Research & Analysis The Transportation Impacts of Vehicle-for-Hire in the City of Toronto: October 2018 to July 2021

The 2019 Transportation Impacts Report was the City's first deep dive using private transportation company (PTC) data on the trip making patterns and trends of PTCs in the City of Toronto. This report studied detailed trip data for the period of September 2016 to September 2018 and MLS-summarized records from October 2018 to March 2019.

Some key findings of that period included:

• PTC trips were largely concentrated in the inner City; outside the downtown core, trips were concentrated around major transit stations, shopping destinations, and postsecondary institutions.
• Friday and Saturday night time trips were the largest trip market.
• PTCs in downtown Toronto were found to conservatively make up 5-8% of total traffic. This estimate does not account for circulating vehicles that are waiting for trip requests
• The University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) surveyed a sample of Toronto residents in May 2019 to determine the factors that influence residents’ choices of when they use PTC services. 49% of the respondents stated that they would have taken public transit in the absence of PTCs for their most recent PTC trip, while 33% would have taken a taxi. The remaining 18% would have driven, been driven by someone, walked, biked, or would have not made the trip at all. These percentages do not represent overall trips taken because they do not account for the frequency of respondents' travel.