A recent news story reported that DC Metro ridership had fallen to its lowest level since 2000. Another story reported the Philadelphia bus ridership had fallen to its lowest level since 2002. While the Antiplanner has been tracking the decline in transit ridership for several years, I never thought of expressing it in this particular way.
So I decided to look at major urban areas and transit agencies to see how many years it has been since their ridership has been as low as it was in 2018. If nothing else, this would give me the ability to casually say at cocktail parties, “Did you know that Los Angeles transit ridership is the lowest it has been since 1997?” Unfortunately, for some reason, the Antiplanner doesn’t get invited to too many cocktail parties.
In any case, I decided to compare calendar year 2018 ridership data with the Federal Transit Administration’s historic time series. One slight problem is that the historic time series is based on the fiscal years of the individual agencies, so the 2018 data, when it is published, won’t be exactly the same as the calendar year 2018 numbers. But the historic time series goes back to 1991, while the monthly time series that is the source of the calendar year data only goes back to 2002. Continue reading
