STM struggles to fill bus seats
‘Alarming’ 13.32 per cent decline in ridership from 2012 to 2017
Despite major investments to improve the reliability and comfort of its buses, the Société de transport de Montréal has seen bus ridership plummet in the last few years, according to figures obtained by the Montreal Gazette in an access-toinformation request.
The findings come as most major cities in North America are also struggling with declining or stagnating numbers. The request was for bus ridership numbers over the last 10 years, but the STM only provided data spanning 2012 to 2017, saying statistics for previous years were not available.
The findings show a steep overall decline of bus ridership by 13.32 per cent in that period, with the biggest drop in 2015, when ridership plummeted 6.38 per cent. From 2012 to 2017, the STM’s bus ridership dropped by more than 34 million trips per year.
“It’s alarming,” said François Pepin, the president of the lobby group Trajectoire Québec.
He pinned the blame on former Montreal mayor Denis Coderre and his decision to reduce the budget of the STM in 2013 and 2014.
“In terms of kilometres driven, we never got back to the level we were at in 2012-2013,” Pepin said. “The service was reduced by about three per cent, and that had an effect on ridership across the board.”
In fact, the number of kilometres driven by buses carrying passengers in 2017 was predicted to be about 67.2 million kilometres, according to the STM’s 2018 budget, compared with 73 million kilometres driven by buses in 2012, a reduction of 7.9 per cent.
The STM declined repeated requests for an interview with either Luc Tremblay, the corporation’s director general, or its chairperson, Philippe Schnobb. However, STM spokesperson Amélie Régis issued a five-sentence statement to explain the decline.
She blamed construction in the Montreal region in part for the drop, and said as a result of the increased congestion, the STM added service on certain bus lines. She also blamed external factors like alternative transportation options (Bixi, Uber and car sharing). She said the growth in métro ridership is good news, and could show that public-transit users will be more likely to take the métro because it is not affected by congestion.
Trajectoire Québec’s Pepin countered that, while car sharing, Uber and bike-sharing services all seemed to gain users during that period, that doesn’t account for a 13-per-cent decline.
Another factor affecting the decline could be the high number of buses taken out for repairs. In 2017, 21.1 per cent of all buses were in the garage for repairs, up from 19.3 per cent the year before.
While the bus appears to be falling out of favour for transit riders, the opposite is true for métro service. In fact, the STM’s overall ridership grew by 4.25 per cent over the same period from 412.6 million trips in 2012 to 429.5 million trips in 2017. Possible reasons for the métro’s bump could include the addition of the new Azur métro cars, which have more capacity and are more comfortable than the older cars.
But among buses, even the STM’s most popular and frequent routes are shedding riders. Nine of the 10 most-used buses had shrinking ridership, and seven of those had declines of more than 12 per cent.
Pepin said taking the bus is not an attractive prospect for many transit users, but bus ridership is the backbone of the transit system, so if this trend continues, it could negatively affect all forms of public transit, and result in even worse congestion on roads and highways.
He called on the STM to inject much more money into its bus network in order to entice people to take the bus.
“I would say the bus is not the most attractive mode of transportation. Most buses are not airconditioned, and they are affected by congestion, so they’re not necessarily reliable,” he said. “When people stop taking the bus, it’s very hard to get them back, and many will never go back.”
Pepin said the good news is that the STM is investing in bus service, having boosted its reserved lanes to 350 kilometres on the island last year, and adding priority traffic lights for buses at intersections and initiating the iBus service where users can track their buses. The STM has created a new operations centre for buses to deploy the fleet in a more efficient manner.
A McGill University public transit researcher said the STM’s situation is not unique. Bus ridership appears to be declining or stagnating in all major North American cities.
Geneviève Boisjoly, a PhD student in Urban Planning at TRAM — Transportation Research at McGill, recently published a study that examined 25 cities in North America. It concluded that it is the volume of service, which she defines as kilometres travelled by the bus fleet, that had the greatest impact on ridership. The study found that for every 10 per cent increase in the volume of bus service, there was an 8.27 per cent increase in overall public transit use.
“Most trips are made by bus and métro, so it’s really important to keep up the volume of bus service,” said Boisjoly.
She said agencies can increase the volume of bus service by buying more buses, making routes more efficient by adding bus lanes, and by investing in maintenance in order to reduce the number of buses in the garage.
The STM is adding 300 new hybrid buses to its fleet by the year 2020, and that will certainly help, Boisjoly said.
It’s not all bad news for the STM. Some targeted bus routes have seen improvements in ridership, specifically on 15 key bus lines where service was boosted in September 2016 in an effort to reduce congestion in the city.
Each of those lines saw significant upticks in ridership, with the 71 Du Centre in LaSalle and Verdun registering a 15.34 per cent increase in 2017. The 105 Sherbrooke St. bus in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce saw an 8.3 per cent increase in ridership last year after the STM added 15 trips per day to the route.
The four new express buses the STM put in place in 2012 to entice people to take the bus during the five-year reconstruction of the Turcot Interchange also seem to be bearing fruit, as ridership nearly doubled on bus Nos. 405, 425, 475 and 485.
Some other highlights from the figures obtained:
The most-travelled bus on the network was Bus 141 Jean-Talon-East, which links the St-Michel métro station at the eastern end of the Blue Line to the Honoré-Beaugrand station at the eastern end of the Green Line.
The least travelled is Bus 76 McArthur, which links the Du Collège métro station to McArthur St. in St-Laurent’s industrial sector. It has two weekday departures, leaving the métro station at 9:41 p.m. and 10:05 p.m. With just 6,960 riders throughout the year, which works out to just 27 passengers per day.
Four out of five of the buses that saw the biggest dips in ridership were express buses (467 St-Michel, 435 Du Parc/Côte-des-Neiges, 430 Pointe-aux-Trembles, 420 Notre-Dame-de- Grâce). The fifth bus affected was Bus No. 144, Des Pins. The buses registered ridership declines of between 44.41 and 51.52 per cent.
The bus that saw the largest percentage increase in ridership — 163.49 per cent — was Bus No. 475, the Dollard-des- Ormeaux express bus, which links to the Côte-Vertu métro station from the Dollard Civic Centre.
It was one of the four created as a mitigation measure during the Turcot project.