As York Region Transit marks its 25th anniversary, the milestone invites more than celebration. It offers a moment to ask a deeper question: not just how much transit exists in York Region — but how well it actually works for the humans using it.
Transit planner Jarrett Walker’s influential book Human Transit provides a useful framework to examine that question. Walker argues that transit systems succeed or fail based on how clearly they prioritize human mobility over political geography, road design, or symbolic infrastructure.
Before YRT’s creation in 2001, transit across York Region reflected municipal fragmentation.
From Municipal Patchwork to Regional Network
Before YRT’s creation in 2001, transit across York Region reflected municipal fragmentation. Each town or city operated its own inward-facing bus service — designed around local needs, budgets, and boundaries.
From a Human Transit perspective, this was a textbook example of what Walker critiques: transit shaped by governance rather than by movement. Riders crossing municipal lines encountered confusing transfers, inconsistent fares, and disconnected schedules. The system lacked what Walker calls network legibility — the ability for riders to easily understand how to get from anywhere to anywhere.
YRT’s amalgamation changed that. By integrating routes, fares, and planning under one regional body, the system began functioning as a true network rather than a cluster of services. This shift alone dramatically improved transit’s usefulness — because, as Walker notes, transit value grows exponentially when services connect seamlessly.
The Rise of Frequency and the Viva Model
Walker places heavy emphasis on frequency as freedom — the idea that transit becomes genuinely useful when riders don’t need to plan their lives around a timetable.
York Region’s Viva bus rapid transit system moved service in this direction. With dedicated rapidways, larger vehicles, and more consistent headways, Viva corridors introduced higher-order transit into a suburban landscape built for cars.
This reflects Walker’s principle of balancing ridership vs. coverage — investing more service where demand is strongest rather than spreading thin routes everywhere. Frequent corridors create mobility spines that make the entire network more viable.
Yet frequency remains concentrated along a handful of arterials, leaving much of the Region in low-frequency coverage mode — useful for access, but not for spontaneity.
The Roads vs. Destinations Problem
One of Walker’s clearest arguments is that transit should be designed around destinations, not just infrastructure geometry.
In York Region, many routes still mirror arterial road layouts. Buses run where roads are wide and continuous — not always where people most need to go: employment clusters, hospitals, campuses, or cultural hubs.
This produces indirect trips and long travel times, weakening transit competitiveness. In Walker’s framing, the system optimizes operational efficiency over human usefulness.
The result is cultural as much as logistical: transit becomes viewed primarily as a cheaper alternative to driving — rather than a mode people choose for convenience.
The Connectivity Gap
Walker repeatedly stresses that transit is only as strong as its weakest transfer.
Regional rail integration is where this principle is most visibly strained. At stations like Maple GO, bus connections remain physically and operationally disconnected. Riders often face long walks, indirect routing, or reliance on limited on-request services.
From a Human Transit lens, these are not minor inconveniences — they are structural network failures. A missed or difficult transfer can invalidate an entire trip, no matter how efficient the rest of the journey is.
The same issue appears in subway-to-rail links, where Line 4 passengers must traverse significant distances to reach GO services — weakening multimodal cohesion.
Ridership vs. Coverage — The Suburban Tradeoff
Walker’s most politically sensitive concept is the tradeoff between ridership and coverage.
- Coverage prioritizes geographic equity — ensuring everyone has some service.
- Ridership prioritizes productivity — concentrating service where the most people will use it.
Suburban systems like YRT often lean heavily toward coverage, reflecting political pressure to serve all communities. But this comes at the cost of frequency, speed, and overall usefulness.
Walker argues that great transit requires difficult choices: you cannot maximize both everywhere.
The Next 25 Years: Human Transit or Road Transit?
YRT’s first quarter-century transformed transit governance — replacing municipal silos with a regional framework and introducing rapid transit corridors that would have been unthinkable in the 1990s.
But Walker’s framework suggests governance reform is only the first step.
The next phase requires designing transit that is:
- Frequent enough to enable spontaneous travel
- Direct enough to compete with driving
- Connected enough to function as one seamless network
- Destination-focused rather than road-focused
In short: transit built for human movement, not just municipal service delivery.
As York Region celebrates 25 years of YRT, the anniversary becomes less about looking back — and more about deciding whether the future network will follow roads, or follow people.