Lest you think that this growth is being heavily subsidized by the city, Brampton Transit now has a farebox recovery of over 50%, putting its ratio well above that of metropolitan core cities in the American West and Sunbelt, cities which have a similar development pattern. You don’t have to have a tight grid system like the old cities of New York City, Boston, Washington, Toronto, and Chicago, where the cores were laid out before the mass adoption of the automobile. Even a grid based on large blocks like one sees in Sunbelt cities like Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Atlanta, Tampa, and Phoenix, can experience what Brampton has achieved with its adaptations to the way it operated.

For Brampton, switching to a grid for major routes was a big start to improving farebox recovery, because it represented money being shifted from coverage to frequency. Because these routes were now more frequent, they became actually useful, and so people started taking them more. As this occurred, the city rewarded the routes that experienced growth with more funding. Because the portion of the budget that went to routes that had a higher farebox recovery increased, overall the system lost less and less money as a proportion. This became a positive feedback loop: more investment begat more ridership, and more ridership begat more funding.

In 2017, the budget finished with 54% of operating costs coming from fares, and another 5% from other sources such as advertising, for a total of 59% of operating costs coming from revenue, and total city subsidy rate of 41%. That increase was due to higher than expected ridership growth. And when it came time for increases, 80% of the city-allocated budget increase came from expected fare revenues. At this point, ridership growth is being constrained by operating hour increases.

What was the ‘higher than expected ridership growth’? 2017 saw an 18% ridership increase; the previous year was 9%. For the 2018 budget year, the city projected for an 8% increase, and nine months into the current year, Brampton Transit is already seeing increases well within the 15-20% range.

Where is Brampton’s ridership coming from? Brampton Transit may be reaching a tipping point where more and more people who used to drive are now opting to park their cars and taking transit.

Brampton has now hit the point where it is attracting the mythical “choice rider”: people who very much have the choice to drive a car or take transit, and opt to take transit. It really goes to show that you don’t have to spend massive amounts on rail transit with fancy stations to attract middle-class riders to transit. Charlotte, North Carolina’s Lynx Blue Line cost more to build than Brampton’s Queen, Main, and Steeles Züm lines combined, yet the former carries 16,900 passengers per day, while those three lines in Brampton carry 48,000 passengers each day, a factor of 2.8x (ridership data for both is from the 4th quarter of 2017). The smaller capacity of buses actually becomes an advantage, as you don’t need to add a massive amount of capacity to increase the frequency by one vehicle per hour. The more fine-grained capacity addition of buses greatly lends itself to incremental improvement across many lines in any city.

Take-Home Points

The lessons to take from Brampton are:

Grids are highly efficient for transit systems (even if they are super-grids like in Brampton, or U.S. sunbelt cities like Phoenix)

Frequency is more important than coverage for ridership, and you don’t have to spend a fortune to build out a good transit system.

Redistribute your resources to form a grid of higher frequency routes. Then as ridership goes up, start prioritizing routes for more resources according to ridership.

Keep fares paced with inflation, and just keep incrementally improving the system. If some chunks of the route experience much higher demand, feel free to use buses that only run that segment, so you can deliver more service to busier areas.

Putting in limited-stop buses on busier routes is great. They cost very little to implement, yet for people who take longer stretches it can offer substantial time savings when instead of stopping every couple hundred feet, the bus stops every quarter mile or less. Brampton Transit favours 750m to 1500m stop spacing (a little under a half mile to a mile). People are willing to walk further to get on a faster bus route. Traffic signal priority when buses are late (allowing the bus driver to trigger a green light as he/she approaches) can also help put buses back on schedule and improve reliability; people hate it when the bus is late and they miss their connection.

The funny thing is, to most transit planners, very little of this is likely new. The core reasons most transit systems in the US and Canada struggle are a lack of political will and a lack of funding. People don’t like change, and politicians don’t like major change-ups, because they will have constituents complaining about their route going away—especially older people who vote in disproportionate numbers. Politicians also favour rail over buses because the former is seen as politically attractive, with fancy ribbon cuttings.

A good path forward is to separate transit from being entrenched heavily in the city administration. Push for more autonomy for transit agencies, where the City actually gives them enough funding to do their job, and grants them the flexibility to decide how best to use the allocated money. This could be the tipping point that sees more and more bus-based systems being adopted in an already car-centric society.

Buses may be stodgy, and rail seems to have pizzazz, but for most North American cities, the bus is the backbone of the transit system.

(Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons)