Transit ridership is booming in suburban Brampton, Ontario. Here’s how the city got residents to get on the bus
by JONATHAN ENGLISH
IT IS taken as a truism in the world of urban planning that successful transit requires what is known as “transit-supportive development” — a high-density combination of concentrated destinations and walkable streets. But what if I told you that some of the highest transit usage in North America can be found in a place with none of those things? It’s a Canadian city full of suburban cul-de-sacs, Big Box retail complexes and wide arterial roads.
To be clear, none of these things are good for transit ridership. All of them do indeed make transit less appealing and less pleasant to use. What this place shows, though, is that even in a place without any of the supposed prerequisites, you can still get tens of thousands of people to choose to ride the bus. We don’t have to wait until all our suburbs are rebuilt to become European-style walkable utopias; it’s possible to get people out of their cars in a matter of months simply by running buses more frequently.
Not Cultural Difference
Brampton, Ontario, is a large industrial suburb of Toronto, indistinguishable from many across North America. Six-lane-wide arterial roads lined with strip malls course through residential developments full of detached single-family homes with garages. The city is also home to many factories and distribution centres — massive warehouses with blank walls surrounded by parking lots. Yet, with a population of about 700,000, Brampton has 226,500 bus riders on an average weekday.
Compare that to Orange County, California, with 3.2 million people and 112,000 daily bus riders. Orange County has a similar suburban built form, and its population density in core areas like Santa Ana is higher than that of Brampton. Comparison with other areas is just as stark: Columbus, Ohio, with about 900,000 residents, has only 34,100 bus riders per day; the Pace bus network, serving 5.7 million residents of suburban Chicago, averages 56,900 riders per day.
What explains the enormous divergence? It doesn’t have anything to do with any US-Canadian cultural differences — Bramptonians used to be as reluctant to ride transit as American suburbanites. Quite simply, Brampton provides service that is good enough to make getting around by transit reasonable for people who have other transport options — a group that transit agencies often dub “choice riders” — as well as for people with no other choice.
In Orange County, like many suburbs, buses typically run once per hour and rarely more than every half hour. The last trips of the night are often too early to be usable by someone working closing shift at the mall, let alone someone coming home from the bar. Weekend service is even more limited. In Brampton, by contrast, core bus routes run as frequently as every five minutes, with express and local service, while even secondary routes typically run at least every half hour well into the late evening.
This makes an enormous difference. In many places, you don’t need to even bother checking a schedule before beginning your trip. High frequency also makes transfers feasible, meaning that people can make anywhere-to-anywhere journeys rather than being constrained to going to wherever their local bus happens to go. Nobody wants to be stuck for a half hour or an hour at a desolate suburban bus stop waiting for a transfer.
Gradual Cost
Brampton wasn’t always a transit success story. Twenty years ago, it was a fairly typical suburban city,
with infrequent buses, low ridership and a growing traffic congestion problem as its population swelled.
The municipal government considered a pricey light rail plan, but the then-head of local agency Brampton Transit, Sue Connor, had a cheaper idea: Upgrade the existing bus service to a high-frequency network, so people could count on all-day service throughout the city, including separately branded core routes with upgraded buses and shelters. Once the buses were busy, later, the city might upgrade further to bus rapid transit service.
The upshot was 288% ridership growth from 2004 to 2018.
It helped that the cost of these improvements was gradual and in the millions of dollars, rather than the billions that big capital projects like a light rail system demand. Steady increases in ridership (and therefore revenue) meant that Brampton Transit’s level of public subsidy did not rise significantly despite the massive increase in service. The percentage subsidy basically remained unchanged at about 50% — considerably lower than many agencies.
Drilling down into the data, the effect of service improvement is even clearer. On one route, a 54% increase in service on Sunday (a shift to a consistent half-hourly schedule) brought a 177% increase in ridership. On Saturdays, where there was no change in service, ridership rose only 18%, demonstrating that the increased ridership was not primarily by neighbourhood change.
Induced Demand
The Brampton case clearly shows that there is no such thing as tailoring service to demand — demand is not fixed. The phenomenon of induced demand is as real for transit as it is for highways: If you provide a more attractive service, more people will use it. If you cut service, riders will disappear.
Rather than pursuing expensive capital projects right away, Brampton built ridership incrementally through improving the basic local bus network. Today, the city’s about to break ground on a big light rail extension, but unlike many such projects, the bus route it will replace is already carrying more people than many long-running light rail lines. The strong local bus network that had been put in place over the last several decades will feed even more train riders.
How was a coalition created to support transit? One important factor has been the strong support of the city’s many industrial employers, whose workers rely on transit to get to jobs. Good off-peak service is especially important since distribution centres do not operate on a nine-to-five basis.
“The Brampton business community is completely supportive of improved transit,” said the Brampton Board of Trade CEO Jaipaul Massey-Singh. “It’s essential for businesses to be able to get workers to their workplaces without adding to congestion on the crowded streets.”
This comes as no surprise when you see dozens of people lined up at remote bus stops in front of warehouses. Some Amazon fulfilment centres caused so much bus crowding that it provoked anxieties during the Covid pandemic. In many suburbs, these kinds of industrial areas often see little or no transit service at all, so unsurprisingly there are few riders.
What lessons can be drawn from Brampton’s example? Firstly, buses can draw riders even in places that don’t look like traditional prewar transit-friendly neighbourhoods, as long as service is frequent.
Secondly, it’s important to recognise that many, if not most, potential transit riders are not commuting to a nine-to-five job, so transit needs to be usable all day, every day. Thirdly, it’s as much a victory to get a household to decide they don’t need a second or third car because taking the bus is a viable option than it is to get a household to go completely car-free.
Finally, any city contemplating big capital projects like a light rail or subway system should consider decent local bus service — running everywhere, frequently, all day, every day — an essential prerequisite. — Bloomberg
- This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition
The post The Canadian suburb that mastered mass transit appeared first on The Malaysian Reserve.
