I think Mississauga just got back to 100% or above now, for many of the same reasons that Brampton’s ridership is rocketing. Lots of industrial and logistics employment, a younger population, as well as a lot of ridership either connecting to BT or headed to Sheridan College.
I wonder if restrictions on international students will deflate some of the ridership growth in Peel Region.
A significant portion of MiWay ridership is people coming from Brampton. There is a reason the MiWay routes running to Sheridan get packed, and also why Derry has such robust ridership.
Important to remember that no existing students are being booted out, if they otherwise had permission to be here, but the number of new incoming is being cut.
The full impact will take at least 18 months to be felt (Sept '25)
While this is likely to curb Brampton's absurd growth rate, we are
unlikely to experience 20%+ ridership growth in a year ever again, I would be surprised if Brampton Transit went below an average of 10% a year. The thing to understand is that even with in migration being cut, Brampton is still likely to experience 15k+ annually from abroad, which adds ridership to Brampton.*
Oh, I know. I just wonder how much it has contributed to ridership growth in the last few years.
It has been significant, but ridership growth in Brampton will remain robust compared to other cities
One thing transit agencies broadly experience, even stable ones is a phenomenon called "churn", where they have new people coming in, and existing customers leaving. Even if an agency is averaging a 0% change, they are likely still experiencing 10% of their customer base leaving and replaced by new people. If you want to increase total ridership, you need to do some combination of reducing outflows and increasing inflows. While Brampton Transit does experience high outflows, it also experiences a smaller proportion leaving, because owning a car in Brampton is exorbitant once you consider car insurance. This leads to a reduced incentive to leave BT, unless you are also relocating out of the city. One thing currently increasing outflows is that the buses are so crowded as to render the system unreliable, this results in people of means being incentivized to leave. However, if the City of Brampton continues strong service hour increases, this will result in decreased crowding, reducing outflow rate. Increased service hours leads to higher frequency, which leads to faster travel times beyond the reduction in crowding.
**
The reduction in travel times leads to an improved cost benefit ratio to taking transit (less cost in time), which also diminishes the benefit from switching to driving. If my financial savings from taking transit are $500 and I spend a hour extra commuting each workday then I save $25/hour by taking transit, enough to stop many low wage workers from leaving. If my financial savings are still $500/month, but the extra commuting time is cut down to 30 minutes a day, then my savings per time spent in transition is $50/hour, enough to stop even middle class people from leaving, and possibly enough to start inducing people to switch to taking it.
*edited my response to Northern Light to fix a typographical error that altered the meaning of what I said (I originally said likely when I meant unlike)
**Added a paragraph break in the writing on churn to improve readability
Post Script, I should caveat that the unlikely to see 20% increases is more a function of once we get crowding under control we are unlikely to experience ridership growing at 3x the service hour increase. As the service hours will be introduced in three major batches this year, the total effect is likely to exceed 20%, but due to lag might not materialize this year, instead materializing next year in January as the next batch of international students arrive.
