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Category Archives: Useful Data

December Driving 96.6% of 2019

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I guess Musk didn’t fire everyone at the Federal Highway Administration, as the agency finally released its December traffic volume trends indicating that Americans drove 3.4 percent fewer miles in December of 2024 than the same month in 2019. Driving over the entire year of 2024 was 0.6 percent greater than in 2019.

This compares with transit, which carried 76.5 percent as many riders in 2024 as it did in 2019. Amtrak carried 2.8 percent more passenger-miles and the airlines carried 7.2 percent more passengers in 2024 as 2019. Continue reading →

January Air Travel 11.7%, Amtrak 7.8% Above 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The airlines carried 11.7 percent more passengers in January 2025, while Amtrak carried 7.8 percent more passenger-miles, than in the same month in 2019. The air travel data are based on passenger counts from the Transportation Security Administration, while the Amtrak data are based on its monthly performance report.

The big question is where are the highway data? The Federal Highway Administration usually releases traffic volume trends about 45 days after the end of any given month. In other words, December data should have been out in the middle of February, but here we are in March and it hasn’t yet been posted. Did Elon Musk fire the people in the Federal Highway Administration who keep track of this data? If so, it would be hypocritical for me to complain as I believe the federal government is too big, but I still hope the data appear soon. Continue reading →

December Transit 77.3% of Pre-Pandemic Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 77.3 percent as many riders in December of 2024 as the same month in 2019, according to preliminary data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s down from 78.4 percent in November. Ridership for calendar year 2024 ended up being 76.5 percent of 2019.

Highway data will be added as soon as it is available. For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post from last week.

Because monthly numbers are preliminary and FTA updates prior months with each new release, I went through and corrected transit numbers for previous months in the above chart. I counted only 96.55 percent of February 2024 riders as that month had one more day than February 2019. As corrected, transit reached a peak, relative to pre-pandemic levels, of 78.7 percent in October, and dropped in both November and December. Continue reading →

November 2024 Transportation Recovery

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Americans drove 2.2 percent more miles, flew 4.7 percent more trips, and took Amtrak 6.2 percent more passenger-miles in November 2024 than the same month before the pandemic, according to data recently released by federal agencies. Transit ridership, however, still lagged almost 22 percent behind pre-pandemic numbers.

For once, the Federal Highway Administration, Federal Transit Administration, and Amtrak all released their monthly data reports at about the same time, late last week. TSA passenger counts are available only a day or two after each day, but I generally wait for data from other agencies before posting the airline data. Continue reading →

Transit Carries 77% of Pre-Covid Riders in October

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s public transit systems carried 77.3 percent as many riders in October 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the highest level transit has achieved since the beginning of the pandemic.

The increase is likely due to more people returning to downtown jobs instead of working remotely. While President Biden seems content to let many federal employees work at home, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to order them to return to work, which will create an interesting situation as the new administration takes office in January. Musk and Ramaswamy have hinted that their real goal is to get many federal employees to quit, thus relieving the president of the necessity of firing them to achieve the goal of reducing the federal budget by $2 trillion. Continue reading →

September Transit Ridership 76.3% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit agencies carried 76.3 percent as many riders in September of 2024 as they did in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s best performance, when measured as a share of pre-pandemic numbers, since the pandemic began.

Highway and Amtrak results for September will be posted here when it becomes available.

Highway travel had fully recovered from the pandemic by around July 2021. Air travel, which the Transportation Security Administration says carried 108.7 percent as many travelers as in September 2019, had recovered by January 2023 and Amtrak by October 2023. In October 2023, transit ridership still hadn’t reached 75 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, but that is probably the best it was going to do. Some of the growth in transit since then is due to some people returning to downtown offices, but much of that growth is probably more attributable to regular growth, not to recovery from the pandemic. Continue reading →

August Driving Nearly 103% of Pre-Pandemic Miles

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Americans drove 102.7 percent as many miles in August of 2024 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Highway Administration. Moreover, this is the first month I can remember since the pandemic began that driving exceeded pre-pandemic numbers on all types of roads, including urban and rural interstates, other arterials, and other roads.

For a discussion of Amtrak and airline data, see this post. For a discussion of transit data, see this post.

August 2024 driving was greater than 2019 driving in 28 states, while it was less in 22 states plus DC. DC driving was slightly less than 80 percent of 2019 miles, and miles of driving were also particularly low in Delaware (82%), Hawaii (84%), West Virginia (86%), and Massachusetts (88%). Continue reading →

Lower Fares, Higher Operating Costs

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit agencies carried 18 percent more riders in 2023 than 2022, but 29 percent fewer than in 2019. Average trip lengths declined from 5.5 miles in 2019 to 5.0 miles in 2023, probably because commuter rail and commuter buses, which tend to carry riders the longest distances, did particularly poorly. Overall transit carried 35 percent fewer passenger-miles in 2023 than in 2019. These data are based on the National Transit Database and in particular the 2023 database that the Federal Transit Administration released last week.

A bus-rapid transit line has generated lots of positive publicity for Cleveland transit, but the truth is that Cleveland has one of the worst-performing transit systems in the country, with ridership falling 35 percent between 2014 and 2019 and another 30 percent between 2019 and 2023. Photo by GoddardRocket.

Fares were proportional to passenger-miles being 35 percent less than in 2019, while operating costs were 22 percent greater. The result was that the operating subsidy per rider, at $7.26, was more than twice 2019’s, which was $3.51 and only a slight improvement over 2022’s operating subsidy of $7.59 per rider. Operating subsidies per passenger-mile grew from 64ยข in 2019 to $1.51 in 2022, declining only slightly to $1.45 in 2023. Continue reading →

Housing Data for 2023

By | | Housing, Useful Data
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The median owner-occupied home was worth $340,000 in 2023, which was 3.5 times median family incomes, according to 2023 American Community Survey data recently released by the Census Bureau. While a value-to-income ratio of 3.5 is still quite affordable, it isn’t as affordable as the 3.0 ratio in 2019. The difference is probably mainly due to supply-chain problems and labor shortages since the pandemic.

More than 6 million single-family homes were added to the nation’s housing stock between 2019 and 2023.

Despite the increase in housing costs relative to incomes, homeownership grew from 64.1 percent in 2019 to 65.2 percent in 2023. Moreover, despite densification programs in many major cities, the population of people living in single-family homes grew from 73.6 percent in 2019 to 74.3 percent in 2023. Continue reading →

Transit’s Ride into Irrelevance

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Just 3.5 percent of American workers commuted to work by public transit in 2023, according to American Community Survey data recently released by the Census Bureau. That’s down from 5.0 percent in 2019. Since transit ridership so far in 2024 is only about 4 percent more (when measured as a share of 2019 numbers) than it was in 2023, the 3.5 percent number is not likely to improve much in the future.

The increase in remote working has permanently shifted transportation patterns and particularly devastated transit ridership.

According to the survey data, the share of people working at home in 2023 was 13.8 percent, down from 15.2 percent in 2022 but up from just 5.7 percent in 2019. As I’ve noted before, the increase in remote working has a double impact on transit ridership. First, the downtown workers who were transit’s main customers before the pandemic are more likely to work at home than many other people. Second, the reduction in congestion resulting from increased remote working will lead some people who were avoiding congestion by riding transit to return to driving. Continue reading →