Case Study: City of Thunder Bay achieves expanded transit access and a strategic mobility hub plan with Urban SDK

How Urban SDK was used to create a comprehensive precinct plan that is transit-oriented, walkable, safe, diverse, and practical

The City of Thunder Bay engaged a multidisciplinary study to decide whether to relocate its Water Street transit terminal to a centralized mobility hub at Waverley Street & Red River Road to better serve the North Core. Urban SDK supplied anonymized mobility data (app and cell-tower + census-derived analytics) used alongside TMIG/TYLI and City staff to quantify catchments, origins/destinations, ridership patterns and first/last‑mile needs so the City could evaluate access, equity, operational efficiency and redevelopment opportunities.

Using Urban SDK’s travel‑demand and OD analysis to test hub layouts and route concepts, the team recommended a pedestrian‑first Plaza option (Option 4B) with optimized routing. The study found the relocated hub would serve +1,692 more residents within a 10‑minute walk (+514%), increase local stops in the 10‑minute catchment (39 vs 26), reduce overlapping bus service by ~83,600 km annually and cut transit GHGs by roughly 430 tonnes/year. Urban SDK’s data directly informed these route and design decisions; estimated full implementation cost is about $20.3M with ~$8.19M in existing grant funding identified.

City of Thunder Bay