Ridership has tanked on key Vancouver bus routes

What’s going on: An advocate is warning of a “ridership death spiral” for Vancouver bus service, with a new report showing tanking ridership on key routes, as TransLink has cut service in Vancouver to meet the needs of other areas in Metro Vancouver.

Denis Agar, executive director of the transit riders’ advocacy group Movement, says data in the 2024 Transit Service Performance Review show what could happen if the agency invested in more frequent service, as routes that have benefited from the shifting priorities have seen significant increases.

In a press release about the 2024 TSPR, Movement contrasted the “transit death spiral” in Vancouver and Richmond against the “transit growth spiral” seen in places like Surrey, Langley and South Vancouver.

Background: Metro Vancouver has grown in population by 13% since 2020, but Movement says there has been no corresponding increase in funding to boost service. In fact, since the pandemic, the transit agency has been in a funding crisis, as the Lookout explored earlier this year.

This is in part due to lower ridership, and therefore lower fare revenue, but also higher costs due to inflation and declining fuel tax revenue, with increasing hybrid and electric vehicle use.

Bailouts: TransLink has been effectively begging senior levels of government for funding to address shortfalls in order to not cut service, including:

• $644 million in 2020 from the provincial and federal governments as part of the Safe Restart agreement, with a cap on fare increases as part of the deal;

• $176 million in 2022, extending the Safe Restart from 2020; and

• $479 million in stabilization funding in 2023.

• $300 million in capital funding in 2024.

In April, TransLink announced it was able to fill most of the $600-million annual funding gap with an array of funding sources, including increases to transit fares, off-street parking taxes, and property taxes, as well as one-time funding from the province and “new revenue source(s) to be enabled by the Government of BC in 2027,” according to the 2025 investment plan.

Surrey’s rapid population growth: Surrey has been the fastest-growing municipality in BC. It’s also home to a higher proportion of workers deemed essential during the pandemic, meaning ridership didn’t plummet in Surrey in the same way it did in places like Vancouver.

That meant Surrey has actually seen its service improved along a number of routes — but without significant funding to increase overall service, Agar told the Lookout it has come at the expense of other routes.

“Transit ridership is exploding in some interesting ways in Surrey,” Agar said. “Because there’s no new service, TransLink has been shifting buses out of Vancouver and to Surrey to deal with massive overcrowding on the buses there. And they’ve focused those cuts [to Vancouver] on routes that were previously very frequent.”

The rationale: In some ways, that makes sense — Agar notes TransLink isn’t going to cut from a route with 30-minute frequency. But it also means reducing routes that have been reliably frequent in the past, and that can have an impact on ridership. While ridership overall for TransLink has caught up to its pre-pandemic rates, that isn’t true for all routes.

“A route that is less frequent is going to be less attractive, and so we’re seeing a death spiral, a ridership death spiral in Vancouver, where a few routes in particular are less than half of their ridership in 2019,” Agar said.

Tanking ridership: In particular, the 8 along Fraser St., ran nine times per hour during peak hours in 2019, according to TransLink data, and it saw ridership increase from 5.5 million boardings in 2015 to nearly 6.3 million in 2019. However, more recent data show the same route’s frequency has dropped to just four times per hour, while its ridership dropped to a bit over 2.9 million boardings in 2024, for a decline of around 53%.

• The 3 and 20 saw similar drops in frequency, which have been matched by 49% and 52% declines in annual boardings, according to TransLink data, despite seeing similar population growth in their areas.

Surrey’s rapid ridership growth: Agar contrasts those routes with the 323 in Surrey, which runs along 128th St. That route saw a significant frequency increase in 2023, and ridership in 2024 is now nearly 66% higher than in 2022, according to TransLink’s most recent data.

“It’s exciting, in some ways, to see all that growth in Surrey,” Agar said, but “it’s very clear that we’re in a ridership death spiral in Vancouver, and the only way to get out of it is to just pour more service onto those streets.”

Correlation and causation: Agar says the relationship between dropping frequency and declining ridership isn’t a one-to-one causal link. Part of the declines in frequency were responding to declines in ridership during the pandemic, for instance.

But he notes there is ample evidence that increasing frequency — along with other service improvements and fare reductions — is an important tool to increase ridership, albeit with diminishing returns, according to one study. And Agar says he’s heard from people who say they’ve reduced their use of buses because of the lower frequency in Vancouver.

• “If they switch from the bus to biking — I’ve heard that a lot in East Vancouver — that’s good. That’s fine if they’re biking more,” he said. “But the less good scenario is if they switch from the bus to driving, and I’ve heard that too.”

TransLink’s investment plan: The transit agency unveiled its plan for a 5% increase in bus service across the region last month, but Agar notes that there isn’t much in the plan for Vancouver, besides boosting seven routes in the “frequent transit network” to 12-minute service, or about five per hour, including the 3, 8 and 20.

“That’s progress, but it doesn’t restore the 3 or the 8 or the 20 to … what it was in 2019,” Agar said.

What TransLink has to say: The transit authority told the Vancouver Sun it had to balance the difficulties of service reductions in the Burrard Peninsula — including Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster — against the need to address population growth in Surrey and Langley, but added the investment plan would help reverse some of the cuts.

“The good news is that now, with the funding acquired through the 2025 investment plan, we will be able to expand service across the board without having to reallocate service,” Mountain told the Sun. “(But) we acknowledge that those three years really did have an impact on some of those slower-to-recover routes.”

Speed a factor: While frequency is one important factor in improving ridership, Agar notes that another important aspect is travel time, something that is also backed up by studies. Some routes have seen improvements, according to TransLink’s data — the 3, 8 and 20, for instance, have all seen average speeds increase or hold steady, while on-time departures have improved.

• But the bus still tends to be a relatively slow mode of travel. The slowest in the region, the 5/6, which runs around the West End downtown, has an average travel speed of under 10 km/h, while the 3, 8 and 20 each have average speeds of around 14 km/h.

Those can be improved, he said, by creating more bus-only lanes, something TransLink has included in its investment plan, and which Agar said has been successful in a number of other cities, including San Francisco and Seattle.

He also suggested allowing back-door boarding on all buses, something done “pretty much anywhere in Europe,” and implementing traffic signals that detect when buses are coming and ensure they get a green light at intersections.