This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Philip Cross, September 5, 2025
For over a decade, Canadian governments have poured money into mass transit projects. These outlays totalled $115.4 billion between 2016 and 2025, more than all investment in pipelines over this period and triple that by the auto industry. Public funding of mass transit was supposed to change how Canadians commute to work. The latest data on commuting patterns say it has been an abject failure.
Statistics Canada data show the share of commutes via public transit fell from 12.6 per cent in May 2016 to 11.9 per cent in May 2025. In absolute terms, ridership on urban mass transit has never returned to its pre-pandemic high, despite the near-doubling of investment spending from $10.2 billion in 2020 to a record $18.6 billion in 2025. Adding bike lanes and walkways was no more successful, with these “active transit” commutes falling from 6.8 per cent to 6.2 per cent of the total over the past decade.
Despite all the money spent, Canadians commute in private vehicles more than before the pandemic. Private vehicles now account for 80.9 per cent of all commutes, versus 79.4 per cent in 2016. The increase obviously isn’t large. But governments were looking for a big decline and they have not got it.
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Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
