This Toronto Suburb Has More Bus Riders Than Columbus, Ohio

When you think of high public transit ridership, suburbs don’t often come to mind. But Brampton, Ontario — a suburb of Toronto — turns this on its head. The town, with a population of 700,000, sees roughly 226,500 bus riders on an average weekday.

As Jonathan English explains in Bloomberg CityLab, Brampton proves 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.”

The industrial city is laid out like many North American suburbs, with sprawling warehouses, wide multilane roads, and little pedestrian infrastructure to make walking appealing. So what makes transit more appealing here? “Quite simply, Brampton provides service that is good enough to make getting around by transit reasonable for people who have other transportation options — a group that transit agencies often dub ‘choice riders’ — as well as for people with no other choice.”

Brampton’s bus routes run as often as every five minutes and offer some night service, making the system much more practical for residents. “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.”

The system improved service gradually, leading to a steady growth in ridership that helped offset the costs of additional service. According to English, Brampton Transit demonstrates a version of ‘induced demand’ for transit: “If you provide a more attractive service, more people will use it.”