Contributed by Robert Lyman © 2024. Robert Lyman’s bio can be read here.
empty transit train car

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Perhaps the best study of trends in transit ridership in Canada was the 2018 Canadian Ridership Trends Research Project Final Report prepared by  a team of professors in the University of Toronto. It classified the potential influences on ridership in four categories: the characteristics of the built environment (notably population, population density and the size of the urban land area); transit service attributes (notably service frequency and reliability); socioeconomic factors (notably the age of the riding population, the size of the student and recent immigrant populations, and car ownership rates); and other factors (notably temperatures and levels of precipitation). The large number of factors involved implies that the carrying capacity of the transit system, in terms of infrastructure and vehicles, must be viewed in context and may be a relatively minor factor. The key factors influencing ridership will vary greatly from city to city.

The pandemic produced a large reduction in the percentage of people who commute to work by whatever means.[1] In October 2022, the numbers commuting were still 7% below pre-pandemic levels.

The statistics on transit ridership in Canada since the mid-1990s show four different periods. From the mid-1990s to 2014, there was a steady rise in ridership. That trend leveled off from 2014 to 2020. The governmental restrictions implemented following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant reduction in ridership starting in 2020; ridership fell from 1.9 billion trips in 2019 to 849 billion in 2020 and then to 778.4 million in 2021, less than half of the 2019 total. Since 2021 there has been a steady increase, so that by December 2023, ridership was back up to 80.5% of the pre-pandemic levels. However, while pre-pandemic activities have largely resumed and Canada’s population has grown by almost two million people, there were 426.3 million fewer passenger trips in 2023 compared with 2019.

 For Canada as a whole, of the 15,740,000 commuters in 2023, 83.6 % travelled by car, truck or van, 10.2% travelled by transit, and 6.1 % travelled by active transportation (mainly cycling and walking). The share using transit has actually declined from 11% in 2011 and is close to what it was in 1996. Transit ridership is much lower in smaller cities and in rural areas than in the larger cities.

There are too many factors that influence transit ridership to draw definitive conclusions about the main causes of changing ridership. There, however, is clearly no direct connection between the greatly increased levels of public subsidies to transit systems (averaging over $4 billion per year from the federal government alone) and the levels of ridership over the past decade. Expenditures are increasing and the population is increasing, but the percentage of commuters that use transit is actually declining. From the taxpayers’ perspective, the billions of dollars over-spent on transit capital infrastructure is just bad investment of funds that are badly needed elsewhere.

[1] https://bdl-lde.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Canadas_New_Workplace_Mobility_Report_FINAL_EN.pdf