Scheduling issues on the first day buses returned to the road resulted in drivers being called in at the last minute to cover 85 shifts, many at overtime pay.
“Some of those would have been on overtime, some would have been on extensions of regular time,” OC Transpo general manager Alain Mercier said yesterday.
Mercier said that by Friday morning, they realized they would be short shifts and were calling people in all day Friday to fix the schedule.
“We were left with about 12 hours to get Saturday up and running,” Mercier said.
Aside from that glitch at the beginning, Mercier said the first five days of transit has been a success.
After sitting for nearly 60 days, there were a number of small defects on the road, but Mercier said the spare buses were able to pick up that slack and no routes were cancelled.
Mercier said they have allocated around 65 per cent of extra buses to deal with excess demand.
“As we anticipated at the very beginning, there would be a few little glitches in the system,” he said.
“That’s normal.”
