Toronto households spent more than CA$440 million on ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft in 2023 — just over half of what they spent on public transit. Among households earning $200,000 or more, spending on ride-hailing has surpassed spending on transit: $146 million to $118 million.
That finding captures something larger than a shift in transportation preferences. It is evidence of a class exit from the public commons, one that is accelerating the fiscal decline of the city’s public transit provider, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), while enriching a ride-hailing industry whose drivers earn a median of less than $6 an hour after expenses.
It is evidence of an increasing economic segregation of the public sphere, mirroring the scandalous rise of private inequality. With a possible provincial takeover of ride-hailing regulation, the City of Toronto may have missed a decade-long opportunity to act.
Five years after the onset of the pandemic, public transit across North America has not fully recovered — but Toronto’s situation is notably worse than its peers. In the United States, ridership hit 85 percent of pre-pandemic levels by early 2025, buoyed by return-to-office mandates. Vancouver’s TransLink has recovered roughly 90 percent of its pre-pandemic riders.
The TTC, by contrast, is moving in the wrong direction. It projected just 414 million rides in 2025, down from 421 million the year before. As of October 2025, ridership stood at 78 percent of pre-pandemic figures. Work-from-home and transit service issues explain part of this gap. But what explains the rest, and why is Toronto’s deficit so much deeper than its peers?
Ride-hailing is everywhere in North America. But Toronto’s ride-hailing market is uniquely oversaturated, with about 80,000 licensed ride-hailing drivers — comparable in absolute number to New York City. This means there are more than three times as many ride-hailing vehicles per capita in Toronto than in NYC (Toronto…
Auteur: Edgardo Sepulveda
