Toronto's Subway Ridership Success

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Another flaw I see looking at the map of routes here is that they seem to have been drawn without any real examination of where the places they go are actually like. For example a lot of routes on the west side terminate at Ridgmar Mall. I'm sure that was a great setup back in 1992 but Ridgmar Mall is dead and mostly empty and surrounded by blighted vacant retail centers. Really instead of this, buses should trunk together on the freeway frontage roads and then there should be a transit center on Camp Bowie West somewhere, which should have BRT, and which should be targeted as a redevelopment area.

This is a good point. In the U.S., transit agencies seem to be EXTREMELY slow at responding to ridership/land use changes, and cling to legacy routes.

In NYC, until a recent citywide bus route redesign, the bus system basically mirrored the 1920's-era trolley network, as if nothing had changed in a century. Thankfully the new network map is more responsive to current conditions.

In Detroit, the busiest bus line ends at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, which is no longer in use. The second busiest bus line ends at Northland Mall, which was vacated and demolished, and is surrounded by vacant retail and office. Insanity.

[Quixote]

Most of the factors have already been covered. The core ones are IMO:

1) A more transit-friendly culture within Canada, one that doesn't place a stigma on taking the bus and viewing it as reserved for the lower middle class and working class

2) Demographics... more of a uniformly middle class population and significantly less "scary people" and crime (real or perceived)

3) Operations... frequency (< 5-minute headways during evenings and weekends is amazing) and connectivity with other modes

4) Service. The lines serve the financial, civic, shopping, and entertainment districts within the urban core, along with two major public universities, cultural attractions, and adjacent neighborhoods anchored by active commercial corridors.

5) Stations are better integrated with more residential neighborhoods

[Nite]

Originally Posted by mhays

I haven't seen one of the key factors yet:

Toronto's growth tends to be highly concentrated, with dozens of tower clusters right next to transit.

Chicago's is more dispersed. Outside of limited highrises areas, it's a townhouse city and a SFR city.

Townhouses are great but residents probably aren't as close to trains as a big cluster of towers might be.

You are still missing the point that the bus system is the key ingredient. it has nothing to do how the population of Toronto is spread out or concentrated because you will have frequent buses no matter where you live. Americans cities have focus their transit system on rail infrastructure while Toronto has focus it's transit infrastructure on buses producing the best bus system on the continent. frequent buses everywhere is the key ingredient to Toronto large transit ridership.

[Crawford]

Chicago actually has higher rail ridership than Toronto, right now. It's might be a short-term quirk, however. Canada had a somewhat stricter Covid response and this might be a legacy effect? Perhaps more WFH? I'm really stereotyping here, but more germaphobe East Asian transit riders in GTA?

https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uplo...rship-APTA.pdf

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Nite

You are still missing the point that the bus system is the key ingredient. it has nothing to do how the population of Toronto is spread out or concentrated because you will have frequent buses no matter where you live. Americans cities have focus their transit system on rail infrastructure while Toronto has focus it's transit infrastructure on buses producing the best bus system on the continent. frequent buses everywhere is the key ingredient to Toronto large transit ridership.

Buses are certainly a part of it. It's also why Seattle beats most US cities.

But concentration is definitely a factor.

My post didn't rank factors or try to be comprehensive. It only said concentration wasn't discussed yet.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Nite

• Video Link

I do not think I could have found a more informative video for this topic. Answers a lot of questions and upholds a lot of observations about both systems. Thank you.

[Doady]

High frequency is kinda overrated a lot. Toronto buses didn't start at 3-4 minutes frequencies on day one like they are now. They started at 30 minutes off-peak and 20 minutes peak hour and the higher frequencies are a later product of higher ridership. After all, high frequency is a feature of rapid transit, another way to increase capacity to deal with increasing ridership.

Reducing gaps between buses are important as I said, so that's not just gaps between bus routes, but also the gaps between the individual buses on each route. But even tripling the buses and operators to increase frequency from 15 minutes to 5 minutes for example would only reduce average wait time by 5 minutes, from possibly a 50 minutes trip. What requires more effort, waiting in one spot for an extra 5 minutes, or walking an extra 5 minutes to the bus stop? I would say 5 minutes walking makes more difference, and that means smaller gaps between routes, filling in those gaps.

Walkability to transit is definitely overlooked in US cities and suburbs compared to those of Canada, but if you compare Canada to UK, you can see how lower walkability can also force more people onto transit, and that is why Canadian cities have higher transit ridership than UK cities. After all, transit isn't just competing with the car, but also with cycling and walking, and arguably transit is more akin to the car in terms of travel distance. Despite their transit ridership, Canadian cities arguably more akin to US cities than to UK cities. High transit ridership can be just as much a product of sprawl as high car dependence. Canadian cities have used this sprawl, this lack of walkability, to get people onto transit, and US cities can too.

