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Ottawa's transit scorecard, and the $700K contract council never voted on
Dear Bernard Couchman,
I'm an Ottawa resident, a transit rider, and the builder of otranspo.ca, an independent transit platform made in Ottawa. Before anything else, here is the live transit scorecard for all 24 Ottawa wards: https://otranspo.ca/en/insights?view=scoreboards&board=wards. It ranks every ward on how often buses actually arrive within five minutes of schedule, measured from OC Transpo's own settled arrivals over the last fourteen days, and each ward opens onto a live map of the vehicles running right now. Use it at the doors and in debates, no strings attached.
Here is why I'm writing. 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:
The disclosures also leave basic questions unanswered. Royale is a subscription product, so is the $180,000 a one-time cost or an annual one, and is it priced per rider or a flat fee? At Transit'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 and pricing were 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, the STO gets the same app for free. When Gatineau launched real-time tracking in Transit in 2019, the STO's president said publicly that the partnership cost nothing, because showing an agency's buses is Transit's free tier (Le Droit, Jan. 31, 2019: https://ledroit.com/actualites/gatineau/sto-les-parcours-en-temps-reel-6ec8c8b15a3398d70012e209c2fcc63e). What Ottawa paid for is the extras, monitoring the quality of the City's own data feed, sponsoring a premium subscription, and buying crowdsourced rider surveys.
Riders already get those extras free on otranspo.ca, with independent scorecards for every ward, route and station, crowdsourced rider reports at https://otranspo.ca/en/report where riders log the no-show buses, crowding and breakdowns the official feed never records, and live tracking with real-time traffic. There is nothing to subscribe to, and it costs the City nothing.
Ottawa already has the bones of a world class system. What we've lost is trust, and residents need to see the system working, not just be told that it works.
So I'm asking you to commit to three things if you're elected:
1. A public review at Transit Commission of the sole-source Transit app contract, including its full cost, term, pricing structure, and performance, before it gets extended again.
2. Fair, open, competitive processes for rider-facing transit technology going forward.
3. An open partnership framework so qualified Ottawa-built platforms, mine included, can integrate with OC Transpo and share crowdsourced data back with the City.
I'm publishing every candidate's answer on otranspo.ca before advance voting starts October 1, yes, no, or silence. I'd also welcome 15 minutes to show you or your team the platform.
Respectfully, Wyatt Baldwin otranspo.ca
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