Urban transit carried just over half a billion trips in the United States in December, and just under 6 billion in 2022 as a whole, according to December 2022 transit data released Monday by the Federal Transit Administration. December’s ridership was 66.0 percent of December 2019 while the calendar year’s was 62.0 percent.
Transit trips are from the National Transit Database; Amtrak passenger-miles are from Monthly Performance Reports; airline passenger data are from the Transportation Security Administration; and highway vehicle-mile data are from the Traffic Volume Trends. December highway data will be available in a week or so.
Meanwhile, after reaching above 90 percent of 2019 numbers in November for the first time since the pandemic, Amtrak numbers fell to 80 percent in December, its lowest, measured as a percentage of 2019, since May. Airline passenger numbers fell a little bit as well, but only from 94.3 to 93.3 percent of 2019. December highway numbers should be available soon.
Transit agencies should be happy that ridership did as well as it did. November had one more business day in 2022 than 2019, which helped explain why ridership took a jump from 63.7 percent in October to 67.5 percent in November. But December had the same number of business days as in 2022 as it did in 2019, yet ridership remained almost as high.
Transit in many major urban areas is doing especially poorly. December transit ridership was less than 55 percent of 2019 in Chicago, Phoenix, the Twin Cities, and San Francisco-Oakland, and less than 60 percent in Atlanta, Denver, Philadelphia, Portland, St. Louis, Seattle, and Washington. Despite poor results, Baltimore (which was under 63%), Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and other regions are still planning or building rail transit projects that didn’t make sense before the pandemic, much less now.
Fifty years of efforts trying to get people out of their cars and riding transit have failed miserably, yet this rhetoric continues to be used throughout the country. It’s almost as if someone expects to make a lot of money building multi-billion-dollar transit projects that will serve no useful transportation purposes.
As usual, I have posted an enhanced spreadsheet of the FTA’s December update, with totals by year (since 2002), by mode, by transit agency, and by urban area. These enhancements were made to the ridership (UPT for unlinked passenger trips) and service (VRM for vehicle-revenue miles) worksheets.
