Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Final Report Submitted to Canadian Urban Transit Association (CUTA) Prepared by: Eric J. Miller, Ph.D. Amer Shalaby, Ph.D., P.Eng. Ehab Diab, Ph.D. Dena Kasraian, Ph.D. Prepared for distribution by CUTA October 2018 Table of Contents Part I: Report introduction………………………………………..……..………….……...……...1 Part II: Literature review ….…………………………………………..……..….……..…...…......4 Part III: Survey of Canadian ridership prediction practice ……………….………..……..…........25 Part IV: Data overview and ridership trends ……………...…....…………....……...………........49 Part V: Modelling ridership trends ..……………………………….………………….……..…...66 Part VI: Analytical tool for policy analysis ……………………..……………………….……….91 References and Appendices……………………………………………………….……...….…...95 Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page ii – CUTA Final report /10.2018 List of Appendices Appendix A: Review of the academic literature ………………………………………...….…101 Appendix B: Review of transport authorities and research centres reports …...…………........112 Appendix C: Survey of Canadian ridership prediction practice ……………………………....119 Appendix D: Description of variables tested for inclusion in the final model ……...………...134 Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page iii – CUTA Final report /10.2018 Part I Report Introduction Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page 1 – CUTA Final report /10.2018 1. Project overview Recently, there have been growing concerns about the negative impacts of rising automobile use and road congestion on personal mobility, safety, air quality and climate change. To address these issues, special attention has been given to improving and expanding transit services to attract new riders in pursuit of environmental and societal goals. This special emphasis on public transit has been reflected in many cases by additional capital investments in public transit systems across Canada. Despite these efforts, transit ridership across Canada has been slowing down and declining over the past few years. For example, ridership statistics in 2015 showed levelling-off and declining trends in ridership in many Canadian cities including Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver (Curry, 2017). Similar trends have been observed in many cities across the US. This highlights the need of a better understanding of the underlying factors affecting transit usage in each region. Understanding, measuring, and modelling the factors affecting transit ridership has traditionally been done by analyzing transit level of service factors in addition to socioeconomic and land use factors. Emerging evidence from New York and other regions1, however, suggests a strong impact of emerging new technologies and transport alternatives (e.g., Uber-like services and bike-sharing systems) on the use of public transit. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to provide a comprehensive and clear understanding of the reasons behind changes in ridership, while acknowledging the likely contribution of different emerging factors. The “Canadian Ridership Trends Research” project intends to perform this task and offers policy-relevant recommendations for improving transit service ridership across Canada. This document presents the final report for the “Canadian Ridership Trends Research” project. The project’s overarching objective is “to conduct an in-depth study on current and future conventional ridership trends through research and consultation with transit systems” which is “to provide an understanding of the correlation between causal factors and ridership in Canada and provide explanation(s) of ridership decline at a transit system, Census Service Area (CSA), and national level.” This report brings together the deliverables for the Canadian Ridership Trends Research project organized into five parts. Part II provides a comprehensive literature review of recent ridership prediction models and the factors affecting ridership at the aggregate level. The reviewed literature consists of both the academic literature (28 papers) and reports from transport authorities and research centres (14 documents) since 2000. The reviewed literature covers different levels of spatial aggregation (i.e., within-city or city level and multi-city studies) and temporal scope (including cross- sectional and longitudinal studies). This part provides an overview of the applied methods of ridership prediction. Furthermore, it synthesizes the findings of the literature on the significance 1 Fitzsimmons, E. (2017), Subway Ridership Declines in New York. Is Uber to Blame? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/nyregion/new-york-city-subway-ridership.html Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page 2 – CUTA Final report /10.2018 of various transit ridership factors including the built environment, socioeconomic, transit service and other external and contextual variables. Part III presents the results of a survey of transit agencies regarding their ridership prediction practices. This survey was carried out in February and March of 2018 to understand the current state of ridership prediction practice and the key factors affecting ridership. Thirty-six CUTA (Canadian Urban Transit Association) member agencies completed the web survey, which amounted to a 35% response rate. This part summarizes the acquired information on ridership prediction methodologies used in the industry, ridership data sources and quality, the level of satisfaction with data and methods (both qualitative and quantitative) and suggestions for improvements. Part IV outlines the preparatory steps taken to describe and analyze the nationwide trends in ridership, its influential factors, and their relation over time. It starts with an overview of the various collected longitudinal datasets of ridership as well as the influential internal and external factors. Then, it demonstrates the trends in annual transit ridership measured in millions of linked trips from 1991 to 2016 at various levels. Finally, it presents the findings of several exploratory analyses in terms of the relationship between ridership and influential indicators nationwide. Part V provides an empirical investigation of variables explaining variations in transit ridership among transit systems and over time, using data from CUTA member agencies and a comprehensive set of indicators related to a) built environment attributes, b) socioeconomic factors, c) transit service factors and d) other external/contextual factors. The goal is to improve our understanding of the association of these various factors with past ridership trends, which should consequently improve our ability to forecast future trends. This part starts with the methodology used in the analysis, provides summary statistics of a number of key factors related to ridership trends and it investigates several case studies. It presents the results and interpretations of the implemented models before ending with some concluding remarks and policy implications. Part VI presents a description of three policy analytical tools that have been developed in MS- Excel to estimate and predict ridership as a function of various influencing factors. The tools are based on the models of the study. The main objective is to provide an understanding of the relative impact of each factor on ridership at the transit agency level as well as the national level, while keeping all other variables constant at their mean values. Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page 3 – CUTA Final report /10.2018 Part II Literature Review Canadian Transit Ridership Trends Study Page 4 – CUTA Final report /10.2018 Table of Contents 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 6 2. Literature review methodology ............................................................................................... 6 2.1 Review of the academic literature .................................................................................... 6 2.2 Transport authorities and research centres reports ........................................................... 8 3. Rreview of the literature .......................................................................................................... 8 3.1 Academic literature .......................................................................................................... 9 A. Within-city studies vs. city level and multi-city studies ............................................... 9 B. Research methodology ............................................................................................... 11 3.2 Reports of transport authorities and research centres ..................................................... 13 4. Transit ridership factors ......................................................................................................... 14 4.1 Built environment factors ............................................................................................... 15 4.2 Socioeconomic factors ................................................................................................... 16 4.3 Transit service factors .................................................................................................... 17 4.4 Other external/contextual factors ................................................................................... 19 4.5 Comparison between internal and external factors ........................................................ 21 5. Literature