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TTC: Complete Subway Station Ridership Figures

Good find! Must have just gone up, I was in there, yesterday I think, and I hadn't seen it. The file is only dated last Friday. And very nice presentation!!

Jonny5 said:
King down 9%... St.Andrew up 11%.
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And Union up 26%. If you look at volumes, King is down 5,000, Union is up 21,000, and St. Andrew is up 5,000. Is there some kind of change in the area that would push passengers away from King? Bay/Adelaide has opened ... but I don't see how that would change much, and Queen was only up 2,500.

There's a 5,000 drop at Bay as well. And 2,000 (19%) at Donlands; did something close around there?

The drop in ridership on the SRT is stunning. At the rate it's dropping, they won't need LRT, just a bus! Has employment in Scarborough been effected more than the rest of the city?

The increase in the Sheppard ridership is quite respectable. Ridership at Don Mills dropped 2,000 (hmm, that's a lot of Scarborough riders again) however the line as a whole grew 2,000. The line is becoming less just people going end to end, and actually using the intermediate stops more. Bessarion being the fastest growing station on the system.

Of course much salt must be taken with these numbers ...
 
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The many comments about accuracy of counts is very important here. On surface route counts, I have seen five years elapse between updates, and yet the ancient counts are used in the so-called route performance measures in the annual (more or less) service standards reports.

People who are not counted by the turnstiles also include those who go through crash gates where an operator sits beside a farebox. The presence or absence of a crash gate person (or two) varies day to day depending on available manpower as well as special events that might justify extra staff at a station. Therefore any extrapolation from turnstile counts (if it were attempted) is likely to be way off.

TTC has few passenger counting staff, and this sort of thing is done extremely infrequently. We don't know the date(s) of the samples or whether multiple samples are averaged for one year.

Most importantly, we don't have time of day information. For example, anyone who rides the Yonge line northbound in the PM peak knows that there is little room for more passengers, and growth in usage at stations is unlikely, at least for peak travel. However, off-peak usage may grow especially with changes in surrounding land use.

Sadly, the TTC publishes a lot of data that is superficially interesting, but is full of potential for error. Too often it is used as definitive data, rather than being illustrative plus or minus a generous error factor.
 
SteveMunro said:
However, off-peak usage may grow especially with changes in surrounding land use.
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Isn't a lot of the comments from TTC about growth in the last couple of years been indicating that much of the growth is off-peak?

Certainly there has been a lot of off-peak increases in bus-service ... both because of the extension in minimum service, but also of frequency increases (presumably growth driven) on a few lines.
 
It would be interesting to know how different transit systems carry out their ridership counts. Just going by published numbers, Bloor-Yonge has about 10% more boardings per weekday than the Times Square complex in New York, which is served by 14 lines.

Just goes to show you how much of a funnel is created in Toronto by our lack of alternative lines.
 
scarberiankhatru said:
I wonder what an acceptable level of fluctuation is...10%? 50,000 one day could be 42,000 or 53,000 the next day and that could be totally normal. A graph-savvy person might reap interesting results if they used several years of data...

Bessarion will almost undoubtedly lead in percentage growth over the next decade as ParkPlace is built. The only competition would be Ellesmere, if the York Mills bus made a real connection to the station.
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You are looking for the term 'standard deviation' and 'confidence interval'. A typical high-confidence statistic will have a 95% confidence interval within one standard deviation 19 times out of 20. 95% of the time we are 95% sure that it's within the average of the sum of the difference (ie the set of 4.9, 5.0, 5.1 has a 0.1 standard deviation).

Of course Bessarion will lead ridership percentage growth; it's like saying a newborn infant will lead child percentage growth. What really matters is % usage versus % capacity. I get off at Bessarion station because it's equally inconvient as Bayview station for me unless I'm shopping on the way home.

Chuck said:
It would be interesting to know how different transit systems carry out their ridership counts. Just going by published numbers, Bloor-Yonge has about 10% more boardings per weekday than the Times Square complex in New York, which is served by 14 lines.

Just goes to show you how much of a funnel is created in Toronto by our lack of alternative lines.
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You can find direct system comparison on the APTA website. Really Toronto has as high a passenger/km count as NYC and it's just the number/length of routes they best us by.
Q1 2010: http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Documents/Ridership/2010_q1_ridership_APTA.pdf
 
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Mapleson said:
You are looking for the term 'standard deviation' and 'confidence interval'. A typical high-confidence statistic will have a 95% confidence interval within one standard deviation 19 times out of 20. 95% of the time we are 95% sure that it's within the average of the sum of the difference (ie the set of 4.9, 5.0, 5.1 has a 0.1 standard deviation).
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No, I'm not looking for those terms or I would have used those terms. They imply that some reasonably reliable sampling was conducted. If the annual counts are dubious, the daily counts are unknown. A single 'sample' is not an average of anything, especially when it is explicitly defined as a "typical number." Guesstimates and ballpark figures seem to be the correct terminology.

