The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and the Transit app today released the APTA Ridership Trends dashboard, a new resource designed to provide up-to-date, week-by-week estimations of public transit ridership for agencies across the U.S.
According to APTA, public transit ridership has risen and fallen rapidly in response to public health alerts across the country as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The association says these changes make it difficult for public transit agencies that rely on monthly or quarterly reporting to follow up-to-date ridership trends and benchmark against their peers. To tackle this challenge, APTA and the Transit app have partnered to build a new resource for the entire industry, tracking demand for public transit and publishing estimates of ridership change in real time.
“Agencies are looking for new, faster ways to gather data in order to respond to rider demand," David Block-Schachter, Chief Business Officer of Transit, said in a statement. "The number of people using our app for transit information is a great barometer for estimating overall ridership in near real-time. Together with APTA, we’ve been able to refine this data to provide insights to the entire industry.”
Transit’s team also analyzes route-level and system-wide origin-destination data to provide transit agencies with up-to-date information about rider demand in its Transit Dashboard.
User surveys by Transit have shown the demographics of its users to be broadly reflective of public transit ridership at large in the U.S., including during the pandemic. The company has provided a real-time tracker of public transit demand on its website since the start of the pandemic, and found its demand indicators to track closely with actual ridership statistics.
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SOURCE: American Public Transportation Association
