Ottawa Student Transportation Authority

Not able to secure buses for the new school year. This is ridiculous. A new transportation authority is needed.

How do you expect a 13/14 year old to walk to school for 8am 3.1km away in Ottawa winter?
Because my daughter is now G9 and we are on the cut off line for transportation she is expected to walk this distance to school or take a public bus and pay $97 a month. Plus the bus pick up is located at the other end of our street and if we lived a few houses closer she would qualify for the bus that’s how close we are to the cut off line. No one at Osta can seem to help!

All around terrible decision making in terms of cancellations/snow-days. Just to give one example, on January 29 I thought that a snow-day might have been plausible. I strongly believed that the buses would be cancelled or delayed, especially after seeing how the Weather Network was portraying the weather for that day, but once I woke up and having found no cancellations whatsoever, I was surprised, and wondered if the weather was poorly estimated. The problem was that once I took my first step outside, I was knee deep in snow. To contrast, one week earlier we had a snow-day over drizzle that ended overnight and barely froze. My main point is that the deciding factor of a cancellation should be heavily reliant on the weather and any effects it would have on road surfaces/conditions, so I don't understand how a little bit of rain could cause more of a problem on the roads than 20cm of snow. Frankly, I'm not exactly sure how cancellations are decided, but I feel that deciding a bus cancellation is a very straight-forward process that could be done by anyone competent enough to look outside their window, yet still seems to be a task that is almost never done correctly.

The One day they gives us the snow day is when we already got a pd day.like wht? What bout the days we actually at school and and r bus be slipin

Lack of snow days in dangerous weather, expect kids to walk and wait in dangerous circumstances, little for safety first

Terrible people who can't tell the difference from a millimeter to a meter of snow. Just all around awful people just embarrassing. Also if they got a CT scan no brain would show up.

I understand that it is hard to make calls but seriously. I wish they would think more about rural areas before they decide all the roads are nicely plowed.

OSTA has got to be worst organization ever created. They have no clue how to send out timely notifications.ex. On Jan 29,19 all indication are busses are on time. My daughter head to bus stop and after 20 minutes waiting in -20 weather; I get notice of a 30 minutes bus delay. My daughter and everyone at her bus stop go home because they are cold.
In addition their are different bus drivers every week, they do not understand the routes and they read while they drive - distracted drving with a bus full of kids!

Tonight when my son got off the van the driver called him an idiot and annoying.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had a problem with them. The van driver couldn’t speak English, he hasn’t shown up but claims he did, drives like an idiot, late picking the kids up at school multiple times, and so much more! This van company needs their services re-evaluated!
The transportation company is actually called “Sommer School Transportation Services Inc. ”
And has it’s contract through OSTA.
UNACCEPTABLE!