Originally Posted by Doady
The bus routes with the most boardings in Mississauga on October 28, 2019 were mostly the industrial routes. E.g. Hurontario, Derry, Dixie, McLaughlin, Malton Express, Britannia, Airport Road, Tomken.
19 Hurontario 10,256
102 Hurontario Express 9,858
109 Meadowvale Express 9,596
42 Derry 7,744
66 McLaughlin 7,265
5 Dixie 7,240
3 Bloor 7,130
35 Eglinton 5,958
26 Burnhamthorpe 5,623
101 Dundas Express 5,532
107 Malton Express 5,445
61 Mavis 5,415
1 Dundas 5,306
1C Dundas-Collegeway 5,130
39 Britannia 4,566
19A Hurontario-Britannia 4,230
23 Lakeshore 4,033
51 Tomken 3,934
7 Airport 3,834
10 Bristol-Britannia 3,808
The low-income people working in these suburban factories and warehouses are the low-hanging fruit when it comes building transit ridership for a new transit system. 42 Derry is almost a pure industrial route, 21km long, hardly serving any commercial or residential uses, no connection to the Toronto subway, doesn't even touch the Toronto border, but it has twice the ridership of the Cleveland RTA Blue/Green Lines.
I see it with my own eyes everyday along Britannia Road: people crowded together and risk being stranded at the bus stops because the buses are getting too full to accept more passengers, the 40 foot buses recently replaced with 60 foot articulated buses, the rush hour frequency gradually went from 34 minutes to 27 minutes to 23 minutes and now to 20 minutes, the MiWay system constantly having trouble keeping up with the demand.
So forget the idea that transit along these roads is "impractical", that these workers and workplaces are a hopeless target, that it's the downtown office workers are the easiest target. That is not what I have seen based on my personal experiences as someone who is no longer allowed to drive a car because of seizures, living in a big industrial and car-oriented suburb. I can also see it in the skyrocketing transit ridership in neighbouring suburb, Brampton, which is even newer and even more industrial and has even more car-oriented built form. Transit ridership declined in other places only because they had the same idea that it would be "impractical" to serve these kind of workplaces with transit no matter what, so they didn't even try.
Practical transit means is a complete network, without any gaps. Even the densest and most urban city cannot be an island, isolated from the rest of the metropolitan area. The decentralization of jobs, spread out in huge industrial areas did not hinder the ridership in the industrial car-oriented suburb like Mississauga. What was holding the system back were the gaps in the network, and those have recently finally been filled, even some 24-hour service added recently. THAT is the number one thing holding transit in USA back, just simple lack of routes, especially with full service, because of the idea that so many places are not worth trying to serve.
Systems that were successful at maintaining high ridership and growing from 2011 to 2019 like Seattle, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, it was not about an increasing concentration of jobs downtown, it was just about maintaining a complete transit system with fewer gaps and further filling in those gaps. Likewise, high ridership systems like Milwaukee that lost 41% of their ridership during that same time period, it wasn't because of the decentralization of jobs.
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