Transit ridership is off the charts in Brampton, Ontario, despite its typical low-density suburban layout. Here’s how the city got residents to get on the bus.
It is taken as a truism in the world of urban planning that successful transit requires what is known as “transit-supportive development”— a high-density combination of concentrated destinations and walkable streets. But what if I told you that some of the highest transit usage in North America can be found in a place with none of those things? It’s a Canadian city full of suburban cul-de-sacs, Big Box retail complexes and wide arterial roads.
To be clear, none of these things are good for transit ridership. All of them do indeed make transit less appealing and less pleasant to use. What this place shows, though, is that even in a place without any of the supposed prerequisites, you can still get tens of thousands of people to choose to ride the bus. We don’t have to wait until all our suburbs are rebuilt to become European-style walkable utopias; it’s possible to get people out of their cars in a matter of months simply by running buses more frequently.
Photo: Sikander Iqbal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
