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.

Kevin Quinn has been the CEO of TransLink since 2021, when he left his role leading the Maryland Transit Administration. Bloomberg CityLab contributor David Zipper spoke with Quinn about the lessons TransLink offers those hoping to grow ridership in other North American cities. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You spent your career in American public transportation before moving to Vancouver four years ago. What about Canadian transit has been particularly striking to you?

I’d offer two observations. First, Canadians put a lot more emphasis on service frequency. The US is still playing around with 15- and 30-minute frequencies for a lot of bus routes and even some rail service. I think Canadian transit agencies understand [transit consultant] Jarrett Walker’s idea that frequency is freedom. We have a ton of routes where buses are running every three or four minutes. You’d find the same in Toronto or Montreal.

Secondly, I would say that for transit to be successful, you need density around it. There are some agencies in the US doing that well, but for the most part, they still have a ways to go. Canadians do a lot of land use planning focused on density around stations.

I want to come back to frequency and land use. But first, how different is the governance structure of TransLink compared to US transit agencies?

We have two bodies that oversee TransLink. We have a 23-member Mayor’s Council that’s comprised of all the mayors of local municipalities as well as an electoral district and a First Nation. Their job is to say, “Here are the transit projects that help us achieve our vision.” I also have an 11-member board of directors that is more of a traditional board, making sure we are cost-efficient pursuing that vision.

Having these two bodies, especially a Mayor’s Council, makes us less subject to political winds. In the US, there are a lot of states where transit projects can come and go with political cycles. In Maryland, sometimes if you have a Democratic governor, you’re going to do this project, but if it switches to Republican governor, the project can get canceled. In Vancouver, we have consistency of vision across a longer time period.

I’m sure you weren’t thinking about the saga of Baltimore’s Red Line just now.

Not at all. Of course not.

Let’s talk ridership. What’s behind TransLink’s comparatively rapid post-Covid recovery?

Our biggest bounce back has been south of the Fraser River, especially in a municipality called Surrey that is seeing tremendous population growth from immigration. Within the next 10 to 20 years, Surrey’s population will surpass Vancouver’s. Not coincidentally, transit ridership in what we call the South of Fraser-East region has risen 30% since before Covid.

Population growth has helped us in lots of places. In the 2010s, the region was planning for 50,000 new residents per year, but in 2024 alone, we added 180,000. We’ve been in the 150,000 to 180,000 range for several years now. Many people are coming from other countries. According to our data, about half of newcomers travel by transit, which is much higher than our overall mode share of around 10%.

It’s interesting that TransLink’s growth is led by rapidly growing suburbs. In the US, burgeoning suburbs can be too sprawled for transit to be very useful.

The situation here is very different, in part because of geography. If you look at Vancouver, you have these huge mountains to the north. To the west, you’ve got the Pacific Ocean. You’ve got the US border to the south. The only direction to grow is east. The southeast part of the region is growing fast, and there’s no room to expand highways there. Geometrically, transit is the only way that this region can grow and keep moving. Absent transit, we’d be at a total standstill.

Then there is the issue of land use. When we use the term “suburbs” in a US context, I envision single-family homes on a quarter-acre lot. That isn’t necessarily the case in Metro Vancouver, where suburbs often have a very high density of townhomes, walk-up apartment buildings, or high rises.

Decades ago, Metro Vancouver leaders established a popular vision for land use: “cities in a sea of green.” Then in the 1980s they created the SkyTrain to connect many of those cities. If you look at a regional density map, you’ll see these pockets of density around each municipality’s town center. Vancouver itself is no longer the center of everything. The need here is to connect the suburbs — not just feed into the big central city.

What role has transit-oriented development played?

A big one. If you build density around transit, guess what? Ridership goes up at those stations.

Places like Brentwood, Coquitlam and Gateway are key transit hubs where there has been very intentional TOD [transit-oriented development]. We’ve seen around a 30% ridership growth in those places over the last few years.

To what extent have you adjusted transit service since Covid?

First of all, we never cut total service after the pandemic. There are other places, like RTD in Denver, where there were a lot of layoffs and service reductions. That can erode public trust and raise questions among riders: “Is the bus going to show up? Is it reliable? If my bus is getting cut, should I start driving?” I think that happened at other agencies, but not at TransLink.

We did reallocate service to where it’s most needed. For instance, we shifted some buses toward South of Fraser, that fast-growing suburban area in the southeast. There are a lot of shift workers there who cannot work from home, whereas in the city of Vancouver you have a lot of people working 9-to-5 who are not taking transit as much as they used to.

We also rolled out some new service, such as what we call a rapid bus in an area of Surrey known as Newton. It’s fast and frequent — coming every five to ten minutes — and ridership on that corridor doubled after we installed it.

How will TransLink’s service change in the future?

In September we’re beginning a 5% increase in bus service across the system. It’s a mixture of frequency improvements, expansions to run earlier or later in the day, and additional vehicles on existing routes that are overcrowded.

As far as I know, we’re the only North American system that is actually expanding bus service right now. I was just at a large transit conference, and I kept asking around. I couldn’t find anyone else doing it.

In the US, some advocates have promoted fare-free transit as a way to boost transit ridership. Has that been a strategy at TransLink?

Well, we get 45-50% of our operating budget from fares. If those hoping to go fare-free want to maintain today’s level of service, then we need to generate around half a billion dollars of new revenue from something that’s not fares. I don’t know what that would be.

I think Canadian culture plays a role, too. In my experience, US transit systems revolve around independence: Letting people do what they want. But Canadian systems are based on fairness. The fare-free movement kind of flies in the face of a principle that everyone should pay their fair share.

Now that I think of it, I don’t know of any Canadian transit systems that have gone fare-free.

Me neither.

Are there particular lessons from TransLink’s experience that might be useful to transit staff and advocates in other North American cities?

I would emphasize frequency. Running the bus every 30 minutes isn’t going to cut it if you want to grow ridership. With 30-minute service, if one bus doesn’t show up it’s now 60-minute service. Folks aren’t going to rely on that.

In Vancouver, we have lots of buses run with headways of five minutes or less. The SkyTrain is running every three or four minutes, and because it’s driverless, we have the capacity to run even more. That was extremely helpful when Taylor Swift completed her Eras Tour here last year, and we were able to empty out a 55,000-person stadium in 45 minutes because the SkyTrain came every 90 seconds.

Personally, I take the bus every day, and it runs every 10 to 15 minutes. I live my life without a transit schedule, and I like it. I think that’s how most metro Vancouverites live their lives, too.