Alex Cullen, chair of the city's transit committee, said changes will expand Ottawa's transit service by seven per cent. (CBC)

Transit route changes this fall will boost service overall, but may make it more difficult for some Ottawa residents to get around.

Joyce Mortimer takes the Route 18 bus to get downtown from her home in Ottawa's Westboro neighbourhood, just west of downtown. Her children planned to take that route to school in Nepean. But beginning Sept. 6, that bus won't be running by their house anymore. Instead, the route will end further away from downtown Ottawa.

"Certainly the 18 has been a tried and true, counted-on route for us and for most people in our community for years," Mortimer said Wednesday.

"We do have many seniors in our community as well, it's quite a mixed community, many of whom don't have cars, and the loss of the 18 is going to be crippling for them."

Dozens of OC Transpo route changes will go into effect on Sept. 6, including:

• The cancellation of six bus routes.
• The addition of 10 new ones.
• Renumbering of some routes.
• Changes to the path taken on some routes.
• Increased service frequencies for some routes.

"The bottom line is we're expanding our transit service by about seven per cent," said Coun. Alex Cullen, chair of the city's transit committee.

"So we're trying to make the system more efficient. We're trying to deliver more service."

OC Transpo head Alain Mercier said the changes mean more options for customers. He added that the city-run-and-owned transit company ultimately wants to make things more convenient and predictable.

Peter Raaymakers, executive director of Public Transit Ottawa, an OC Transpo watchdog, said a number of routes have actually been shortened.

"Some routes will now end on the western edge of downtown, some on the eastern edge — just to limit the number of buses that seem to be going in the downtown, which OC Transpo acknowledges is a problem," he said.

Raaymakers added that the transit service is also trying to get people used to transferring, as that will be required when the proposed new light rail line is built downtown.

Among the routes originally slated to be cut was Route 24, which serves Beacon Hill, said Tim Tierney, a spokesman for the Beacon Hill North Community Association. A flurry of complaints saved it, but Tierney said he knows why neighbourhoods like Westboro were unable to save routes like the 18.

"It was such a small window of time to reply, from the time that they actually announced it," he said. "We were lucky, we were mobilized."