Sources of and Gaps in Public Transit Ridership Data

Abstract

Public transit in the United States has been ailing since before the COVID-19 pandemic. With high-quality, accessible, up-to-date data, practitioners and researchers can diagnose the causes of America’s transit ridership woes, as well as evaluate and recommend possible cures. Our study found that public transit ridership data is comparatively comprehensive, though in some cases incompatible across agencies or datasets. Data on individual riders have more holes, especially in non-commute transit trips.

About the Project

This project presents and reviews the available sources of data on public transit riders and ridership, as a resource for those who manage or simply wish to understand U.S. transit. In conducting this review, the researchers consider the advantages and disadvantages of publicly available data on transit from a variety of public and private sources, as well the relatively scarcer and less available sources of data on other providers of shared mobility, like ride-hail services, that compete with and complement public transit and pieces missing from the transit analytics pie. Data gaps both align with existing inequities and enable them to continue, unmeasured, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made closing these gaps all the more important.