Dude, Where's My Bus? | movie | 2024 | Official Clip - video Dailymotion

Filmmaker Gio Petti takes an in-depth look at the city's troublesome transit system in his documentary, Dude, Where's My | dG1fdU9kdWZ2RUY5Q0E

Transcript

00:00This led me to Riley Brockington, Transit Chair Board Member as well as City

00:05Councillor of Ward 16.

00:07It's not our job to get in there with wrenches and fix buses or

00:11or, you know, immerse ourselves in operations, but some of the high-level

00:15issues that impact our residents on a daily basis with the system we need to

00:21identify and address.

00:22Riley is a huge advocate for public transit and was able to

00:26speak to me about a lot of the issues I encountered and specifically

00:29illuminating what was contributing to late buses, performance versus reliability.

00:34So there's a difference between performance statistics and reliability

00:39statistics. Performance means the route actually went out, the run which actually

00:45went out. Reliability statistics means within certain acceptable time range.

00:51So you could have a bus that's an hour late but still goes out, that meets the

00:56performance stat, but if it's an hour late it doesn't meet the reliability

01:01stat. So performance stats are actually high in the City of Ottawa. It's the

01:07reliability data that is not acceptable. It's too low.

01:11As I explored further, it seemed a lot of people all over Ottawa were facing the same issue.

01:17I'd be standing at bus stops with a crowd of 30 or 40 people and people

01:20would be saying, I've been here for 40 minutes, the bus is supposed to come

01:23every 10 minutes. What has happened? I mean people were talking about it taking

01:29an hour to get locations that used to take 20 minutes and things like that.

01:33That's Carrie Glynzelliot, one of the founding members of Ottawa Transit

01:38Riders, an organization dedicated to the improvement of transit services in Ottawa.

01:42So we decided that we needed a group that would speak for transit riders.

01:46We say that we try to be the voice of transit riders. We're a member driven

01:51organization. We do surveys and we have forums in different places and we say

01:56well what are the issues that you have and what would you like to see us

01:59challenge and prioritize?

02:06When I go out to the bus stop, I don't know if my bus is going to come and you can't run a

02:12transit system with that kind of unreliability. It creates a huge amount

02:16of anxiety. If you have somewhere to be, if you're supposed to be at a job

02:20interview, a medical appointment, if you have to pick your kid up from daycare,

02:24the fact that you go out to the bus and you don't know if it's going to show up

02:30is just unbelievable to me. You have to have a reliable bus system.

02:40When I was a teenager I took the bus in Ottawa and that was the chronic

02:44complaint I've been hearing all my life. I said it, I hear my students saying it.

02:49You stand out there and of course the problem is most acute in the winter.

02:51Because of the delays, snow on the road, car accidents, blah blah blah blah blah

02:56the bus doesn't show up on time and so you're sitting out there freezing at ten

02:59below zero.