candidates will keep offering solutions. Ottawa already hired the operator. Listen to him. Fund the timetable at the level the timetable requires. Score the system on whether the bus showed up, not whether the press release did.
On October 26, inform yourselves. Vote on the record.
Fallowfield (Barrhaven, the city’s largest lot): 30% of 1,709 spaces
Strandherd: 20%
Innovation: 13%
Terry Fox: 11% of ~517 spaces
Nepean Woods: 5%
Surprise?
People are voting with their feet and their cars
Commuters are choosing the option that feels most reliable and time-certain, which right now is often driving the whole way rather than using many of the large bus-oriented lots. These are early-September averages; peak-hour occupancy at the popular rail lots is even higher (Bowesville often fills by 8:30 a.m.).
Ottawa has a well-documented record of engineering and project problems on major transit work, and that record is a fair reason to be skeptical of official reassurances. Things could get out of hand when they start scaling the concrete in the St. LAURENT tunnel.
Water leakage in that 1980s tunnel has been known for decades. Inspections in 2020 already flagged severe delamination and called some repairs “urgent.” The full 2022 inspection was deferred. Pieces of concrete later fell onto the tracks. Officials still described the issues as “manageable” and “not a safety concern” while installing temporary mesh. That history of delayed action and optimistic language is why people do not automatically trust the current set of engineering statements.
What they have so far is mostly surface information:
Visual checks of leaks, stains, cracks, and loose tiles
Sounding (tapping the concrete with hammers or bars). A hollow or dull sound usually means the outer layer has separated from the slab underneath. Then they scale (chip) off the loose pieces
Periodic OSIM inspections, which are detailed visual-plus-sounding reviews. The 2022 round was largely skipped on three of the four tunnel sections because of construction on the bus terminal above
A delamination survey Stantec did in 2025
Some opening of ceiling tiles after the 2024 incidents
The problem with being a doom sayer is that nobody thanks you if you are right and nobody thanks you if you are wrong.
My advice? Protect yourself. Plan for it. Expect the unexpected.
Region
Park & Ride Lot
Average Occupancy (%)
Total Spot Capacity
O-Train Line 2 / South
Bowesville
93%
~823
East / Orléans
Place d'Orléans
85%
N/A
O-Train Line 2 / South
Leitrim
78%
~308
O-Train Line 2 / South
Greenboro
63%
~575
East / Orléans
Trim
59%
N/A
West / Kanata
Eagleson
38%
~1,220
South / Barrhaven
Fallowfield
30%
~1,709
South / Barrhaven
Strandherd
20%
~330
West / Kanata
Innovation
13%
~246
West / Kanata
Terry Fox
11%
N/A
South / Barrhaven
Nepean Woods
5%
~278
Primary Source: City of Ottawa Mobility Dashboard (Engage Ottawa), updated weekly to present transit performance and Park & Ride availability metrics.
Secondary Source: Local Ottawa reporting via CTV News Ottawa covering the City's Fall Mobility Update.
Gemini Advises the following:
The stark contrast in Park & Ride occupancy reveals critical shifts in commuting behavior, infrastructure efficacy, and city design across Ottawa:
**1. The "Rail Effect" Driving High Utilization**
*
**Higher Transit Reliability:** Lots connected to rapid transit lines—such as Bowesville (93%), Leitrim (78%), and Greenboro (63%) on Line 2, along with Place d'Orléans (85%)—see heavily concentrated usage.
*
**Seamless Commuting:** Commuters are significantly more willing to park and ride when transitioning onto high-frequency rail or dedicated rapidways rather than relying on traditional mixed-traffic feeder buses.
**2. The Decline of Suburban Bus Express Commuting**
*
**Kanata & Barrhaven Lag:**
West-end (Eagleson at 38%, Terry Fox at 11%) and South-end (Fallowfield at 30%, Nepean Woods at 5%) lots are drastically underutilized.
* **Remote & Hybrid Work:
** Suburban regions with high concentrations of tech workers and federal public servants continue to leverage flexible hybrid schedules, shrinking daily long-distance transit demand.
*
**Direct Driving vs. Bus Transfers:**
With Highway 417 and arterial roads accessible, suburban commuters increasingly prefer driving directly to their destinations rather than parking to board buses that may face traffic congestion or route transfers.
**3. Infrastructure and Budgetary Implications**
*
**Underutilized Real Estate:**
Large lots like Fallowfield (~1,700 spots) and Eagleson (~1,200 spots) represent vast tracts of paved asphalt operating at a fraction of capacity.
* **Repurposing Opportunities:**
These low-occupancy sites highlight potential opportunities for transit-oriented development (TOD), affordable housing, or municipal infill projects rather than single-use parking spaces.
*
**Service Allocation:** Low lot usage challenges the cost-effectiveness of running heavy express feeder routes to underperforming lots, pushing OC Transpo toward reallocating bus hours to high-demand corridors and local neighborhood connectors.
