Why Vancouver’s transit system is at risk and what it means for commuters

This is part one of our series. Stay tuned for the next story later this month.

Sweeping service cuts due to a huge operating deficit could upend the very identity of the city

Philip Vargas is like many Vancouver transit users.

Like most of his peers, the 22-year-old University of British Columbia student uses transit to get around the city. He takes a bus to commute from his home in East Vancouver to UBC. After a day of classes, one of the many buses from campus brings Vargas downtown. For medical appointments on Commercial Drive he can hop on the SkyTrain. 

Vargas has no plans of switching to a car anytime soon. He says that as someone on the autism spectrum and with ADHD, he hasn’t been able to learn to drive.

“There's the aspiration of having a car and the freedom and all that. But for me, I find that transit is more freeing in my life than having a car would be,” Vargas said.

But it's his passion for transit that sets him apart. He has fond memories of taking transit with his grandparents as a child and talking about the SkyTrain that ran by his elementary school. He first started taking the bus by himself while in high school. That’s when Vargas’s dedication to public transportation really took off, he said. 

Vargas began sharing this passion about transit (along with advice on the best bus to catch) with friends, earning himself the nickname ‘Transit King.’ One of his friends eventually encouraged him to start an Instagram page under the same name, where he now posts about transit.

“I want to build a culture of transit, like how there's car culture or bike culture,” he said.

Last November, Vargas posted a couple of photos of his Halloween costume. He’s wearing two black poster boards, tied together over his shoulders, with the words ‘transit nightmares’ printed out in red. The posters display a number of common transit woes, like the dreaded ‘SORRY BUS FULL’ message or a satirical news clipping about the shortsightedness of cutting transit service. 

But Vargas is genuinely worried about the latter, given TransLink’s warning that it might have to dramatically cut services in 2026 if it doesn’t find a new funding model to fill a $600 million yearly operating deficit.

“That’s a real nightmare, real scary,” he said.

Without additional funding, regional bus services could be cut by half, SkyTrain and the SeaBus service by 30 per cent and HandyDART by 25 per cent. The West Coast Express (a commuter train between downtown Vancouver and Mission City) and a funding program for road maintenance and infrastructure upgrades could be completely eliminated.

A monkey wrench 

As one of the busiest transit services in North America and part of Vancouver’s urban DNA, the consequences of transit cuts could be far-reaching. 

On an average weekday in fall 2023, over 430,000 people used transit in Metro Vancouver. Vancouver and UBC have the largest ridership in the region, accounting for nearly half of TransLink’s system-wide boardings in 2023.  

In terms of ridership, TransLink punches above its weight: it serves the 22nd most populous urban region in Canada and the United States but has the third-highest bus ridership (behind only New York and Toronto) and the fourth-highest ridership on a rail rapid transit system. 

The regional transit operator’s financial woes started in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns and physical distancing, according to Werner Antweiler, a professor at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.

“COVID has actually thrown a monkey wrench into the operations of all transit systems in North America,” Antweiler said.

Not only did TransLink take a huge hit to its ridership revenue with over 50 per cent fewer transit boardings, but the overall slowdown of activity in the region meant less revenue from advertising, parking, development charges and fuel taxes. TransLink also cancelled a planned fare increase. 

In its 2020 annual report, TransLink said these challenges “have created a deficit that will persist over the long term.” 

Reduced ridership can have lingering effects on routes and route density, Antweiler said. Cuts to service delivery might mean fewer buses are running per day in certain places, making people less inclined to take them.

“There’s basically an endogenous [meaning internal] reaction that can make transit systems function worse than in the past,” he said.

Until 2019, TransLink was in a “virtuous cycle,” Antweiler said. More people were taking transit, so they were improving the system. Having rapid transit lines with buses running every few minutes (like the R1 or 99 B-Line) makes people feel comfortable taking the bus, because they know they won’t have to wait long.

“That used to be a game changer,” Antweiler said. “And now we’re actually at the point where, if they have to cut back, that’ll hurt the attraction of public transit as an alternative to the car.”

But even as ridership has increased since the height of the pandemic, lingering effects like delayed transit fare increases and inflation, and other factors like consumers reducing their fuel consumption, remain.

Revenue from TransLink’s fuel tax (where Metro Vancouver drivers pay an additional 18.5 cents per litre for gas or diesel) is declining, due to the uptick in electric vehicle use. The tax generated $34 million less in revenue for TransLink in 2023 compared to 2022.

“As people are shifting towards driving electric [vehicles] more and more, we will see that there is an erosion of the fuel tax revenue,” Antweiler said. 

Recently, TransLink’s operations have been kept afloat by emergency funding from the provincial and federal governments. In 2020, Translink got $644 million from the province and the federal government as part of pandemic relief funds, an additional $176 million in 2022, and another $479 million from the province in 2023. 

In early 2025, the federal government committed $633 million to TransLink over 10 years, but that money is only for transit infrastructure improvements. Similarly, the 2025 B.C. Budget provided $9 billion in funding for ongoing projects like the Broadway Subway and the Surrey Langley Skytrain. However, neither of those recent announcements provide TransLink with the needed funding to run day-to-day operations. 

What makes Vancouver different

Reduced transit wouldn't only affect the hundreds of thousands of transit users like Vargus. It would impact everyone that uses Vancouver’s roads, and alter the make-up of the city itself.

Unlike many similar-sized cities, Vancouver doesn’t have a freeway running through it. And despite developing during an era when municipalities (like Calgary, Edmonton, Dallas, or Houston) typically took a more car-reliant approach, Vancouver is comparable to much older Eastern cities (like Toronto, Montreal or New York) in its large transit ridership.

“Generally, when a city was mainly built up dictates the way that people get around,” said Denis Agar, the executive director of Movement, a grassroots regional organization advocating for transit users. Movement is currently campaigning the province to fund transit.  

These younger Albertan and Texan cities, for example, largely grew when cars were the main form of transportation. But Vancouver differs because — for the most part — it didn’t build freeways into its downtown core.

“It made a few really key choices that meant that it diverged from the pack,” said Agar.

In the twentieth century, cities saw freeways as a way to respond to ongoing suburban sprawl that had been happening since the 1800s: people with wealth were leaving polluted industrial downtowns to move to the greener, cleaner city outskirts. 

“Building freeways seemed like the natural solution,” said Sara Stevens, an architectural and urban historian and professor at UBC. 

Planners thought freeways would encourage people to commute downtown for work and cultural activities, like going to a theatre or museum. And eventually, city planning reflected this, with industry condensed in one urban area while residential areas grew around the city’s outskirts.

But by the time a freeway system was proposed in Vancouver in the 1960s, people were aware of how they changed cities. Chinatown and Strathcona residents and their supporters protested the planned construction of a freeway that would have levelled their neighbourhoods. While most of the freeway was never built, Hogan’s Alley – the centre of Vancouver’s Black community – was bulldozed and its residents displaced to build the Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts.

“It was grotesque how these big and dominant freeways would have demolished tens of thousands of homes and businesses,” said Agar. “And they would have cost money to build and maintain, and they would have eliminated property tax revenue by demolishing all those things, so it was really a raw deal for the city.”

Today, the layout of Vancouver still reflects the history of its streetcar grid, with major bus routes still running along historic lines like 4th Avenue, Main Street, and Broadway. Residential neighbourhoods like Kitsilano and Mount Pleasant are built around those historic transit networks. 

“You build a different form of city around a car,” Stevens said. “You think about how fast people are driving and what turning radius the car can take, and then you design something that looks like a freeway with those big cloverleaf intersections.”

Even as more and more Vancouverites started using cars instead of streetcars, “the scale of the city’s streets were already set,” Stevens said. “That didn’t change, even though the way people moved around the city changed.”

Vancouver’s layout is also influenced by the SkyTrain system, first built in the ‘80s in advance of Expo ‘86. 

It’s much faster than other light rail systems built in Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle, and Portland, said Agar, making it more competitive with driving. 

And where there are SkyTrain stations, there tends to be a lot of housing density and shopping centres (like the Broadway-City Hall Station).

This all shapes how Vancouver looks today because “the businesses and homes and institutions in a city flock to the mode of transportation that is dominant, that is the fastest, that is the most useful,” Agar said.

Keeping what we have

Just as the movement of hundreds of thousands of Vancouverites today is determined by decisions made decades prior, the movement of future residents will be determined by decisions made now. While higher levels of government continue to fund transportation projects, TransLink might have to cut back on the systems it currently has unless something changes, upending how people like Phillp Vargas move through the city.

“It would severely impact my mobility, my personal freedom of movement, of getting around the city,” he said.

Vargas says that reduced bus frequency would make it harder for him to get to class and medical appointments, and worries he’d have to pay for Ubers or taxis — something he can’t afford.

But Vargas isn’t sitting around waiting to hear if TransLink gets operational funding. He joined Movement’s campaign to ‘save the bus,’ advocating for the province to provide funding for the operating deficit. He’s been canvassing at bus stops, where talks to transit users about TransLink’s financial problems, and encourages them to contact their MLAs.

Vargas wishes he and Movement could be advocating for more buses and Skytrains instead. 

“We could have used this energy, this activism, this time, and money, towards improving what we have, but now we have to use it to just keep what we have.”