AI Analysis: Passenger bus and urban transit statistics, by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's monthly transit dataset (Table 23100251) tracks Urban Transit Systems and Interurban & Rural Bus Transportation across Canada from January 2017 to January 2026, revealing a right-skewed distribution of values ranging from $0.5M to $369M with a mean of $101.2M. The most defining event in the dataset is the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused urban transit revenue to collapse by 99.7% — from a peak of $369.0M in September 2019 to just $1.1M in May 2020 — followed by a gradual post-2021 recovery. Meaningful data was only available for Urban Transit Systems [485110], with Interurban & Rural Bus Transportation [485210] showing suppressed or missing values throughout the period.

Key Findings

• Urban Transit Systems [485110] averaged $141.64M in total revenue and 60.69M passenger trips per period, both exhibiting right-skewed distributions with medians well below their means ($98.3M and 46.4M respectively).
• The most extreme outlier in the dataset is urban transit revenue dropping from a record high of $369.0M in September 2019 to a record low of $1.1M in May 2020 — a 99.7% decline driven by COVID-19 lockdowns.
• The overall dataset spans 1,090 records across 109 monthly time periods, with a standard deviation of $99.72M — nearly equal to the mean of $101.17M — confirming exceptionally high dispersion in transit activity levels.
• Interurban & Rural Bus Transportation [485210] had no reportable data for either revenue or passenger trips, suggesting systematic data suppression for this NAICS category throughout the 2017–2026 period.
• The interquartile range of $126.88 (Q1: $16.88M, Q3: $143.75M) indicates that the middle 50% of transit values are widely spread, reflecting significant diversity in transit activity across regions and time periods.
• Geographic coverage spans four regions — Canada (national), Atlantic/Quebec and Ontario, Prairies, and British Columbia and Territories — enabling regional comparisons that highlight disparities in transit revenue and ridership.
• Post-2021 recovery trends are observable in the data, with ridership and revenue gradually rebounding toward pre-pandemic levels through the most recent data point in January 2026.