Again, I was wondering what the city/TTC considers an acceptable level of fluctuation. This year, the University/Spadina line was mostly way up, but the Yonge and SRT lines were mostly down. Next year, the percentage changes for various blocks of stations could be reversed, and we have no real clue if either is closer to reality, but we will know that annual 'catching up' corrections reflect, shall we say, less than ideal data collection and counting methods. Are they basing maintenance, janitorial, or additional collector allotments on those numbers? Using them in EAs? Do they care if station counts are off by 10%, 20%, or more, in one direction or the other, on a year by year basis or do they have other, better figures that get used internally? The surface routes are updated even less often.

Mapleson said:
Of course Bessarion will lead ridership percentage growth; it's like saying a newborn infant will lead child percentage growth. What really matters is % usage versus % capacity. I get off at Bessarion station because it's equally inconvient as Bayview station for me unless I'm shopping on the way home.
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There's an even smaller infant at Ellesmere, you know, but it won't grow. Try reading posts in the context of the thread, not after you've already hit reply with quote. The feature was a huge chart showing percentage changes for every station, many of them a bit dubious. Bessarion will likely lead in percentage growth for a number of years, even if/when it begins passing a half dozen other stations in daily ridership. That's the point, and the ridership figures alone do not show this. If/when redevelopments join ParkPlace, Bessarion could easily plateau over 10,000 per day.

Station capacity does not matter, by the way. Bessarion can theoretically move probably over 100,000 per day, but who cares? That is neither remotely realistic nor desirable in the slightest. Bessarion's theoretical capacity probably exceeds the Sheppard line's current capacity.

Bessarion was not designed perfectly. Angling the exits differently could have brought station access a block westward instead of having two exits right across the street from each other. Perhaps future redevelopments will change this and create mini-PATH connections.
 
The ridership figures would confirm the wisdom of building subway lines where people are actually living, instead of where we want them to live. Somehow this simple concept seems to elude many people.
 
nfitz said:
This looks like the same one that the TTC posted on their website on ... oh, end of May sometime: http://www3.ttc.ca/PDF/Transit_Planning/Service_Summary_2010_06_20.pdf
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Yep, thats it, exact same, but I must digress, I havent had time to 'geek off' as much as I'd like lately, Working full time sorta nulifies any ideas of just fanning the days away.

btw, next time your at a subway station, look on the ends of the turnstiles, most have a oldstyle lcd counter screen, some have gone LED, as was told to me at Doors Open Greenwood shops, by one of the people that is in charge of the overhauling of the turnstiles, when they are overhauled, they are putting in LED counters (bright blue ones).
 
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Bayer said:
The ridership figures would confirm the wisdom of building subway lines where people are actually living, instead of where we want them to live. Somehow this simple concept seems to elude many people.
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Both impressive density and transit use can be found all around Toronto. The biggest problem is that many people don't see the reality on the ground, that the amount of higher density dwellings in various parts of the city is substantial. They seem to only accept conventional American planning paradigms which assume a "suburban area" to be a low-density area which, hence, is no place for grade separated rapid transit.
 
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leopetr said:
That's why people don't like the Sheppard subway.
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To be fair, the Sheppard subway seems to be getting more and more use as the density around it intensifies. Obviously it was way out of left field when it was originally built, but development along the line has picked up over the years and soon enough it will no longer be a sore point in discussions.

My only gripe is that the connection from Don Mills to [Insert end point here] is going to be LRT which will effectively forever leave the subway as a stub instead of seamlessly connecting it to an end point.
 
xtremesniper said:
My only gripe is that the connection from Don Mills to [Insert end point here] is going to be LRT which will effectively forever leave the subway as a stub instead of seamlessly connecting it to an end point.
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That's the whole point of the LRT - to kill any future of the subway's extension. Or else they'd have done with a ramp-up (from concourse level) to in-median LRT platform setup.
 
xtremesniper said:
To be fair, the Sheppard subway seems to be getting more and more use as the density around it intensifies.
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Not according to TTC. Typical weekday ridership was only 49,440 in 2012/13 down from 50,410 in 2011-2012. If you dig further back to say 2006-2007 it was only 43,260, but it seems to have stagnated. And even with a growth of 6,000 in six years, it's dwarfed by the growth on the YUS line (85,000) and the BD line (31,000) in the same amount of time.

There is a TTC subway ridership thread here, BTW - urbantoronto.ca/forum/showthread.php/3047-Complete-TTC-Subway-Station-Ridership-Figures
 
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