Independent, citizen-led transit information for Ottawa–Gatineau riders. Not affiliated with OC Transpo or STO.

Two minutes

Send this to your candidates.

This is the resident version. It asks for two things: a public review of the contract, and open competition for rider-facing transit technology from now on. It says nothing about this site, and it is not signed by us, you send it as yourself.

How to use it

Replace [Candidate name], [ward], [Your name], and [Your ward] with your own details.
Send it to the candidates running in your ward, and to the mayoral candidates.
Municipal election day is October 26. Advance voting starts October 1.

Find out who is running in your ward

Subject

The $700K Transit app contract that never got a vote. Where do you stand?

Letter

Dear [Candidate name],

I'm a resident of [ward] and I vote. I'm writing about something I only recently learned, and I want to know where you stand before October 26.

Since 2023, the City has committed close to $700,000 to the Montreal company that makes the Transit app, all on one contract (33523-92002-G01). $282,000 for monitoring the real-time data, $180,000 to roll out the free Royale subscription, and another $233,794 in 2025 for rider surveys inside the app. There was no RFP, it was all sole-sourced under an exception in the Procurement By-law, and it never went to council for a vote, staff signed it under delegated authority. It's all in the City's own contract disclosures:

https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/default/files/Document%201%20%E2%80%93%20Transit%20Contracts%20awarded%20under%20delegated%20authority%20for%20the%20per_AODA.pdf

https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/default/files/Contracts%20Under%20Delegation%20of%20Authority%20January%201%20to%20June%2030%202025-AODA.pdf

The disclosures also leave basic questions unanswered. Royale is a subscription product, so is the $180,000 one-time or annual, and is it priced per rider or a flat fee? At the app's advertised price of $24.99 a year, $180,000 only covers about 7,200 subscriptions in a city of a million people, and nobody can say what we actually bought because the term was never made public. The 2025 payment also means the City is paying a Montreal company to compile crowdsourced feedback from Ottawa's own riders.

Across the river, Gatineau's STO gets the same app for free. When the STO launched real-time tracking in Transit in 2019, its president said publicly that the partnership cost nothing (Le Droit, Jan. 31, 2019: https://ledroit.com/actualites/gatineau/sto-les-parcours-en-temps-reel-6ec8c8b15a3398d70012e209c2fcc63e). Showing a city's buses is the app's free tier, and Ottawa paid for extras, including paying the app company to monitor the quality of the City's own data feed.

I'm not saying anyone broke the rules. I'm saying a decision that big about how riders get information should have been debated in the open, and it never was.

Ottawa has the bones of a world class transit system. What we've lost is trust, and trust doesn't come from being told the system works, it comes from seeing it working. Spending like this, made quietly, doesn't help.

So I'm asking you to commit to two things if you're elected:

1. A public review of this contract at Transit Commission, including its full cost, term, pricing structure, and performance, before it gets extended again.

2. Open, competitive processes for rider-facing transit technology from now on.

Please reply and tell me where you stand. Your answer will matter when I vote.

[Your name]
[Your ward]