[Midtown Urbanist]

I am creating a more technical thread focused on posting and discussing ridership of various transit systems and services in the region.

TTC Subway Ridership (2016) can be found in this link.

TTC Surface Transit Ridership (2014) can be found in this link.


Regarding new Spadina Subway Extension; from The Star:

Two stations on new York subway extension among the least used on the TTC network

Numbers collected by the TTC between October and November show the best performing station on the extension is York University, which has about 34,100 combined boardings and disembarkings every day.

That’s followed by Finch West, with 17,700, and Pioneer Village, which also serves the York campus, with 17,300. Vaughan Metropolitan Centre station at the end of the line has a daily usage of 14,800.

But two of the extension’s new stops have performed much worse. Highway 407 station is used by just 3,400 people a day, and Downsview Park by just 2,500.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Thanks to the recently released GO Expansion Full Business Case (November 2018), we also have 2017 ridership numbers for the GO lines. See below:

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

The ridership is getting a bit out of date, I considered hiding the column altogether. I haven't been able to find up to date data for GO lines for a while now, but I recently discovered that RTM includes the ridership on their route description pages. (Though I noticed they have completely the wrong route length for the Vaudreuil-Hudson line, probably including the now-abandoned tracks to Rigaud). West Coast Express ridership is actually down by 1000 passengers per day compared to 2016 because of increased competition from the new SkyTrain Evergreen extension.

Here's the chart again, this time showing the years of the ridership counts:

Thanks a bunch. It honestly sucks that Metrolinx isn't as keen as the TTC on releasing ridership numbers. Hopefully we get an update soon fro not only the GO lines, but the TTC lines and GO Bus lines as well.

This is amazing, great job! Definitely confusing why Ontario's ridership numbers are so out of date, not to mention missing lots of stuff (e.g station usage, GO bus ridership). I guess QP doesn't want the opposition or media questioning things, but still people want to know numbers.

Can't the ridership be FOIed?

Yeah, this information can be FOIed or requested from staff.

If we wanted to get them FOI'd, what information exactly would we be looking to find?

 

[Allandale25]

^ I would say as much information as they are willing to provide. Ridership by line, train #, and if possible how many people transfer from GO to local transit...

What does the last set of stats look like?

 

[Streety McCarface]

^ I would say as much information as they are willing to provide. Ridership by line, train #, and if possible how many people transfer from GO to local transit...

What does the last set of stats look like?

I don't think there is a public set of stats like that. I'm also not sure Metrolinx has transfer data from all sources: presto isn't used in Guelph or Waterloo.

 

[TOareaFan]

Thanks to the recently released GO Expansion Full Business Case (November 2018), we also have 2017 ridership numbers for the GO lines. See below:

View attachment 169193

Those are rail only I presume (since the Milton off peak number is zero it cannot be including the “train buses” or any other buses in the corridors).....if that is so:

• Those off peak midday trains on Kitchener line are getting surprisingly high use
• If you added the evening and weekend bus use, it is not hard to picture that the Kitchener corridor may have as many off peak users as peak!

 

[reaperexpress]

Can someone calculate the daily ridership? Very sick and don’t want to do the math. . .

No, because they haven't broken down the off-peak ridership between weekdays and weekends. And anyway like @TOareaFan said, they seem to be omitting train-bus services which were included in the 2014 per-line data I used in my charts.

• Those off peak midday trains on Kitchener line are getting surprisingly high use
• If you added the evening and weekend bus use, it is not hard to picture that the Kitchener corridor may have as many off peak users as peak!

GO Tickets are accepted on UP Express between Weston and Union so that might be part of the off-peak ridership.

My bigger question is why the Barrie Line has no off-peak ridership when it has almost full all-day two-way service. I ride that line and although off-peak it's certainly not busy, the trains certainly aren't empty either.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Does anyone have updated YRT and VIVA ridership numbers?

This is what I have saved:

(For comparison of scale, the Eglinton East corridor (if all routes are tallied together) sees a weekday ridership total that is equal to the entirety of the YRT+VIVA system. )

 

[Toronto1834]

Updated version of the same graphic. Annual reports and service plans with this information are posted here. It looks like while overall ridership is relatively stable, ridership on the busiest routes is significantly increasing.

 

[Midtown Urbanist]

Updated version of the same graphic. Annual reports and service plans with this information are posted here. It looks like while overall ridership is relatively stable, ridership on the busiest routes is significantly increasing.

Do we have anything like this link below which shows ridership numbers of all the routes but a) in a more recent year; b) a yearly average rather than one-month snapshot?

Dec 2014 - https://www.york.ca/wps/wcm/connect...-90326d2123ad/mar+5+ridership.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
Oct, Nov 2015 - https://www.york.ca/wps/wcm/connect...26621ed7/feb+4+kost+ridership.pdf?MOD=AJPERES

I am skeptical of ridership numbers from a specific month because ridership across the calendar year can be variable due to weather and academic year.

e.g. apparently in October 2015 the Blue Line had a weekday ridership average of 19,774. Which is higher than even the 2017 yearly average of 17,808.