Of course, you can see increasing density and walkability due to high transit ridership in certain places and corridors within Canadian cities, but like high frequencies that density and walkability is arguably more a product of high transit ridership than the other way around. Don't be so quick to attribute higher ridership to different culture, maybe the culture is a product of the transit system too. You can see the car-oriented culture in Canada in these graphs, the lack of walkability compared to UK, how higher walkability hurts transit ridership in UK. Car vs. transit is not such a black vs. white issue, not as opposite of each other as you might think, and so people and cities of Canada and US not as different as you might think either.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by mhays

Buses are certainly a part of it. It's also why Seattle beats most US cities.

But concentration is definitely a factor.

My post didn't rank factors or try to be comprehensive. It only said concentration wasn't discussed yet.

Buses aren't part of the solution, they are the solution. invest in bus frequencies, across an entire city, and forget about rail infrastructure, this would do more for public transit than anything else in my opinion.
mot people will never be in walking distance of a train station but nearly everyone can be within walking distance to a bus network, just making very frequent.

[mrnyc]

Originally Posted by Nite

Buses aren't part of the solution, they are the solution. invest in bus frequencies, across an entire city, and forget about rail infrastructure, this would do more for public transit than anything else in my opinion.
mot people will never be in walking distance of a train station but nearly everyone can be within walking distance to a bus network, just making very frequent.

while they are more flexible, busses are also more expensive. i think i read somewhere that you have to replace busses four times over the life of a subway train car. then there are the frequency, crowding and clumping up issues that really aggravate riders. even with dedicated brt. i like busses, i prefer to ride them and do all the time, so not saying you are wrong, of course you are right, but busses are not the sole solution.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Nite

Buses aren't part of the solution, they are the solution. invest in bus frequencies, across an entire city, and forget about rail infrastructure, this would do more for public transit than anything else in my opinion.
mot people will never be in walking distance of a train station but nearly everyone can be within walking distance to a bus network, just making very frequent.

Americans generally won't ride buses, so, outside of a few urban centers and college towns, they aren't going to drive non-poor ridership.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Americans generally won't ride buses, so, outside of a few urban centers and college towns, they aren't going to drive non-poor ridership.

show me an example with a system with very frequent bus service with low ridership before we come to that conclusion.
It's like saying American's will not ride bikes based on the data from a city with no separated bike lanes.
You build separated bike lanes and a very frequent bus service and people will use it, my case study is Toronto which is not much different than most US cities.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Nite

show me an example with a system with very frequent bus service with low ridership before we come to that conclusion.
It's like saying American's will not ride bikes based on the data from a city with no separated bike lanes

Detroit's Woodward Ave. line had buses every 10 minutes and 24/7 service until relatively recently. The ridership isn't total crap for U.S. standards but it isn't good either. I think it's like 10-15k riders daily, on basically the Yonge Street of Metro Detroit.

The other major Detroit arterials had only slightly lower service levels, and a small fraction of the Woodward ridership.

[Nite]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Detroit's Woodward Ave. line had buses every 10 minutes and 24/7 service until relatively recently. The ridership isn't total crap for U.S. standards but it isn't good either. I think it's like 10-15k riders daily, on basically the Yonge Street of Metro Detroit.

The other major Detroit arterials had only slightly lower service levels, and a small fraction of the Woodward ridership.

That's just one line, you need an entire network with these frequencies to create a network effect that will have high ridership.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Nite

Buses aren't part of the solution, they are the solution. invest in bus frequencies, across an entire city, and forget about rail infrastructure, this would do more for public transit than anything else in my opinion.
mot people will never be in walking distance of a train station but nearly everyone can be within walking distance to a bus network, just making very frequent.

If you add a tight grid of grade-separated busways and a HELL of a lot of labor dollars, maybe. So far, nobody has built a bus grid that could handle a major Downtown by itself.

Seattle tried for many years, including three exclusive Downtown lanes in each direction (two one way streets, a two-way street, and the Bus Tunnel). It wasn't enough, even when Downtown was half its current size.

There are no simple answers.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

while they are more flexible, busses are also more expensive. i think i read somewhere that you have to replace busses four times over the life of a subway train car. then there are the frequency, crowding and clumping up issues that really aggravate riders. even with dedicated brt. i like busses, i prefer to ride them and do all the time, so not saying you are wrong, of course you are right, but busses are not the sole solution.

But subways are way more expensive to build and they cannot reach every single corner.

I can't imagine São Paulo without buses. They're as important as the subway and the railway, not only as feeders but as the main transport as well. About crowding, for shorter distances (like my daily commute, for instance), I prefer bus over subway precisely they're less crowded and hardly ever I cannot get a seat. The subway is packed.

