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Metro Vancouver has about 8,500 bus stops. At lots of those stops, there’s no place to sit. No benches to take a load off your feet, nowhere to recline and give your achy back a breather.

So advocates at Movement: Metro Vancouver Transit Riders are taking it upon themselves to get local governments to install more benches at TransLink bus stops — using data supplied by your fellow Transit riders.

Every month, 1 in 3 TransLink riders use Transit for their trip. Any time someone opens the app and launches GO, our step-by-step navigator, we ask some quick Rate-My-Ride questions:

Our data scientists use these answers to calculate which stops provide shelter, lighting, bike racks, trash cans, wheelchair access, and those glorious benches. We then share results in our data dashboard for partners working at transit agencies, city government, and advocacy groups.

Here’s how the bus stop seating sitch shakes out in Metro Vancouver over the last four months of 2025:

• There are 8,383 bus stops, once you exclude bus bays
• There’s seating at 2,797 bus stops
• There’s somewhere to sit nearby at 32 stops
• There are 1,240 bus stops with nowhere to sit at all
• And for the other 4,314 stops? We don’t have enough data to know for sure.

Now, sometimes there’s a good reason why a bus stop doesn’t have a bench. Maybe there’s construction, the sidewalk is too narrow, or the slope too steep.

Plus, the wisdom of crowdsourcing doesn’t always perfectly match reality on the ground. And we excluded bus bays because they’re usually side-by-side, making it difficult to attribute a bench to one bus bay versus another.

That said, this tally is a good place to start figuring out where bus riders need a place to square their derrière.

But which bus stops need benches the most?

This is where Josh comes in.

Josh is our business intelligence analyst, a stand up guy, a sitting enthusiast, and Transit’s in-house bench mensch.

Josh ranked Metro Vancouver bus stops by how often they appeared as boarding or transfer points in trip plans and GO trips last year. While this isn’t a perfect measure of humans at each stop, it is an industry-approved metric to estimate ridership.

We combined Josh’s bus stop popularity index with our list of bench-needing stops and… drumroll please…

The good news: most of Metro Vancouver’s busiest bus stops already have benches.

The 2,000 busiest pick-up points are responsible for an estimated 73% of Metro Vancouver’s overall bus trips. Among those top stops, at least two-thirds have a bench.

Across the entire system, at least 61% of all bus trips happen at a stop with somewhere to sit.

But that still leaves lots of riders waiting upright without anywhere to rest their cheeks.

We found stops without seating in 21 of the 23 local authorities across Metro Vancouver. Bowen Island and Lions Bay were the only places without enough Rate-My-Ride responses for us to sound out the bench scene.

All 8,383 Metro Vancouver bus stops included in this analysis, regardless of seating availability, are ranked based on approximate ridership as estimated by app usage.

To its credit, TransLink has been doing what it can to improve bus stops.

They’re increasing service so waits get shorter, and expanded funding would allow them to run even more buses. They even used Rate-My-Ride answers from Transit users to figure out which bus stop poles should get solar-powered lights.

But unlike poles, bus stop benches are usually up to each local municipality. Burnaby, for example, has stepped up to install more shelters for its transit riders.

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We did the legwork of figuring out which stops most need a place to kick up your boots. Now it’s up to local governments to actually install the benches…

Unless someone else gets there first.

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Work at a city or transit agency that could put Rate-My-Ride data to good use? Drop us a line and we’ll show you what riders are saying.

Have an advocacy initiative that could benefit from mobilized masses of Transit users speaking up for greener, better ways of getting around? We want to spread the word!

And if you live in Metro Vancouver: get involved with Movement to fight for transit that works for everyone.