Toronto ranks 1st for longest distances travelled on public transit in North America: report

Getting to and from work by public transit in Toronto is an hours-long affair for many. A new report confirms that GTA commuters spend more time and travel further distances on trains, buses and streetcars than most other North American cities.

The report, conducted by Moovit, analyzed 99 cities across 25 countries.

The findings show that the average distance traversed on GTA transit systems is 12.29 kilometres per trip, putting Toronto in the top spot for farthest distance travelled with public transit in North America.

The average commute time in the GTA is 56 minutes one-way, which comes in third to Washington D.C. at 57 minutes and New York City at 58 minutes.

“We have over 1.5 billion users who use the app on a regular basis when they plan a journey in Moovit from point A to point B,” explained Moovit’s chief growth and marketing officer Yavov Meydad. “We get billions of data points that, at the end of the year, we can analyze and understand patterns in specific cities. So we don’t look at individuals and how they travel, but on an aggregate level, all the trip plans that are performed.”

Transit expert Dr. Murtaza Haider says the numbers provide a quick snapshot of averages, but they must be taken in context.

“These kind of numbers tell us that yes, it takes much longer to travel by public transit. That is true. But at the same time, Toronto City or Toronto Region is not worse off than others,” he said.

“The presence of satellite towns, which is places like Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa, Oakville, Barrie, … that have an employment linkage with the main City of Toronto results in longer than usual commutes both in distance and duration. And that is a reason when you see that the average travel times are higher in Toronto, they are higher because of those commuters who are coming from those satellite towns using multiple transit modes” like MiWay, GO Transit and the TTC.

On the upside, the total wait time per commute in Toronto is 12 minutes, among the shortest in North America, with Vancouver (11 minutes) and Montreal (10 minutes) rounding out the top three. The longest wait times are in Miami, at 21 minutes.

“Typically when the wait times are short, it means that buses or trains or the underground are running in high frequency, so passengers don’t have to wait for a long period of time for the next bus to arrive,” said Meydad.

The report also suggests that globally, ridership on public transit has been inching back toward pre-pandemic levels, but commuters are experiencing less efficient commutes.

TTC spokesperson Stuart Green says that’s not the case locally, within the area they serve.

“Right now our ridership on a weekly basis is around 70 per cent  — it’s about 68 per cent during the week and about 80 per cent on weekends,” he says.

“In terms of our service levels, we match capacity to demand, and right now we’re delivering about 95 per cent of the service we were delivering pre-pandemic for about 75 per cent of the ridership. So right now we’re actually delivering a fairly good level of service in terms of the number of vehicles we have on the road.”

Metrolinx is reporting similar trends across their system, with GO Transit ridership reaching 59.2 per cent recovery and UP Express reaching 64.7 per cent in September, compared to pre-pandemic levels. Weekend ridership on GO recovered by 93.6 per cent.

GO Bus service levels are back to 100% with train services also close to that figure.

“The more people return to public transit, and I hope that they will, the more improvement we’ll see in terms of frequency, in terms of reduced travel time, in terms of more choices,” said Haider.

The authors of the Moovit report hope making their data freely available worldwide will help with those improvements and remove barriers to the adoption of public transit by commuters.

“It can give the policy makers a lot of insights about the things that would make people say goodbye to using private cars and shift their mobility habits to using public transportation. And if that happens, cities will become better places to live, less congested, less polluted and overall, better quality of life will be offered,” said Meydad.

Haider adds that in order for people to choose public transit over personal vehicles, transit needs to provide incentives in terms of both time and money.

“As long as travel times by public transit are twice as long as they are by car, which is the case in most areas, then it is quite likely that people will continue to choose cars. And then if the schedules are not aligned for different transit systems, then it may add two to five to 10 more minutes of wait times,” he said.

“So what we need now going forward in the Greater Toronto Area, is to have an integrated transit planning system where schedules are aligned. We have to provide people with competitive travel times and times competitive, not with other transit systems, but times competitive with cars.”

He adds that another way to encourage people to use transit would be a single, regional fare, that takes people door-to-door across various transit providers and city lines.

“People don’t think in terms of, ‘I’m going to deal with Peel transit first, then I’m going to go and deal with the government of Ontario, GO Transit, then I’m going to land in Toronto, and then I’m going to use Toronto Transit to Commission, which is governed by the city of Toronto,'” he said.

“As a commuter, we’re making one trip and let’s make this one trip a single trip for individuals from a logistic point of view, from a fare point of view, from a planning point of view.”