Vital Signs: Transit Ridership per Capita by Operator - Bay Area (2022)

VITAL SIGNS INDICATOR
Transit Ridership (T11)

FULL MEASURE NAME
Daily transit boardings

LAST UPDATED
February 2023

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 total typical weekday boardings.

DATA SOURCE
Federal Transit Administration: National Transit Database - http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/data.htm
1991-2022

California Department of Finance: E-4 Historical Population Estimates for Cities, Counties, and the State - https://dof.ca.gov/forecasting/demographics/estimates/
1991-2022

US Census Population and Housing Unit Estimates - https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest.html
1991-2022

CONTACT INFORMATION
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METHODOLOGY NOTES (across all datasets for this indicator)
The National Transit Database (NTD) dataset was lightly cleaned to correct for erroneous zero values - in which null values (unsubmitted data) were incorrectly marked as zeroes. 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.

2022 data should be considered preliminary, as it comes from the monthly data tables rather than the longer-term time series dataset. 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. 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.