Back to the US, with their very wide streets, it's quite easy to implant BRTs on the busiest ones. They're great.

[Innsertnamehere]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Chicago actually has higher rail ridership than Toronto, right now. It's might be a short-term quirk, however. Canada had a somewhat stricter Covid response and this might be a legacy effect? Perhaps more WFH? I'm really stereotyping here, but more germaphobe East Asian transit riders in GTA?

https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uplo...rship-APTA.pdf

what? looking at that, Toronto's heavy rail is reporting 528,000 daily trips on the subway and the CTA is reporting 259,000... Toronto has double the daily ridership of Chicago, just like it did pre-pandemic.

[Innsertnamehere]

The vox video is excellent, yes.

Also - land use is very much an underrated factor. Look at Yonge St north of the 401 and tell me where something like that exists along a subway line in Chicago. The Yonge Line in Toronto accounts for something like 1/2 the entire system's ridership and is among the busiest on the continent (iirc only NYC's lexington line is busier). A huge portion of the line's ridership is walk-in from North York Centre and Yonge-Eglinton.

Chicago has a lot of great medium density areas along it's older subway lines, particularly north of downtown, but that level of density directly atop (i.e. very easily accessible to) the subway just doesn't exist at that same scale. The only other place with similar residential densities is NYC's upper east side, and sure and behold, the line serving that area is the one that has higher ridership than Toronto's Yonge Line.

The other factor is also concentration of destinations, three of Toronto's four universities are directly on the subway network as are multiple colleges, huge amounts of employment are on them including probably the majority of office space in the GTA, government offices, major shopping centres, etc. are all connected. The only major shopping centre not connected to the subway in Toronto is Sherway Gardens and even then there are proposals going around to connect it to the system.

Toronto's Bloor-Danforth line (the green line / Line 2) has much lower densities along it generally speaking and relies on bus ridership more to drive it's use, which is the other big distinguishing factor for Toronto's system ridership as already extensively discussed here. Bus networks just don't exist in the US to the extent they do in Canada, Toronto is a particularly good example of that.

Also - I've discussed this on other threads but the amount of highway infrastructure into Downtown Chicago is generally almost shocking from a Toronto perspective. I've done counts and Chicago has something like 26 inbound lanes of freeway capacity, including 8 inbound lanes on Lake Shore Drive which service local urban areas that have no real need to drive downtown and have good transit access, while Toronto has 6-8 lanes at most. That alone makes a huge difference as driving is simply way easier in Chicago.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

what? looking at that, Toronto's heavy rail is reporting 528,000 daily trips on the subway and the CTA is reporting 259,000... Toronto has double the daily ridership of Chicago, just like it did pre-pandemic.

You're right. I was reading the wrong line for the Canadian stats, and yeah, HR is undoubtedly heavy rail, i.e. TTC subway.

Here's the 100k+ subway/heavy rail daily ridership stats for U.S/Can agencies for Jan-Mar 2022. No doubt current ridership is much higher, but still nowhere near normalcy:

Chicago - 259k
Toronto - 528k

New York (MTA subway) - 4.82 million
New York (PATH subway) - 120k
Philadelphia - 135k
Boston - 226k
Washington, DC - 212k
Bay Area (BART) - 100k
Montreal - 622k

Just eyeballing numbers compared to pre-Covid, the pandemic seems to have slammed Bay Area transit the most, and Montreal the least.

[Crawford]

And looking at commuter rail numbers, Covid absolutely killed ridership. Not shocking. But I don't doubt the numbers are much better right now:

Chicago (Metra) - 63k
Toronto (GO Transit) - ?

NYC (LIRR) - 179k
NYC (Metro North) - 141k
NYC (NJT) - around 135k (they don't break out daily numbers, so it's an imputation)
Philly (SEPTA) - 45k
Boston (MBTA) - 47k
SF (Caltrain) - 11k
Montreal - ?

Once again, Bay Area rail ridership got killed.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

This is a good point. In the U.S., transit agencies seem to be EXTREMELY slow at responding to ridership/land use changes, and cling to legacy routes.

In NYC, until a recent citywide bus route redesign, the bus system basically mirrored the 1920's-era trolley network, as if nothing had changed in a century. Thankfully the new network map is more responsive to current conditions.

In Detroit, the busiest bus line ends at the Michigan State Fairgrounds, which is no longer in use. The second busiest bus line ends at Northland Mall, which was vacated and demolished, and is surrounded by vacant retail and office. Insanity.

Honestly... this also says a lot about the weakness of bus as a foundational mode of transit. And bus transit as a development tool. You're hard pressed to find a major rail hub that falls into obsolescence, but bus hubs easily do.