Abstract

Public transit in the United States is ailing. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, transit ridership fell by more than 800 million annual transit trips, or about 7.5%, between 2014 and 2019. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 only compounded these losses. Both before and during the pandemic, the changes in transit ridership were uneven, varying across metropolitan areas, built environments, times of day, days of the week, trip purposes, operators, modes, and directions.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. The availability of detailed transit data, disaggregated across a number of axes, is more important than ever to the recovery of the transit industry and the mobility of those who rely on it. Moreover, data about transit use can answer pressing questions beyond patronage declines, including analyses of transportation equity, evaluations of proposed capital and operating improvements, inquiries into the effects of private shared mobility services, and projections of emissions and pollution, among others. All of these topics rely on a growing — though still incomplete and often incompatible — set of transit data sources collected in different ways, from different sources, on different timeframes