Central Transitway (OC Transpo)

The Central Transitway is the downtown section of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada's Transitway. This section of the Transitway uses dedicated lanes on existing streets, namely Albert Street for westbound routes and Slater Street for eastbound routes. These lanes are dedicated to buses only on weekdays from the start of morning rush hour (6:00AM) to the end of evening rush hour (6:00PM); they are otherwise open to regular traffic. Even during rush hour, regular traffic needs to cross the dedicated lanes to access right turning lanes.

This section of the Transitway has four nominal stops: Bay, Kent, Bank and Metcalfe. The eastbound and westbound halves of the stops are not co-located and are not necessarily aligned to each other. For scheduling convenience, identical routes stop at all stations.

The Central Transitway gets very congested during rush hour due to the number of express routes, which provide door-to-door service to those who work downtown and live in farflung suburbs. Almost all express routes pass through the Central Transitway.

Initial plans for the Transitway included a bus-only tunnel in this section but the cost of a ventilated tunnel for conventional buses was deemed too expensive and was not warranted at the time. The latest proposal for bringing the O-Train downtown over the same streets while keeping existing bus and car traffic is being met with objections from businesses along those streets as normal access to these businesses would be impeded. Some pressure is being applied to reconsider the idea of a tunnel but for electrified trains, relaxing ventilation requirements. Another suggested option would be to adapt a hub-and-spoke system to remove most bus routes out of the Central Transitway. However, there is concern that existing transit users would not be keen on transferring between routes, especially those used to door-to-door express services.