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:

Percentage of trips by walking:

Percentage of trips by bicycle:

Percentage of trips by public transit:

Percentage of trips by car:

Percentage of residents with a driver's license:

Percentage of households without a car:

Average trips by distance:

Once again, these maps remind us that the starkest contrast is between active and non-active forms of mobility. In other words, we have a central core where many, and sometimes most people (>50%) walk to where they need to go, and then there's absolutely everywhere else in the region where most people drive (>50%) and, in some cases, where people drive almost exclusively (>90%). Public transit ridership is more dispersed, but it's really only dominant in Toronto, and not in any of the suburbs.

Perhaps the only reasonably uniform finding is that average trip distances tend to be relatively short (<10 km) no matter where you live.

Maps from the School of Cities at the University of Toronto; cover photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash

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:

I chose Hong Kong because, according to this dataset, it has the highest percentage of people living within 1 km of a major rail transit station at 75.8%. Toronto, on the other hand, sits at 20%, which is frankly not very good (though I don't see our slow-moving streetcars on the above map). It's also why our bus network has to do so much heavy lifting to get people to rail. This places us 8th in the US and Canada (see below). Once again, when it comes to transit in this part of the world, there's New York, and then everyone else:

But add in the rest of the world -- most notably Europe and East Asia -- and New York drops down to 17th position:

This, to me, is a critically important metric. For what share of residents is rail transit close and convenient? In cities like Hong Kong, Paris, and Stockholm, it is the majority of the urban population. But for the majority of cities in Canada and the US, the answer is a very small percentage. To improve this, you can obviously build more lines. And that's certainly part of it. But to really maximize the value of these investments, you also need density. I hope our city leaders are paying attention to this metric.

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.

Maybe what we need to do is stop thinking about transit-oriented development as something special, and instead remind ourselves that this is standard operating procedure. It’s just what you do next to transit.

Thanks to Sam Kulendran for sharing the above study with me.