Thursday, April 14, 2016

Some Impressive Compass Card Stats

TransLink recently posted slides from the presentations given at their most recent open board meeting. One of the presentations was about the Compass Card program.

Around 2.5 million people call Metro Vancouver home, and not everyone is travelling every single day. If you eliminate people aged 0-4, there are about 2.4 million people in our region.

According to the presentation, there are about 700,000 active Compass Cards with around 300,000 of them being used each and every day. That means that at least 28% of people over the age of 4 have a Compass Card in the region, and 12.5% of them use a Compass Card every day.

Not everyone over the age of 4 is travelling in the region every day, and there are still people that use cash and old FareSaver tickets. As a percentage of all trips in region, transit usages has likely been underrepresented in both regional trip diaries and Stats Canada census information.

The following table shows that former paper monthly pass holders have successfully transitioned to Compass Card with no loss. The second table shows the massive uptake of money loaded onto Compass Cards as a replacement for FareSaver tickets and cash. I am currently trying to find the stats for the number of people still using cash on buses.

Compass Card Monthly Passes compared to old paper monthly passes. Select chart to enlarge.

Daily value loaded onto Compass Cards. Select chart to enlarge.

While there has been a lot of media attention about everything that’s wrong with Compass Card, TransLink has essentially switched over all of their customers to the Compass Card in around four months with little issue. That’s pretty impressive.