Ask any regular user of OC Transpo about any trouble they might have had dealing with the bus or the LRT and you'll probably hear a story from every one of them. OC Transpo's struggles have been regular news in Ottawa for years, from a major strike in 2008 to the disastrous launch of Stage 1 of LRT in 2019, to the massive deficits it is projecting in 2025. Caught up among all of this are the riders who rely on the system to get around the city.
Gio Petti is one of them. His daily 19-kilometre commute takes him from Riverside South to downtown Ottawa and back. OC Transpo is how he does it, and it often involves lengthy waits and no-show buses.
One day, he decided he'd had enough. Petti put together a documentary on OC Transpo, asking how we got here. How did a city that was once lauded as an example of how to do transit right, and that boasted some of the highest per capita transit ridership numbers in the country, become a system that now elicits so much frustration from users? The 43-minute film titled "Dude, Where's My Bus?" begins with his usual wait at the bus stop.
"So, I'd wait, and wait, and wait outside," he told Newstalk 580 CFRA's Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron on Thursday. "It's a two-sided deal: you wait for the bus, and you pay OC Transpo and OC Transpo is supposed to be there on time to take you where you need to go. I would complete my side of the deal; I'd wait for the bus, and it would never show up, so I really thought to myself, 'what can I do?' .
.. I'm a p.
