Transit ridership in July 2020 was 64.9 percent less than it had been in July 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only a slight improvement from June, when ridership was down by 69 percent from June 2019. July bus ridership was down by 52 percent (vs. 56% in June) while rail ridership was down by 77 percent (vs. 83% in June).
Worst off was Washington DC, whose July ridership was still down by 82 percent, about the same as in June. At the other extreme was Richmond, Virginia, where July ridership was down by only 21 percent. Many urban areas in Florida and Texas were down by less than 50 percent. Apparently, the South has risen again, or at least transit ridership in the South has risen faster than in the north.
As usual, I’ve uploaded an enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet, which has month-by-month data for each transit agency and mode. My enhanced version has annual totals in columns HY to IQ, mode totals in rows 2190 through 2211, agency totals in rows 2220 through 3219, and urban area totals for the nation’s 200 largest urban areas in rows 3220 through 3424. These enhancements are made on both the ridership (UPT for unlinked passenger trips) and service (VRM for vehicle revenue miles) pages.
Normally, when I post enhanced spreadsheets, I don’t change the raw data (which are in cells A1 through HX2188). However, when I was writing the streetcar policy brief last week, I noticed there were two sets of streetcar data for Cincinnati, one under the name of the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) and one under the city of Cincinnati. Since I knew there is only one streetcar in Cincinnati, I thought this might be a mistake.
It turns out that the city of Cincinnati had asked SORTA to operate the streetcar but, after three years of disappointing ridership, was unhappy with SORTA’s management. So, on January 1, 2020, the city took it over from SORTA. Streetcar numbers before January appear in SORTA’s name; after January they appear in the city’s name.
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The problem was that ridership numbers appeared in both their names after January. The numbers for SORTA even declined, as you would expect, in April, while the numbers for the city went to zero in April because the city shut the streetcar down during the pandemic. Numbers were included for SORTA only on the ridership page; 2020 SORTA streetcar cells on the vehicle-revenue miles page were blank.
I asked the people who compile the data what was going on and they agreed that the SORTA numbers should be zero. However, when SORTA stopped reporting any data, the FTA’s database program substituted “a growth-based estimate.” The FTA promised to fix it for the September monthly report but said it was too late to change the August report. I managed to correct it by zeroing out SORTA streetcar ridership numbers for January through July 2020. Otherwise, the raw data are intact.
In other news, apparently the FTA uses “growth-based estimates” when transit agencies fail to report data. I hope these estimates are replaced with real numbers before the annual National Transit Database is released, as those reports never get updated.
Note: Due to the Labor Day weekend, this week’s policy brief will appear tomorrow.