 

[innsertnamehere]

Q2 2018 APTA numbers are available through the link below;

https://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2018-Q2-Ridership-APTA.pdf

The final 2 pages of the PDF has many Canadian transit agency ridership statistics.It's important to note that they are "unlinked" trips however, so if a person uses two different bus routes in a single trip, it counts as two trips. (the TTC shows extreme growth as they were in error previously providing APTA linked trips, and recently corrected it).


Regarding YRT, the stat's show a continued decline in ridership, falling over 4% in the previous year. Compared to Brampton Transit, with growth in excess of 17%.

What I would like to know is Burlington Transit - anyone know where to get ridership statistics for them?

 

[Streety McCarface]

Q2 2018 APTA numbers are available through the link below;

https://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2018-Q2-Ridership-APTA.pdf

The final 2 pages of the PDF has many Canadian transit agency ridership statistics.It's important to note that they are "unlinked" trips however, so if a person uses two different bus routes in a single trip, it counts as two trips. (the TTC shows extreme growth as they were in error previously providing APTA linked trips, and recently corrected it).


Regarding YRT, the stat's show a continued decline in ridership, falling over 4% in the previous year. Compared to Brampton Transit, with growth in excess of 17%.

What I would like to know is Burlington Transit - anyone know where to get ridership statistics for them?

I'm not going to lie, it's really sad that only Philadelphia, Staten Island, and Cleveland have growing heavy rail ridership growth.

Something seems really fishy about the TTC's heavy rail numbers: 1,334,600 trips per day. I know we just got an extension, but that was only projected to increase ridership by around 100,000 individuals, so how the hell did ridership spike nearly 36% in 2018?

The increase in bus traffic seems justified with the huge loss in streetcar ridership (which is likely explained by all the replacement buses that the city has had the past year), but how did subway ridership gain so much that we're now the city in Canada with the highest heavy rail ridership? It'll be interesting to see a full summary of ridership numbers by line and station in 2 years.

Also, it seems interesting that the SRT ridership is over 50K passengers per day. I can't help but think that is in error.

 

[innsertnamehere]

I'm not going to lie, it's really sad that only Philadelphia, Staten Island, and Cleveland have growing heavy rail ridership growth.

Something seems really fishy about the TTC's heavy rail numbers: 1,334,600 trips per day. I know we just got an extension, but that was only projected to increase ridership by around 100,000 individuals, so how the hell did ridership spike nearly 36% in 2018?

The increase in bus traffic seems justified with the huge loss in streetcar ridership (which is likely explained by all the replacement buses that the city has had the past year), but how did subway ridership gain so much that we're now the city in Canada with the highest heavy rail ridership? It'll be interesting to see a full summary of ridership numbers by line and station in 2 years.

Also, it seems interesting that the SRT ridership is over 50K passengers per day. I can't help but think that is in error.

I wouldn't look too far into some of those. Cleveland's supposedly rapid growth of 8% is going from 19,000 daily trips to 20,500. The TTC subway ridership could grow by 0.1% and match that growth by a pure numbers perspective.

When ridership stats are that low, they tend to be a lot more volatile in terms of growth rates.

As I said, the TTC was previously reporting linked trips, and changed it to unlinked this year. So stats jumped up by 36%. Actual ridership is expected to decline by about 2% this year.

 

[nfitz]

Actual ridership is expected to decline by about 2% this year.

Total ridership might drop that much, but the subway share could be bigger.

Recall if you look at the 2017 ridership data, based on where fares are being paid total ridership was down 1%, but bus was up 4% while subway was down 3%. Also if you dig deeper, weekday travel was actually up slightly in 2017, it was weekend travel that had dropped.

 

[Streety McCarface]

I wouldn't look too far into some of those. Cleveland's supposedly rapid growth of 8% is going from 19,000 daily trips to 20,500. The TTC subway ridership could grow by 0.1% and match that growth by a pure numbers perspective.

When ridership stats are that low, they tend to be a lot more volatile in terms of growth rates.

While true that lower riderships are subject to greater fluctuations, it's worth noting that I was commenting on the fact that there was an increase at all. This is Cleveland after all, one of the few US cities with a declining population. It's also worth nothing change of 1,500 passengers per day is quite huge for a line that barely saw any ridership to begin with, and this increase is relatively constant throughout the system. Since it is true that Toronto's transit mode share is much larger than that of Cleveland's, it is obvious that a far greater number of people are needed to shift ridership levels the same percentage, but saying that Toronto's ridership fluctuations are far more significant because of this isn't really fair. Again, Toronto has a much larger population, a heavily growing population, far greater density, fewer freeways per capita, usefulness of lines and most importantly, a general public desire to use transit. Cleveland doesn't have any of these things, all of which contribute to good transit ridership, so any positive fluctuation from an already established low number is just as difficult for them as it is for Toronto, if not more difficult since the reasons for using transit there are non-existent.

As I said, the TTC was previously reporting linked trips, and changed it to unlinked this year. So stats jumped up by 36%. Actual ridership is expected to decline by about 2% this year.

Oops, my bad. I guess ridership numbers won't be as interesting for each subway station. Oh well. Well, come to think of it, the SRT had a fluctuation of 10K PPD, meaning that there are 10K passengers that bus to (not from) Lawrence and STC each day. Come to think of it, we could get some fairly accurate numbers for % of bus users when these numbers are released.