Metro Vancouver transit ridership soars past Toronto and Hamilton
Metro Vancouver transit ridership soars past Toronto and Hamilton
If you could award medals for transit ridership like the Olympics, Metro Vancouver just snagged a silver medal.
Metro Vancouver, or Greater Vancouver, has surged past the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area in per capita transit ridership. Not only that but we’re also closing in Greater Montreal, which currently is the highest in the country.
That’s according to the latest data in TransLink’s Transit Service Performance Review, which is like a report card on transit ridership. It tracks patterns and trends of how and where people are using transit across the network.
It underscores how more people in Metro Vancouver are choosing to take transit as their first choice.
Per capita ridership is a way of measuring how many trips are taken on average by each person in a region.
Put another way, for every ride taken by someone in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, someone in Metro Vancouver is taking more.
While other regions may exceed us in total numbers, we punch well above our weight. This is no small feat for our metropolitan area, which has 60 per cent of the population of Greater Montreal and only 36 per cent of the population of the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.
In Vancouver’s metropolitan area, TransLink is the sole agency responsible for delivering transit service, while in the Montreal and Toronto/Hamilton metropolitan areas, they are the responsibility of multiple transit agencies.
In Toronto, it includes the Toronto Transit Commission, GO Transit, York Region Transit, MiWay, Durham Region Transit, Brampton Transit, and Burlington Transit. While in Montreal, it includes Société de transport de Montréal, Société de transport de Laval, Réseau de transport de Longueuil, and EXO.
Zooming out, we recorded the third-highest bus ridership across all Canadian and American transit agencies despite a smaller population than most agencies.
Our bus ridership exceeds that of the transit agencies in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, and San Francisco.
As Metro Vancouver continues to grow, we remain steadfast in delivering the very best for the region — whether you ride transit, drive, cycle or walk.
Starting this September, as part of the 2025 Investment Plan, we’re expanding service to help alleviate overcrowding and provide improved access to previously under-served areas.
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