April 19, 2024

The number of trips and its corresponding revenue for public transit operators is creeping back up.

What is not reported here is that while the work from home and reduced ridership in public transit hit revenues, it also significantly delayed the need for adding capacity. For most transit services (and the cities that fund them) this results in a large long-term savings.

The growth in transit use is the growth in employment numbers and the growth in population. Both of those would have continued higher had there been no pandemic resulting in significant strains on our underfunded public transit systems.

Massive investments in public transit are being delayed or done poorly (through the use of P3s) resulting in increased costs of transit builds. The only thing that has stabilized this is the number of workers not using transit every day and working from home.

The fact that the revenue is higher than the number of rides shows how transit is ever increasingly funded by riders.

Instead of using that delayed strain to our advantage and getting ahead of the needed growth by actually building transit, we have simply delayed the funding.

We have a public transportation funding problem in Canada. The government is keen on not spending money because of its (mostly irrelevant, but talked about constantly) debt to GDP ratio. We are doing damage to our economy when we delay building capacity for expanded use of public transportation infrastructure builds, delay means increased threat of mothballing our current production facilities, leading to the loss of these jobs.

The alternative is obvious. A national industrial strategy is necessary for building trains and buses here in Canada that meet the obvious future needs of increased low-carbon public transportation options.

Passenger volumes recovered over 84% of the February 2019 level, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

In February, transit agency operating revenue (excluding subsidies) totalled $306.2 million—an increase of 16.7%, or $43.9 million, from February 2023. However, it was still $28.5 million below the pre-pandemic level in February 2019.

Back to pre-pandemic levels of oil and gas being shipped along pipelines.