My experience is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I’ve been taking the #10 bus into work pretty much every day since I was hired. When gas shot up over $1.30 a litre, ridership about doubled— standing room only on those double, articulated buses. Since gas has declined again, tho, it seems like there are a whole lot fewer people on the bus. Like I said, anecdotal. It’ll be interesting to see hard numbers. Certainly my take contradicts this report from the US:
Gas prices have plummeted during the past several weeks, but commuters do not appear to be returning to their cars, according to transit officials in the region and elsewhere, who say ridership is still increasing.
Transit officials attributed much of the ridership increase earlier this year to skyrocketing gasoline prices. But despite falling pump prices — from a national average of $4.11 a gallon in July to $1.82 yesterday — transit ridership is setting records in some parts of the country, officials said.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2008.
I would say Metro Transit operates on anecdotal evidence, if any evidence at all. Since a lot of people flash passes and transfers on their trips, how does the transit authority even keep track of actual usage?
I would submit that gas prices (at least at the level we’ve seen them so far) haven’t been high enough to really make a difference in how people commute. Discounting all the other costs of owning a car (maintenance, insurance, etc.), the cost of gasoline required for a daily commute is not much more than the price of taking the bus. To illustrate, let’s take an example. “Jim” is driving a Honda Civic (8.3L/100km) to work in the middle of July, when gas is $1.50 a litre. He drives in from Bedford to downtown at Scotia Square (Barrington & Duke). Google maps says that’s a 16km route (let’s round up to 20km). That means 40km a day for a round trip, which should consume about 3.32 litres of fuel. Multiply that by 1.5, and you have a daily commuting cost of around $5.00 (or about $1.70 more than it is right now).A metro pass used purely for commuting works out to roughly $3 per round trip ($60 / 20 round trips). So a savings of about $2, less than what many people blow on coffee and donuts at Tim Hortons on a daily basis. Of course, you can save significantly more than this by getting rid of your automobile altogether, but that’s a major lifestyle shift that (unfortunately) most people aren’t yet ready to consider.