NWTB Explorer

On April 27, 2025, OC Transpo launched “New Ways to Bus” (NWTB), “the largest bus service change in the City’s history”.

OC Transpo has produced great material to understand how specific routes have changed. Their travel planner (or mapping tools like Transit, Google Maps, or Apple Maps) is also great for figuring out how to get where you need to using the new network.

But it’s hard to really wrap your head around a change of this size. How have service levels changed throughout the day? Where is more or less served now than before?

This site tries to help you answer those questions.

How to use

You can explore the new network from a few angles:

• by ward (including a city-wide summary)
• by routes
• by stops

For any of those pages, you can adjust the numbers, charts, and maps displayed based on the “service date“ (weekday, Saturday, or Sunday) and “service window” (time of day).

There are also a few experimental map visualizations. That page might break on phones or other less powerful devices—there’s a lot of math going on! The wards and routes pages have maps, too, that should work more broadly.

Key terms

• “stop”: a physical train or bus stop, usually with a sign and a code (like 3011, Tunney’s Pasture)
• “arrival”: a single time when a train or bus arrives at a stop to take on passengers^[1]
• “arrival frequency”: how busy a stop is—for a given window, do buses arrive only 10 times, or 100 times?

To keep in mind

• “Weekday”, “Saturday”, and “Sunday” service numbers are based on the following, respectively:
  • 2019–2025 (previous): April 11, 12, and 13, 2025
  • NWTB: May 9, 10, and 11, 2025
  • (Note: we manually added in the shopper routes, even though they wouldn’t all run on April 11 or May 9, so rural service is more accurately represented.)
• The “previous” schedule refers to the schedule pre-April 27, 2025 (since the 2019 “#ReallyBigServiceChange”), while “new” refers to the NWTB schedule.

Thank you

Thanks for checking this out! I hope it helps you make sense of how this change affects not only you, but your neighbours throughout the city. If you’d like to, you can learn how the site works, download the supporting data, or learn about me (I’m Lucas, hi!).