Transit for the Climate

This considerable challenge has been exacerbated by the significant changes to the volume, peak periods, and distribution of transit ridership and demand since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, spurred in part by the shift to working from home amongst certain sectors. [...] To evaluate the mode shares, we compute the impact of each policy on transit ridership, then we use the mode shift factors shown in Table 2 to estimate the reduction in car trips, and finally estimate the active transportation using a final target mode share for 2035. [...] The land use multipliers vary across the literature, and most of them are derived from observations across neighborhoods with different levels of transit service at a single point in time, not as a reaction to a change in the level of service in the same place over time, as we are proposing. [...] The effect is of a smaller order of magnitude compared to the operating budget or land use, and it reduces the car trips by 0.3% in 2035 compared to the baseline scenario. [...] The residual transit emissions are due to the combustion of fuel by the diesel buses, and the GHG intensity of the electricity used by e-buses in the different provinces/territories which varies greatly between 29 tCO2e/GWh in Alberta to 0.1 tCO2e/GWh in Québec in 2035.