Vital Signs: Transit Ridership per Capita By Mode – by Metro

VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR
Transit Ridership (T12)

FULL MEASURE NAME
Per-capita annual transit boardings

LAST UPDATED
May 2017

DESCRIPTION
Transit ridership refers to the number of passenger boardings on public transportation, which includes buses, rail systems and ferries. The dataset includes metropolitan area, regional, mode and operator tables for per-capita annual boardings (for an average resident in the given region or service area).

DATA SOURCE
Federal Transit Administration: National Transit Database
http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/data.htm

CONTACT INFORMATION
[e-mail]

METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator)
Paratransit data is sparse in early years of the NTD dataset, meaning that transit ridership estimates in the early 1990s are likely underestimated. Simple modes were aggregated to combine the various bus modes (e.g. rapid bus, express bus, local bus) into a single mode to avoid incorrect conclusions resulting from mode recoding over the lifespan of NTD.

2016 data should be considered preliminary, as it is derived from the monthly data tables rather than the longer-term time-series dataset. The unlinked passenger trips recorded in NTD's Monthly Module Adjusted Data Release database is used to calculate 2016 year-over-year change in ridership. The calculated 2016 growth rate is applied to the 2015 annual unlinked passenger trips recorded in the TS2.1 - Service Dta and Operating Expenses Time-Series by Mode to estimate 2016 ridership numbers. 2016 ridership estimates were not made for small operators that did not report monthly ridership numbers. For the Bay Area, this means 2016 ridership estimates are unavailable for Union City Transit (UCT) and Vacaville City Coach. Due to the omission of some small operators from 2016 estimates, regional and metro ridership numbers are likely slightly underestimated. Weekday ridership is calculated by taking the total annual ridership and dividing by 300, an assumption which is consistent with MTC travel modeling procedures; it was also compared to observed weekday boarding data (which is more limited in availability) to ensure consistency on the regional level. Per-capita transit ridership is calculated for the operator's general service area or taxation district; for example, BART includes the three core counties (San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa) as well as northern San Mateo County post-SFO extension and AC Transit includes the cities located within its service area. ACE per-capita transit ridership is calculated using the population of Alameda and San Joaquin counties. For other metro areas, operators were identified by developing a list of all urbanized areas within a current MSA boundary and then using that UZA list to flag relevant operators; this means that all operators (both large and small) were included in the metro comparison data.