National Transit Statistics

[UrbanWaterloo]

National Transit Statistics
www.statcan.gc.ca

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[UrbanWaterloo]

Large urban transit April 2010 (Preliminary)
June 22, 2010 | http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/100622/dq100622b-eng.htm

Total operating revenue (excluding subsidies) for 10 of Canada's largest urban transit properties rose 9.1% from April 2009 to $222.8 million in April.

These 10 companies represent about 80% of total urban transit across the country.

Ridership levels rose to 122.4 million passenger trips in April, a 2.5% increase from the same month a year earlier.

[UrbanWaterloo]

Public transit in Canada, 2007
A. Munro, Environment Accounts and Statistics Division
June 29, 2010 | http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/article/11283-eng.htm
Summary Article: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/100629/dq100629d-eng.htm
PDF: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/16-002-x2010002-eng.pdf


What you should know about this study
This study is based on data from the 2007 Households and the Environment Survey (HES), conducted as part of the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators project. Respondents were asked whether the household had nearby access to a public transit system during the work week, defined as access within five minutes of their home either by foot or by car.
Households with access were asked whether anyone in the household used public transit as a main mode of travel to work or regularly outside of work. Regular use of public transit for non-work travel was described as using public transit 1 to 3 times a week or more over the previous 12 months. Households that did not use public transit were asked to indicate the reasons that had prevented them from doing so.
Also used in this study is 1996 and 2006 Census of Population information on the main mode of transportation to work. This question on the census refers to persons 15 years of age or older that worked outside of their homes and refers to the main means a person used to travel between his or her home and his or her place of work. As it refers to individuals rather than households, no direct comparison can be made between these data and the 2007 HES data.

When Canadians need to go somewhere, they have many transportation choices: they can use private vehicles, bicycles, buses, trains or any combination of modes. This study looks at access to and use of public transit in 2007, using data from the Households and the Environment Survey.

The percentage of Canadians using public transit for the commute to work has increased slightly since the mid-nineties.1 Data from the Households and the Environment Survey (HES) show that many households used public transit for non-work travel as well: close to half of households that regularly used public transit in 2007 used it only for non-work purposes.

Households in areas with wide transit availability were more likely to have used public transit regularly and more likely to have used it to travel to work. Household characteristics were also related to transit use: the households that were most likely to have used transit regularly were those without a vehicle, those that contained teenagers, and those in the lowest income category.

When households were asked why they did not use transit regularly, by far the most common response was that they had not used it because they had access to a car. Households were least likely to say that they had not used public transit regularly because it was too expensive.

Who had access to nearby public transit?

In 2007, 68% of Canadian households reported having access to public transit within five minutes of their home (Table 1). Access to public transit was one of the key factors that determined whether a household had used public transit regularly.

Table 1 Availability and use of nearby public transit by province (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/tbl/11283/tbl001-eng.htm)

Households were more than twice as likely to have reported having nearby public transit when they lived in a metropolitan area: 85% of households living in a census metropolitan area (CMA) had access to nearby public transit compared to only 32% of non-CMA households. Those in CMAs were also more likely to have regularly used nearby public transit when they had it: 44% of CMA households did so versus 23% of non-CMA households.

How did households use public transit?

Much of the available information on public transit refers to the use of public transit for the journey to and from work. Since 1996, journey-to-work data from the Census of Population show a slight increase in the proportion of commuters using public transit as their main mode of travel to work; between 1996 and 2006, the percentage of commuters using this method rose from 10% to 11%.

Data from the HES show a similar increase: in 2007, 15% of households used public transit regularly as one of their main modes of transportation to work, up only slightly from 14% in 1994 (Table 1).

Examining the use of transit for non-work purposes adds context, as does looking only at households with access to nearby public transit. When work and non-work travel is combined, results show that 41% of households with access used public transit regularly in 2007 (Table 1). Travel to work did not dominate the use of public transit on a household level: close to half of households using public transit regularly in 2007 were using it for non-work travel only (Table 1). Overall, 84% of households using public transit were using it for regular non-work travel, with 53% using it for regular travel to and from work.

There was significant overlap between the categories: a household using public transit for one purpose was almost twice as likely on average to also use it for the other purpose. For example, 68% of households that used public transit regularly to travel to work also used it regularly for non-work travel.

Availability of transit

At the CMA level, the availability of public transit was approximated by looking at the percentage of households in each CMA reporting nearby public transit. With this measure, the likelihood that a household had used public transit regularly tended to be higher in areas where public transit was more widely available (Table 2).

Table 2 Availability and use of nearby public transit for selected census metropolitan areas, 2007 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/tbl/11283/tbl002-eng.htm)

One example is Toronto, where nearby public transit was available to 90% of households and 59% of those households used public transit regularly. Another example is the CMA of Québec, where 79% of households had access but only 31% used public transit regularly.

