The Secret to Vancouver's Public Transit Ridership Recovery

The Secret to Vancouver’s Public Transit Ridership Recovery
The Canadian city’s transit agency, TransLink, bounced back from Covid even as other North American systems have struggled. Its leader explains why riders returned.

By David Zipper
October 9, 2025 at 9:00 AM EDT


(Bloomberg CityLab) Across North America, transit agencies have struggled to match the passenger counts they posted prior to Covid, in large part due to an enduring uptick in working from home. Some major systems, such as those in the Bay Area and Atlanta, are still moving only around half as many riders as they did before the pandemic struck. (In Europe and Asia, in contrast, some systems are hitting new ridership highs.)

By North American standards, Vancouver’s regional transit system, known as TransLink, is a success story, now moving around 90% as many people as in 2019. According to the American Public Transportation Association, TransLink has recovered ridership faster than almost any other major transit system on the continent (Washington, DC’s WMATA is another standout). Metro Vancouver recently pulled ahead of Toronto to post the second-most transit trips per capita in Canada, behind only Montreal.

The city has a few aces up its sleeve when it comes to supporting transit: Regional land-use policy has long promoted dense development as a way to preserve open space, and many residents can zip to their destination aboard the SkyTrain, a 54-station network of automated trains on mostly elevated lines.

Vancouver also has some of North America’s most expensive housing — an issue intertwined with its transit infrastructure, as new condos built around Skytrain stations have been blamed for displacement in some areas. ................(more)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-09/how-vancouver-s-translink-escaped-the-public-transit-death-spiral