Why public transit in the suburbs isn’t always completely terrible

Canadians want more, and better, public transportation. A McGill University study published in 2024 found that 97 per cent of people in 10 cities agree that transit is an essential service. Yet the prevailing belief has always been that our suburbs just can’t support it.

That’s probably because we think of the two-thirds of Canadians who live in the suburbs as homeowners with driveways who rely on cars to get around, a trope that has cast a shadow over transit expansion projects in both Canada and the United States for several decades. As American-Canadian urbanist Jane Jacobs once said, “Low densities mean mass transit doesn’t make sense” in cities like Los Angeles and, others have since argued, Toronto.

It’s a perception that has led to a fatalistic attitude toward public transit in North America. But Canadians shouldn’t be so quick to lose hope. In fact, there are many examples under our noses of transit projects succeeding beyond expectations, in environments that by general consensus shouldn’t be suitable for transit at all.

In the Greater Toronto Area, the city of Brampton, Ont., is about as far from European transit utopias like Paris, Amsterdam or Zurich as you’re ever going to get, yet it’s managed to attract huge numbers of people to ride its buses just by running them more often.

As of 2024, on an average weekday, Brampton’s buses carry about 226,500 people. Compare that with Orange County, Calif. It’s a similar, fast-growing suburbia that in many parts is actually much more densely populated than Brampton. But even though it has more than four times as many residents, its bus network carries only about 113,000 riders a day. Pace, the agency serving the suburbs of Chicago’s 5.7 million residents, carries only about 60,000 riders daily.

What makes Brampton different is the frequency of its service. Its busy corridors generally run buses about every 10 minutes, with all-stop routes supplemented by Züm express buses. Even most secondary routes come at least every half-hour well into the evening.

The city figured out that the key to getting people to ride transit isn’t forcing them to check a schedule every time they want to ride. They need to be able to show up at the stop and know that a bus will be along in a few minutes. And because the buses in Brampton are frequent across the system, riders know they can feasibly transfer from one bus route to another. No one’s left waiting for an hour on a connection.

Twenty years ago, Brampton could have chased a shiny megaproject, which is the usual solution to getting people to notice transit. American cities like Minneapolis, Phoenix, St. Louis, Charlotte and Houston have multibillion-dollar LRT systems that move fewer people than a busy Toronto bus route. That’s in large part because their connecting routes are often still running once an hour or less, so the LRTs function as isolated corridors that aren’t truly embedded in a real transit network.

Brampton decided to put the horse before the cart. It upgraded basic local service across the city to build the ridership for future rail upgrades. Ridership grew 288 per cent between 2004 and 2018 and the improvements cost millions, not billions, since more riders meant more fares. On one route, improving Sunday service by 54 per cent to a consistent schedule where a bus came every 30 minutes produced a 177-per-cent jump in ridership, according to Brampton Transit data. On Saturdays, when the service didn’t change, ridership rose only 18 per cent. This shows that the ridership gain wasn’t from some new development or other change on the route – it was just that people were willing to also ride on Sundays once the service became consistent and predictable.

Brampton is now seeing the construction of its first light rail line connecting to nearby Mississauga, Ont., as well as plans for further expansion. And it isn’t alone. Vancouver has improved transit throughout its suburbs with both SkyTrain extensions and better bus service, which has made it the big-city transit success story of North America over the past several decades. From 1997 to 2017, its ridership per capita grew by 45 per cent. 

Toronto’s suburban roads, which pass through neighbourhoods of million-dollar, single-family homes, have buses running, at minimum, every 10 minutes – and they’re full. The Finch East route runs through Toronto’s affluent suburb of North York, with express and local bus service arriving every five minutes at each stop during the daytime, and about every eight minutes in the evenings. It carries more riders than any bus route in New York City.

Even small, affluent cities like Burlington, Ont., have shown that investments in bus service can attract new riders. After meaningful service improvements, though still fairly limited by urban standards, Burlington achieved ridership in 2024 that was 49 per cent higher than in 2019, at a time when many cities were experiencing post-pandemic stagnation. That’s an especially significant achievement, considering Burlington is 60 kilometres from Toronto.

Brampton’s ridership is also an achievement, but one that could be at risk in the coming years if the city decides to follow through with planned cuts to its transit services, citing falling usage numbers in the wake of international-student enrolment losses. Its recent success should serve as a reminder that better and more frequent service is the best path forward.

We don’t have to wait for our suburbs to be rebuilt into Paris or Zurich before we can get people to ride the bus. We also don’t have to emulate American cities, where the bus is a last resort for people with no other option. The ridership numbers in suburban Ontario show that even people with cars will leave them in the driveway if transit is made to work hard enough.