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Top 10 bus routes that drove us through the pandemic

Top 10 bus routes that drove us through the pandemic

Overhead view of busy road, with tree and shrub-lined median in the middle, as several cars and two RapidBuses travel on the road.

There’s no denying that these past pandemic years have impacted transit ridership, and Metro Vancouver as a whole, in ways many of us have never seen before.

But despite the challenges the region faced, transit remained an important part of how people moved. During early fall 2020, we continued to serve 621,000 boardings (360,000 journeys) each weekday. While this number is far from the record-breaking ridership numbers we’ve consistently seen in past years, shamelessly, boardings on our system in early fall 2020 still beat that of our larger North American neighbours. Even more shamelessly – our monthly pandemic boardings were higher than metro Portland’s pre-pandemic monthly boardings. Sorry Portland.

We’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 busiest bus routes in Metro Vancouver.

  1. 99 Commercial/UBC (B-Line)
  2. R4 41st Ave
  3. 49 Metrotown Stn/Dunbar Loop/UBC
  4. 319 Scott Rd Stn/Newton Exch/Scottsdale
  5. 20 Victoria/Downtown
  6. 25 Brentwood Stn/UBC
  7. 16 29th Avenue Stn/Arbutus
  8. 9 Boundary/Commercial-Broadway/Granville/Alma/UBC
  9. R1 King George Blvd
  10. 19 Metrotown Stn/Stanley Park

The 2020 Transit Service Performance Review (TSPR) measures ridership, cost, reliability, on-time performance, and crowding across all transit modes. The findings are an important planning tool that help inform upcoming service change requirements and identify other opportunities to improve service for our customers.

This report also provides key information about how customers used the transit network in 2020. This information informed how we adjusted service throughout the year to respond to COVID-related changes in customer transit-use patterns.

Get more information, and read the full report online at https://www.translink.ca/tspr

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