Lowest Transit Ridership Evah

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.

I also have National Transit Database files going back to 1982. For urban areas with rail transit, I have already noted annual ridership numbers from these files. But doing so is tedious so I didn’t refer to the original data for other urban areas.

Nationwide, 2018 ridership was lower than any year since 2005. But national numbers are heavily influence by the New York urban area, where 2018 ridership was lowest since 2011. Some urban areas are far worse off than the national average.

Among the 60 largest urban areas, it appears that 2018 ridership in Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Memphis, Louisville, Richmond, and Omaha were the lowest levels of any year I have. That means going back to 1982 for Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cleveland and 1991 for the other urban areas. In at least some of these urban areas, I suspect the 2018 numbers are the lowest since sometime before 1920. Nationwide transit ridership hit a very low point in 1995, and if 2018 numbers in a particular region were below that, they may be the lowest in a century.

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The major transit agencies in these urban areas generally go back to about the same year, plus or minus a year, as the urban areas as a whole. In Chicago, CTA’s ridership is the lowest since 1999 while Metra’s is lowest since 2004 and Pace, which runs suburban buses, is the lowest of any year I have. In Los Angeles, Metro’s ridership is lowest since 1997 and Orange County Transit is lowest since 1994, while the city of Los Angeles is lowest since 2004 and Metrolink lowest since 2011.

Most other urban areas are only at their lowest since sometime between 2004 and 2016. That doesn’t mean their situations aren’t equally dire; they just haven’t yet fallen as far as the urban areas mentioned above.

On the positive side, Seattle’s ridership is the highest of any year I have, and considering that ridership was 150 percent greater in 2018 than it was back in the 1980s, it’s probably greater than any time since the 1960s or even the 1950s. Houston’s ridership is the highest since 2008, but considering that ridership in the mid-2000s was at least 10 percent greater than in 2018, Houston has less to brag about than Seattle.

Richmond ridership has begun to recover since it implemented a redesigned bus system in mid-2018. Like Houston, it should grow in the next few years but, like Houston, it may never reach the level it was in 2007, when transit carried almost twice as many trips as in 2018.

Since 2019 ridership is, so far, continuing to decline, it is likely to push back the years since the last low point. In the meantime, you can memorize the above numbers for your next cocktail party.