Every five years, the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area (of southern Ontario) conducts something called a Transportation Tomorrow Survey. And I am told that it is the most comprehensive travel survey conducted anywhere in the world. So let's look at some of the data. The last survey was completed in 2022 and a mapping of the data was prepared by the School of Cities at the University of Toronto.
Population density:
The key to making transit useful for people is not very complicated. It is highly dependent on population densities. In other words, it works best when it's proximate to as many people as possible. And so the more low density a city is, the harder it is for this to be true. It just isn't feasible to run that many lines. To that end, here's an interesting study by the School of Cities at the University of Toronto that compares rail transit and population density for 250 cities around the world.
This is what Toronto vs. Hong Kong looks like:
When we build next to transit, we often call this transit-oriented development.
What’s interesting about this moniker is that it implies we’re doing something a little special — something out of the ordinary. And I guess that makes sense because, in many cities, it is often out of the ordinary.
That’s why you don’t hear people at real estate conferences saying, “check out this new cutting edge car-oriented development that our firm is developing.” That doesn’t need to be specified.
But at the end of the day, I’m not sure how special transit-oriented development really is; it’s basically just urban development. Meaning, you put density on top of and next to transit stations and then more people take transit. That’s how this works.
On that note, here is an interesting study from the School of Cities that looked at Toronto’s transit network and how the populations around each station have changed (or not changed) between 1996 and 2021 (census data).
If you look at the various transit lines, you’ll see that, in some cases, like downtown, we have added a lot of new transit-oriented development. This is good. Populations increased.
But in many/most other cases, populations remained flat; or worse, they declined. This is a serious problem, and it shows how land use restrictions are forcing us to underutilize our existing transit assets.
