Four Takeaways:
1. Better service, not cheaper service, has been Canada’s biggest ridership advantage.
When operating subsidies arrived in the 1970s, Canadian agencies spent the money on more service rather than lower fares. That single choice is still paying off half a century later.
A 1996 paper by Paul Schimek measured the result: 40% more service bought a 100% more riders, because frequency compounds. TransLink’s threshold for a “frequent” route is a bus every 15 minutes or better, all day. That is the frequency at which people stop consulting a schedule and just show up at the stop.
Canadian fares are higher, not lower. Busby poses the question: is a low-income rider better served by a bus that actually shows up, or by a discount on one that comes every 40 minutes?
TransLink publishes its Frequent Transit Network map, and it aims the map at an unusual audience. Not riders, but the developers and land-use planners who decide where housing goes, so that density lands where frequent service already runs. Service and land use move together.
2. A painted bus lane can demonstrate demand long before a multi-billion-dollar rail project opens.
In three months, Colle opened two light rail lines in Toronto. One cost $3.5 billion. The Crosstown, in his words, was “$15 billion, but I don’t think we’ll ever know until there’s probably an investigation or an audit.” It was 15 years in the making. The Crosstown ran more than a billion dollars over budget. Colle is proud of the lines. He is prouder of something that cost almost nothing.
On Queens Quay East, a fast-growing neighborhood was choking a corridor with congestion. A quirk of old road design had left an unused shoulder lane. The TTC turned it into a bus priority lane, about a kilometer of it, and travel times dropped right away.
“Some red paint on some asphalt” is Colle’s approach: a large gain at a fraction of a megaproject’s cost and timeline. Colle calls it “radical incrementalism.” He is using that one kilometer to justify the next moves: priority lanes on two more corridors, parking removed, left turns banned, stops consolidated, all timed to the 2026 World Cup as the reason to act now.
Take the Dufferin bus, a route so slow that riders nicknamed it “the Suffering Dufferin.” After its priority treatment, those same jaded commuters now post on Reddit as they sail past cars stuck in traffic.
The small fast thing is exactly what earns the political license for the big one.
3. Protect bus speed. Congestion is an operating cost. Signal priority and dedicated lanes often deliver some of the highest returns on investment.
TransLink estimates it loses $80 million a year to buses stuck in traffic. That is 15% of its bus operating budget. So it spends $5 to $7 million a year to win the time back: monitoring, corridor studies, signal timing, stop consolidation, and funding staff inside the road authorities that control the curb and the signals. It publishes person-minutes and vehicle-minutes of delay by corridor, which turns a vague complaint into a budget line.
A frequent bus that crawls still costs the full price to operate, and it sheds the riders it would otherwise carry. Protecting its speed is the cheapest capital project an agency will ever run. Put a dollar value on the delay, and you can justify the fixes that recover it.
4. Fund transit as regional infrastructure. Transit creates value beyond its riders from reduced congestion to stronger local economies.
Translink’s funding principle is to draw revenue from each in proportion to the benefit it receives. Riders benefit, and pay fares. Drivers benefit from less congestion, and pay a fuel levy of about 50 cents a gallon (18.5 cents a litre) straight to the agency. Property owners benefit from access, and pay property taxes. The fourth beneficiary is the wider economy, which gains from agglomeration: more people reaching more jobs, more transactions in a denser market. TransLink has no way to tax that gain, and the missing leg is why it leans on unstable provincial transfers.
By law, TransLink must show a ten-year plan fully funded from its own revenues. It cleared that bar every year until March 2020, and hasn’t since, precisely because that fourth leg is missing. In most US regions the same leg exists, as a dedicated sales tax.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation on the Mobility Forum podcast:
–Jinhua
Jinhua Zhao
Professor of Cities and Transportation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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