It is a tale of two light rail transit systems. In Ottawa, ridership levels have not recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, but in Kitchener-Waterloo, levels are at record highs.
According to numbers from the city of Ottawa, overall ridership in September was at 72 per cent of pre-pandemic levels, with bus boardings at 85 per cent and O-Train boardings at 49 per cent.
In the region of Kitchener-Waterloo, their transit service had its busiest month ever in September, with ridership peaking at 2.9 million customer trips. Ridership is up 33 per cent over September 2019, and 44 per cent over 2022. Boarding numbers are also up according to officials. In September, boardings were 43 per cent higher than the average month this year, hitting 3.8 million. An average month for the region is 2.6 million boardings.
"Making sure there are options and building a route that really goes through our corridor, building development around there as well," James says, "It works, it is dependable. Building trust around the system is a huge part of why people use the system." But Scrimgeour admits that boosting Ottawa's ridership also needs to be about improving the system overall. "We need to be here to move the people who have somewhere to go, in order to do that we need to have a service that is reliable, useful, and comfortable that people can count on. That means we need to have bus service reliability that is better than it has been and it definitely means we need to have train reliability than we have had the past couple of years.
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