OC Transpo pass sales data

This is a short one - I received historical monthly pass sales data through an email exchange with OC Transpo staff a few months ago following a failed MFIPPA request. I forgot about it and it languished in my inbox, but I am posting the data now, a few months late. 

This data covers the sales for each type of monthly pass (excluding U-Passes) from September 2018 onwards, which includes pre-pandemic and pre-LRT data for comparison's sake. 

You can view and download the dataset here. 

There are several trends worth noting. 

Before the pandemic, sales of the regular adult pass sat around 40,000 a month. However, that number crashed to under 10,000 in the depths of the pandemic, and remains at 15,000 today. The monthly fare cap is worth mentioning as possibly contributing to this stagnation. 

Sales of student passes are now OC Transpo's largest (alternatively, looking at university enrollment figures, second largest) pass sale segment, at about 20,000 passes sold every month. We can infer that the elimination of OC Transpo's youth pass raised about $8 million/year in new revenue. 

The senior monthly pass sold about 7,500 monthly units before the pandemic, but since then, has been stuck at about 5,000 sales. It is worth pointing out that 2025 sales decreased only slightly, despite a large (and controversial) fare increase in January 2025.  

OC Transpo sells very few Access Passes, only ~50 before the pandemic and ~20 now. This pass is available to Para Transpo customers, and offers reduced fares. 

The Equipass, a pass for people earning a low income, saw about 4,000 monthly sales before the pandemic. This number crashed like everything else during March 2020, and sales remained low until 2024, when it began rising, and it now sits at about 7,000 monthly sales. 

Finally, the community pass, which is offered to ODSP recipients, saw about 5,000 monthly sales before the pandemic, but now only sees about 3,000.