Category Archives: Useful Data

America’s public transit systems carried 80.1 percent as many riders in February 2025 as in the same month of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This is the first month since the pandemic that ridership exceeded 80 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Highway data are not yet available but will be reported here soon.

It might seem a bit picky to point it out, but the pandemic didn’t begin to have an effect on transportation until March, 2020, so February numbers should really be compared with February 2020. In that case, transit carried only 77.4 percent of pre-pandemic numbers in February 2025 (after adjusting for the fact that February had 29 days in 2020). The lines in the chart, however, are based on 2019. Continue reading →

January transit ridership in 2024 was 79.8 percent as much as in 2019, according to data released late last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic and may be due to an increased number of people returning to workplaces in Manhattan.

While transit in the New York urban area carried 88.2 percent of 2019 levels and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority carried 90.5 percent, transit in the rest of the country carried only 73.1 percent. Transit ridership continued to be particularly dismal in Chicago (66.7%), Atlanta (48.0%), Phoenix (50.2%), San Francisco (65.7%), Minneapolis-St. Paul (64.5%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (59.7%), and St. Louis (55.4%). Continue reading →

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 →

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 →