AI Analysis: Passenger bus and urban transit statistics, by Urban transit agency

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 23100307 tracks monthly transit performance across 18 Canadian urban transit agencies from January 2023 to January 2026, revealing a strongly right-skewed landscape where a handful of large systems dominate both revenue and ridership. Total revenue declined approximately 25% and passenger trips fell roughly 29% over the period, though both metrics peaked mid-period before trending downward. A very strong correlation (r = 0.887) between revenue and ridership confirms that agency size is the primary driver of financial performance across the dataset.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 37 monthly periods and 1,114 records across 18 agencies, with values ranging enormously from 5.8K to 67,487.8K (thousands), reflecting vast differences in transit system scale across Canadian cities.
• Total revenue across all agencies declined from approximately 152,652K in January 2023 to 114,462K in January 2026 (~25% drop), while total passenger trips fell from 97,129K to 68,600K (~29% drop).
• Both metrics peaked mid-period — revenue reaching a high of 212,644K and trips peaking at 126,920K — before trending downward, suggesting seasonal patterns or post-pandemic normalization effects.
• South Coast BC Transportation Authority (Translink) led all agencies in total revenue at 56,222.5K in the latest period, while the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) topped ridership with 31,119.6K passenger trips.
• The distribution is heavily right-skewed: the mean value (10,346K) is nearly 5× the median (2,093K), with 50% of all records falling below 2,093K, confirming that a small number of large agencies dominate the totals.
• A very strong positive correlation (r = 0.887) was found between Total Revenue and Total Passenger Trips across 15 agencies, confirming that higher ridership consistently translates to higher fare revenue.
• IQR-based outlier detection flagged 182 of 1,114 records (~16%) as anomalies, with Société de transport de Montréal (STM) accounting for the most outliers (71), followed by TTC and Metrolinx with 37 each.