Increasing Transit Ridership: A Survey of Successful Transit Systems in the 1990s

Abstract

This study examines trends in public transit ridership in the United States during the 1990s. Specifically, it focuses on agencies that increased ridership during the latter half of the decade. While transit ridership increased steadily by 13 percent nationwide between 1995 and 1999, not all systems experienced ridership growth equally. Some agencies increased ridership dramatically, some did so only minimally, and still others lost riders. What sets these agencies apart from one another? What explains the uneven growth in ridership?To examine these questions, we conducted a nationwide survey of transit agencies that added riders during the late 1990s. Specifically, transit general managers or their designees were asked about the factors they deemed important for ridership growth in their systems. We gathered information about specific transit planning efforts and programs that are not available from aggregate data sources, like the National Transit Database (NTD). This article reports the results of this survey and documents recent planning efforts of successful transit systems. We found that:1Service improvements and advertising/information programs are perceived by transit managers to have increased patronage, though opinions varied widely on how significantly such changes affected ridership.2While the literature generally suggests that fare changes affect ridership less than service improvements, universal fare coverage programs are widely perceived to have positively influenced ridership by the systems that implemented such programs.3Three factors outside of the control of transit managers and planners (population growth, economic/employment growth, and worsening traffic congestion) are frequently cited as significantly causing patronage to climb.