Since moving to Ottawa from Edmonton in 2019, Laura Blanchette* has heard multiple opinions about the city’s erratic public transportation system.
Blanchette, a fifth-year journalism and humanities student at Carleton University, relies on public transit. When the LRT broke down in August 2023, she waited an hour and a half for a bus to get to her job downtown. She said this filled her with “so much rage and frustration,” but it also gave her an idea.
She was inspired to give student commuters a place to express their opinions by creating a zine about Ottawa’s public transit system. More than half of Ottawa university students use transit, according to the City of Ottawa.
A zine is a self-published collection of original works, usually created on a small scale with a select group of contributors. Blanchette said a zine is the right medium for this topic because it’s accessible and rooted in activism.
“Part of why I want to make a zine about it is to encourage activism,” she said. “It needs to be more than just something we complain about at the Carleton bus stop. It needs to go bigger than that because everyone that I’ve spoken to has opinions.”
The zine, titled Good Golly Miss Trolley, will have tips for new riders, a letter to Mark Sutcliffe, a “silly” haiku, other poetry and illustrations.
She said she wants student frustrations about transit to turn into engagement with the city.
Seeing cuts to routes and funding is infuriating for someone who relies on transit to get around, according to the Good Golly Miss Trolley creator. Blanchette said she wants to document this irritation, while also celebrating public transport.
For Blanchette, public transit also has its positives. She said transit can be a freeing, community-building and environmentally friendly experience.
“If you’re in a car, you’re just going from one point to the next point,” she said. “And if you only ever go to school, work and the grocery store, then that’s everything […] that you’re going to see.”
She added she enjoys not paying for a car and insurance or having to worry about parking and other logistics associated with being a driver. Engaging with public transit has also allowed her to get to know Ottawa and its people better.
“If you take the bus you’re forced to learn more about the city and you’re forced to pay attention to what’s happening.”
She holds the opinion that Ottawa’s public transport should be better.
For Szabados, who lives in Carp, a rural township west of downtown Ottawa, public transit isn’t readily accessible. Still, she said she gave it a shot last summer: driving to Kanata, taking two buses and one train to get to her summer job downtown. When the LRT broke down in August, an hour-long commute turned into two hours.
“I was super late and tired and exhausted and gave up,” she said. “I ended up driving in and paying the $12 parking every day, because, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t take OC Transpo.”
She’ll be submitting a haiku, along with a four-panel comic detailing the OC Transpo user experience. She said she hopes the zine will demonstrate that the younger generation cares about sustainable transport and access to city infrastructure.
“Just because we’re young doesn’t mean we’re not aware of the challenges facing the city in our community and we’re not motivated to help make good change,” she said. “We might express this differently, and creatively, compared to other people.”
Sadie Badour, a recent graduate from Carleton, befriended Blanchette through the humanities program. Having recently gotten into comic-making, she said she wanted to contribute something positive to the zine: comics that illustrate the reasons why she likes taking the bus.
Despite her frustration with Ottawa’s “subpar” transit system, she said she thinks it’s worth highlighting its positive aspects.
“We want to encourage people to still care about public transit, because it’s super important to the community,” she said. “If you’re privileged enough to have a car, it might be easy enough for you to just give up on public transit and say, ‘I’m just gonna drive everywhere,’ but that’s not a privilege that everybody has.”
Blanchette said the zine isn’t meant to be a dig at OC Transpo itself. Instead, she said she believes any criticism should be geared toward City Hall.
“[OC Transpo employees] are doing their best,” she said. “They can do as much as (…) City Hall gives them a budget for.”
“I hope that they hear that their work is appreciated by people in the city.”
In an email statement to the Charlatan, OC Transpo’s public information officer Katrina Camposarcone-Stubbs said OC Transpo is working on “numerous” initiatives to improve service for university students.
“Students at Carleton University have many reasons to be excited about the opening of Line 2 and Line 4,” Camposarcone-Stubbs wrote.
After multiple delays, Line 2 is scheduled to open in April.
The email also said that student capacity to take the train will double and 24 new stations will be added across the city.
These transit updates will “provide greater flexibility for post-secondary students in choosing housing by extending the benefits of rail to more communities across the city,” Camposarcone-Stubbs said.
A publication date for Good Golly Miss Trolley is yet to be announced. Those interested can get updates on Blanchette’s Instagram, @lunablch.
*Laura Blanchette was a Charlatan news editor in the 2021-2022 publication year.
Featured image by Laura Blanchette.
