OC Transpo's new chief vows to rebuild rider trust
Rick Leary, now two months into his tenure, highlights early wins on reliability while acknowledging the deep challenges ahead.
OC Transpo riders may finally get the reliability they've been promised. General manager Rick Leary, who took over two months ago, sat down with the Citizen on May 26 to talk about early momentum — and he's putting his reputation on fixing the system's most damaging problem: buses and trains that don't show up.
Leary inherited a transit authority in crisis. The O-Train was sidelined by a "spalling" issue that yanked 41 cars out of service in January. Winter saw a cascade of cancelled trips and unreliable service. An auditor general's report found "blatantly obvious" hiring-practice violations under his predecessor, Renée Amilcar. A maintenance backlog plagues the aging diesel fleet. E-buses keep getting delayed. The deficit keeps climbing.
But Leary is focused on two immediate wins: restoring double-car train service to Line 1 by June 8 and hitting the city's 99.5 per cent bus reliability target — which OC Transpo has recently been meeting. "I was really tasked by the city manager to focus on a couple of things to begin with," Leary said. "I believe that the council, the committee, the mayor, the city manager have established the foundation to get us out of the challenges that we have today."
The timing is ironic: halfway through the interview, a decommissioned double-decker bus slid off a tow truck and rolled into a Farm Boy grocery store 500 metres away. No one was hurt, and damage was minimal. But the moment captured the reality Leary is trying to change — OC Transpo as a symbol of dysfunction. He's got the political backing. Now he needs to deliver the buses.