Transit Commuters Up But Ridership Down

Here’s a puzzle: between 2014 and 2017, the number of people who said they took transit to work in the San Jose urban area grew by 25 percent. Yet actual San Jose transit ridership fell by 15 percent. What accounts for this apparent discrepancy?

Similar but smaller discrepancies exist in a few other large urban areas. New York transit commuting is up 4% but ridership down 3%; Chicago commuting up 6% but ridership down 7%; Atlanta commuting up 12% but ridership down 8%. In some smaller urban areas, the discrepancies can be much larger: Cape Coral, Florida transit commuting is up 77% but ridership down 20%; Wichita commuting up 79% but ridership down 37%. In a few urban areas, the trends are reversed: Houston transit commuting is down 8% but ridership is up 4%; Greenville, SC commuting down 35% but ridership up 152%.

Of course, not all transit riders are commuters, so commuting can increase even as ridership drops if transit ridership for other purposes declines by more than the increase in commuting. This seems a likely explanation in many cases as most ride-hailing trips that substitute for transit are not commuter trips.

The American Community Survey questionnaire that is the source of the commuting data asks people how they “usually get to work last week.” Other surveys show that people who say they usually take transit often actually drive, while people who say they usually drive pretty much always drive. Thus, the transit commuting numbers are overestimated, and the degree of overestimate may vary from urban area to urban area and from year to year. This could account for some of the discrepancy.

Another factor that must be considered, especially in the smaller urban areas, is statistical error. The American Community Survey is based on questionnaires from more than 2 million households, which produces results that statistically accurate nationwide and in large urban areas. But when it gets down to small numbers such as people who ride transit to work in Wichita, the results may not be statistically valid.
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For example, the survey estimated that 907, plus or minus 550 (in other words, 357 to 1,457), Wichita commuters took transit to work in 2014 while 1,624, plus or minus 887 (737 to 2,511), used transit in 2017. The margins of errors broadly overlap so there may, in fact, have been no increase. In larger urban areas such as San Jose, however, the margins of error don’t overlap so sampling error is less likely to be responsible for the discrepancy between commuter numbers and total ridership.

In the converse cases — where ridership is up but commuting down — the Houston bus redesign has probably made transit more inviting for non-commuters. The Greenville result, however, is due to an omission in Federal Transit Administration data. Greenville Transit Authority’s ridership fell by 14.4 percent between 2014 and 2017. The Greenville urban area also includes Clemson, whose transit agency carried more trips in 2017 than Greenville’s. However, Clemson numbers weren’t included in the database before 2015 even though the agency has been around since 1996, so the apparent growth in ridership is fictitious.

In her paper debunking the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, former Portland State University researcher Martha Bianco observes that transit’s ridership decline in the 1920s “was occurring in off-peak hours; transit’s peak-hour ridership remained relatively stable.” In other words, as people bought cars, many continued to use transit for commuting but greatly reduced their use of it for other purposes.

The trend is probably repeating itself with the introduction of ride-hailing. While the San Jose numbers are extreme, it is likely that transit has completely lost business in the non-commuting market. It is notable that commuter rail, which usually operates mainly during rush hours, has experienced the smallest decline in ridership of any major mode. While Houston holds out some hope that transit can recover some of this business, in the long run many transit agencies should consider cutting back their hours so they can focus mainly on commuter traffic and stop wasting money and energy the rest of the day.