OC Transpo gets a bad rap. Just today a colleague was telling me that they heard that Ottawa was one of Canada’s worst cities in terms of public transportation according to some ranking in 2019. I know we all love to complain about OC Transpo, but this came as a surprise to me because at the end of the day, Ottawa has a good transit system.
So why did they think Ottawa was so bad? Well, I believe this 2019 ranking from Redfin was the culprit behind this misconception (source):
| Rank | City | Transit Score |
| 1 | Toronto | 78 |
| 2 | Vancouver | 74 |
| 3 | Montréal | 67 |
| 4 | Mississauga | 56 |
| 5 | Brampton | 53 |
| 6 | Winnipeg | 51 |
| 7 | Calgary | 50 |
| 8 | Ottawa | 50 |
| 9 | Edmonton | 49 |
| 10 | Markham | 49 |
| 11 | Québec | 47 |
| 12 | Surrey | 47 |
| 13 | Laval | 46 |
| 14 | Hamilton | 45 |
| 15 | London | 45 |
Based on the numbers, Ottawa is sitting at a pretty lackluster 50, a far cry from Toronto’s 78. I’ve used both, and they honestly didn’t seem like they were worlds apart. I’ve also used Calgary’s (another “50”, same as Ottawa), and it didn’t seem quite in the same tier as ours. So why is Ottawa’s score so low? Why is Toronto’s score so high? And where did these numbers even come from? Let’s dig into these scores and the methodology behind them and find out!
Well, the article states it very clearly: Redfin got those numbers from Walk Score’s “Transit Score” tool. However, the first problem becomes immediately clear from a quick look at Redfin’s corporate DNA and a review of the methodology behind the metric. Redfin is a residential real estate company; Walk Score was acquired by Redfin in 2014; WalkScore provides three indices (Walking, Public Transportation, and Bicycling) that can be useful in evaluating the location of any given property for non-driving modes of transportation. The issue here is that Redfin and WalkScore are both primarily concerned with individual properties, but this ranking is based on city-wide averages. This means that cities such as Ottawa with a range of very good and very poor transit coverage end up with very mediocre total scores, whereas Toronto, a dense urban area, has a much higher overall score.
To help us understand why Toronto has extremely good coverage and why Ottawa has mixed (some very good, some absolutely absent) transit coverage, we have to be careful with how we’re defining “Toronto” and “Ottawa”. To be clear, we’re not talking about the GTA, we’re talking about the City of Toronto. Here’s a reminder of the difference in scale between the two:
However, when non-Torontonians colloquially refer to “Toronto” they’re usually referring to something somewhere in between, including perhaps a third to a half of the orange area above.
So, “The City of Toronto” is actually much smaller than “Toronto”. With “Ottawa”, the opposite is true; something you have to understand about “The City of Ottawa” is that it is big.
Interestingly, almost 80% of this is rural!
So to recap, The City of Toronto is the highly-developed, dense, urban core of the GTA, whereas The City of Ottawa is a mostly-rural, amalgamated monstrosity. It’s practically a joke to compare the two.
To confirm that all this talk about city limits is relevant to Walk Score’s transit scoring methodology, let’s look at the transit section of the Walk Score pages for Ottawa and Toronto:
You can easily see that the outlined areas match the city limits, which shouldn’t come as a surprise.
So in summary, the ranking is using a metric designed to assess individual properties to compare the average transit coverage of a city whose development vastly overflows the city limits with one whose city limits were amalgamated to include most of the surrounding countryside.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is unfair, merely that it is misrepresentative to say that “Ottawa has bad public transit” just because The City of Ottawa has a low average Transit Score. Most neighbourhoods in urban Ottawa have scores comfortably in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s! My building, for example, has a score over 80 (which is pretty important, considering I don’t drive).
The bottom line is simply what Walk Score says: “Ottawa has good transit.”