Abstract
This report presents and reviews the available sources of data on public transit riders and ridership. The research team intends it to be a resource for those who manage or simply wish to understand U.S. transit. In conducting this review, the team considers the advantages and disadvantages of publicly available data on transit from a variety of public and private sources. The research team also considers 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, as well as pieces the team sees as missing from the transit analytics pie. The research paper concludes by discussing how data gaps both align with existing inequities and enable them to continue, unmeasured, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has made closing these gaps all the more important.
