Transit Carries 70% of 2019 Riders in March

America’s transit systems carried 70.3 percent as many riders in March 2023 as in the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. I reported last month that transit also carried 70 percent in February as in 2019, but that was due to a minor error that crept into my spreadsheet. The actual number was 68.5 percent, so transit is still gaining slowly compared with the pre-pandemic era. However, March 2023 had two more business days than March 2019, while the two Februaries had the same number, which is probably responsible for some of March’s improvement.

The Transportation Security Administration reports that 97.8 percent as many passengers passed through airport security in March 2023 as in March 2019. That’s down from the 100.3 percent in February. The actual number of passengers increased from 58 million to 72 million, but that’s just seasonal variations.

Amtrak’s monthly performance report indicated that the railroad carried 88.3 percent as many passenger-miles in March 2023 as March 2019. That’s down slightly from the 88.6 percent in February. As with the airlines, the actual number of passenger-miles significantly grew, in Amtrak’s case by about 25 percent, but again that’s seasonal variation. For comparison, transit agencies carried about 16 percent more riders in March 2023 than in February 2023.

Highway data are not yet available, but I’ll post an update here when they are. You can download both my corrected February spreadsheet and my enhanced March spreadsheet, which show totals by year (starting in column JE), mode (starting in row 2253), transit agencies (row 2280), and urban areas (row 3281) for both ridership (UPT) and vehicle revenue-miles (VRM) of service. Both files are about 18 megabytes.