Ridership on city buses plunged nine per cent last year, primarily the result of declining enrollment by international students at Fanshawe College and Western University starting in September 2025. A new report to the London Transit Commission summarizing the bus system’s performance last year explains that the number of rides dropped from 18.4 million in 2024 to just 17.5 million in 2025. However, the General Manager of London Transit Kelly Paleczny says the declining number of tuition-based bus passes was factored into recent budgets. “We did anticipate that decline,” Paleczny told CTV News. “So that was built into both the 2025 budget, because it really started in the fall of 2025, then it was also carried through into (the) 2026 budget.” The actual ridership is 3.5 per cent lower than the estimated ridership (18.1 million) in the London Transit Commission’s 2025 Budget. That same report reveals a more gradual decline in per-capita rides taken in 2023 (41.8 rides), 2024 (39.2) and 2025 (38.2). The report reads, “The rides per capita measure has been on a steady decline over the period, indicating that service growth is not keeping pace with population growth in the city. This is problematic when the service is already experiencing crowding on many routes and there is limited capacity within approved budgets to increase service levels.” Paleczny suggested the rapid rise in ridership attributed to international students in the years leading up to September 2025 contributed to lower quality bus service. “When we were at those peak levels for the first part of 2025, we had virtually every route operating over-capacity during certain times of the day,” she explained. “We did not have the resources to be able to respond to that. So that led to schedule adherence issues (and) crowding. London Transit’s plan to improve ridership is based on improving service. “If we look at our five-year service plan, the big focus in that plan was to get the current system where it needs to be, so fixing schedule adherence, improving frequency of services,” Paleczny said. A review of previous London Transit performance reports shows ridership reached 24.6 million in 2019 before the pandemic, but Paleczny says that was an inaccurate estimate at the time. Prior to the use of tap cards, London Transit had to estimate tuition-pass usage by extrapolating the results of student surveys. The more recent figures are based on actual passenger counts. The London Transit Commission will consider the 2025 performance report on March 30.
