For our last post examining US Transit trends we will look at bus ridership for the top 25 largest bus systems by 2025 first half ridership.
Previous installments in this series looked at Heavy Rail, Light Rail,and Commuter Rail. While one could make the case for analyzing Bus Rapid Transit separately, ultimately most US BRT systems do not rise above the quality of regular buses with slightly better frequency and branding, so I chose to combine BRT with all other bus services for this chart.
Unique bus modes are listed separately in the FTA NTD data but are aggregated for this analysis and include: regular local buses, demand response(microtransit & paratransit),BRT, commuter buses, and trolleybuses which are still vital assets for the transit systems in
Seattle and San Francisco as a technology well suited for use in hilly
geographies due to their electric motors providing better torque over
conventional motor buses.
Philadelphia and Dayton also runs trackless trolleys, although the mid-sized Ohio city is not large enough to be in this ranking.
Boston recently retired their trolleybuses to the consternation of many transit advocates, who argue that trackless trolleys are more reliable and efficient for meeting decarbonization demands over the current trend of battery operated buses( BEB), which have had troubling issues in reliability especially in colder climates, which threatens future service levels in many cities due to unreasonable climate mandates by leaders who care more greenwashing transportation than actually reducing greenhouse emissions, although that whole quagmire is a topic of another post. Let me finish with these non-sequitors and dive into the ridership analysis.
There are far more than 25 bus systems in the US, but to keep these charts and subsequent analysis at a reasonable length I had to limit myself to only the top 25, but in future posts I will look at smaller yet also productive systems by analysing per capita bus ridership.
Ridership Chart
A quick note on data details: some may object object to listing both of MTA’s bus divisions twice taking away space for a less heralded transit system such say MIlwaukke, but MTA NYTC and MTA Bus Company are fundamentally different systems and deserve to be listed and analysed separately. An exhaustive explanation of the history of surface transit in New York City is beyond the scope of this post, but a short is that MTA Bus Company was created in 2004 to assume operations of seven previously private companies operating under a franchise with the NYC DOT, with operations gradually transferred over the course of 2005-2006.
These private companies predominantly operated local buses in Queens as well as some routes in the Bronx and Brookylyn as well as express routes from the outer boroughs to Manhattan, serving communities typically out of reach of the subway. Analyzing its growth separately potentially reveals actionable insights into ridership surface trends in the largest transit agency in North America, with the MTA Bus Company reaching prepandemic levels and having strong YoY growth while the main MTA bus operations are stagnant and still below 2019 levels, although they have mostly recovered overall owing to NYC’s reliance on transit as the primary mode of transportation for all residents rich and poor alike.
MTA Bus Company’s YoY ridership growth of 7% is a leader amongst large bus systems, doing far better than the larger MTA bus division, although ultimately with far less ridership overall. The reasons for the divergences are unclear and likely will require rigorous geospatial data analysis to uncover relevant factors which are beyond the time constraints of this timely data update but perhaps will be revealed in future updates looking at transit ridership in the US
Overall, bus systems have typically recovered more ridership overall due to the typical demographic makeup of more working class passengers compared to the more prevalent professional white collar worker riding rail downtown who has shifted to a hybrid work situation as a new norm, leading to uneven ridership through weekdays with Monday and Friday having lower rail ridership than the middle weeks.
No agency among the top 25 had either double digit percentage ridership growth or loss, with Vegas and Seattle having the highest YoY increase along with the aforementioned MTA Bus Co. Several systems had moderate losses with Miami-Dade Transit having the largest decline, perhaps related to methodological factors for counting ridership.
SEPTA also had decent growth for bus systems, following the trend of their other modes, although recent service cuts to the SEPTA will certainly reverse any positive gain they have had recently. Most systems were in the modest range of 3-4% YoY growth and with service cuts threatening the utility of many systems nation-wide this is perhaps the the peak ridership for many systems in the 2020s sadly, although there is still time to avert the fiscal cliff death spiral faced by almost every US transit system, although the chance of preventing these dire service cuts becomes slimmer each day.
Ridership Recovery Rates for top 25 highest ridership systems
Finally, looking at recovery rates for the top 25 systems, aside from the MTA Bus Company division which should likely be grouped with the main MTA bus division when analysing ridership, WMATA Metrobus has had the highest recovery rate, matching ridership levels from 2019, another reason to applaud the stellar leadership of Randy Clark. The loss of the DC Circulator bus routes at the end of 2024, shuttle routes largely aimed at tourists, perhaps has played a part too with ridership on these routes likely shifting to regular bus routes; although ridership was marginal with barely over 1 million annual riders in 2024 so those riders accruing to Metrobus likely make up a miniscule portion of the overall success of DC’s surface transit at regaining lost riders.
Orange County Transportation Authority in California has almost matched 2019 ridership levels as well, likely due to demographics of riders in the OC. As a sprawling suburban area, the only likely riders are low income passengers with working class employment unable to shift to work from home or hybrid. Overall, OCTA only has approximately 115,000 weekday riders for a county with a population of 3.2M, so mode share for transit is very low, not surprising considering the car-dependent land use and roads hostile to cyclists and pedestrians.
The cities with poor rail recovery such as Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Denver are also doing poorly at regaining bus riders, likely related to service quality issues and WFH still affecting their downtown office employment. Systems with predominantly working class lower income ridership such as Houston, LA, Las Vegas have largely recovered most of their former ridership, although we hope that ridership continues to grow and does not plateau.
A last note regarding data quality: Miami-Dade Transit switched to using Automatic People Counters(APC) to record ridership in 2022 and determined they were previously undercounting ridership so previous periods were adjusted up by 1.48 for all former months. This revision is reflected in the Complete Monthly Ridership dataset but not the Raw Monthly Ridership dataset, so these charts may differ from charts I have shared on social media in the past now that I have realized the extent of the revisions. Thanks for your understanding.
My next series of blog posts will look at service efficiency for various transit modes using the same dataset.