The purposes for which households used transit also varied with the availability of transit. In CMAs where access was limited, most households that used transit used it only for non-work travel. As the availability of transit increased, so did the percentage of households that used transit for the journey to work (Chart 1). This could also be related to the size of the transit network: small networks might be more compatible with non-work travel than with the regimented journey to work.

Chart 1 Public transit usage and access to public transit, 2007 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/article/11283/c-g/c-g001-eng.htm)
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/article/11283/c-g/c-g1-eng.gif

Who was most likely to use public transit?

Some household characteristics—the availability of a household vehicle, household composition, and household income—were connected to the likelihood that a household would use public transit. These characteristics were also related to the purpose for which public transit was used.

The presence of a vehicle owned or leased by the household was key: households without a vehicle were almost twice as likely to have used public transit regularly. When households with a vehicle did use public transit, they were three times as likely as those without to have used transit regularly only for travel to work (Table 3).

Table 3 Use of public transit by selected household characteristics, 2007 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/tbl/11283/tbl003-eng.htm)

Household composition also showed a relationship with public transit use. Households with teenagers were more likely to have made use of public transit. Households in these categories were also generally more likely than adult-only households to have used transit regularly solely for non-work travel.

Household income had a less direct relationship with public transit usage. In general, households in the lowest income category were more likely to have used public transit and also more likely to have used it only for non-work travel. Households in higher income categories were more likely than those in lower income categories to use public transit only to travel to work.

What kept households from using public transit?

In the 2007 HES, for the first time, households that did not use public transit were asked to identify some of the reasons that had prevented them from doing so. Households were most likely to report that they had not used public transit because they had access to a car: almost three-quarters of households gave this as their reason (Table 4).

Table 4 Barriers to public transit use by province, 2007 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/tbl/11283/tbl004-eng.htm)

Although having access to a car was by far the most common answer, about one quarter of households also indicated one of four other reasons for not using public transit: inconvenient scheduling (27%), living too close to their destinations to need transit (23%), transit being too slow (21%), and the service being too infrequent (21%) (Table 4 and Chart 2). Comparatively few households (4%) indicated that the cost of public transit had been a barrier.

Chart 2 Barriers to public transit use, 2007 (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/article/11283/c-g/c-g002-eng.htm)
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/16-002-x/2010002/article/11283/c-g/c-g2-eng.gif

Even households without a vehicle did not always use public transit regularly: households without a vehicle made up 8% of all households not using transit. These households were most likely to have said that they did not use public transit regularly because they lived too close to their travel destinations to need it (Table 4 and Chart 2). However, 28% of households without a vehicle still reported that they did not use public transit regularly because they had access to a car.

In all areas, having access to a car was the most common reason given for not using public transit. More variation existed with respect to other barriers: for example, households in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were more likely than those in any other province to say that public transit was too slow. Likewise, 44% of non-transit-using households in P.E.I. said that they did not use public transit because the schedule was inconvenient, compared to only 27% of households nationally.

Summary

In 2007, 68% of Canadian households reported that they lived within five minutes of public transit, and 41% of those households used it regularly. Of those households, almost half used it regularly only for non-work travel while the rest used it regularly for work travel or for both purposes.

Households were more likely to have used public transit in areas where transit was more widely available, and also more likely under those circumstances to have used it regularly for the journey to work. Households that did not own or lease a vehicle, households with teenagers, and households in the lowest income category were all more likely to have used public transit. In general, when other types of households had used public transit regularly, they were more likely to have used it only for work travel.

Most households not using public transit said that having access to a car prevented them from using public transit regularly. Those that did not own or lease a vehicle were most likely to say that they lived too close to need public transit, although more than a quarter still reported that they did not use it because they had access to a car. Households were least likely to say that the expense of public transit kept them from using public transit regularly.

[UrbanWaterloo]

Large Urban Transit: July 2010 (Preliminary)
September 23, 2010 | http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/100923/dq100923c-eng.htm

Total operating revenue (excluding subsidies) for 10 of Canada's largest urban transit properties rose 8.2% from July 2009 to $212.1 million in July.

These 10 companies represent about 80% of total urban transit across the country.

Ridership levels rose to 112.0 million passenger trips in July, a 3.4% increase from the same month a year earlier.

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Cut My Commute! (http://www.fcm.ca/election2011/cutmycommute.asp)

Tired of wasting your valuable time in those increasingly long morning and evening commutes? Concerned about the rising price of fuel? Eager to reduce your daily carbon footprint? Angry about your lack of quality transportation options? The Federation of Canadian Municipalities wants you to tell the leaders of Canada's federal political parties "Cut My Commute! (http://www.fcm.ca/election2011/cutmycommute.asp)" Find out how much time and money you've spent on commuting since the election was called, and join the movement to have this pressing issues entered into our national debate.