Sometimes I'll hear people in Toronto talk pejoratively about all of the development that's been happening at Yonge & Eglinton (in midtown). They'll say it's too much density.

But then you come across charts like the ones above (source previously shared here) and you realize that this location is the only section along the new Eglinton Crosstown LRT line that is actually starting to have enough people.

Based on 2021 Census data, there were about 40k people within 800m of the future Eglinton and Mount Pleasant stations. In contrast, there are many downtown stations along the Ontario Line (also under construction) with around 80k people.

Why this is important is because if the objective is to get people to ride this new transit and collect a lot of fares, then the single most important factor is going to be the amount of people that live, work, and play adjacent to each station.

Now, I'm not a transportation planner, but in my mind there are three simple ways to think and go about optimizing for this:

1. You can look at where population densities are already high and then add new transit to service these densities. This is what is happening with the Ontario Line and it was long overdue. We know that ridership is going to be relatively high because of the chart at the top of this post.

2. You can look at where there's existing transit and then work to optimize the land uses around it. This is what we should be doing a better job of along the Bloor-Danforth line, where certain station areas have actually lost people over the last few decades. This is the opposite of what you want next to transit investments.

3. Lastly, you can also proactively plan new transit while simultaneously encouraging more density. An example of this would be the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (just north of Toronto). Extend the line and encourage growth. This is good. The only thing with this approach is that it can seem a bit misaligned if you're currently failing at #1 and #2.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ8ODREybcs?rel=0]

About 9 months ago I wrote about a new startup called Urban Engines that was trying to improve urban mobility by using big data to optimize transit usage. 

Last Tuesday the app launched in 10 cities across North America. So if you’re in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, or Washington D.C., you can go ahead and download it right now.

The biggest “wow factor” is probably the augmented reality feature that allows you to hold your phone up and see transit information overlaid on top of the street in front of you.

But more fundamentally, the real potential lies in the platform’s ability to collect data on the way people move in cities and on how transit lines are performing, so that it can be fed back to improve overall efficiency.

That’s why the company is also working with cities to give them 24/7 analytics and reporting on how every bus, car, and train is performing in their networks.

My hope is that with better data at our disposal, we’ll be able to elevate the discussions around transit and transit planning. Without great data, it’s too easy for these discussion to become political.