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
