Tracking Transit Ridership's Slow Decline Since 1970

Yonah Freemark summarizes the findings of new research about historic trends in transit ridership:

Since 1970, the number of US workers roughly doubled, increasing from 77 million to more than 150 million. But over the same period, the number of transit commuters increased by only about 1 million. Just 5 percent of workers now get to work by bus or train nationwide, compared with almost 9 percent a half century ago. Most people are driving instead.

Freemark created a database of commuting patterns in the U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2019 to complete the research. As noted by Freemark, the trends are driven by residential and economic growth outside of the largest U.S. cities:

Even though the most populous metropolitan regions now account for a much smaller share of the national workforce than they did in 1970, transit use in those regions has remained consistent. In 1970, about 38 percent of US transit commuters lived in the New York City metropolitan area, while about 9 percent of employees nationwide did. Today, the area’s share of the nation’s transit commuters is roughly the same, at 38 percent, while its share of employees countrywide is down 50 percent to 6 percent. But other metropolitan areas have experienced significant changes in terms of people commuting by transit.

According to Freemark, "Major regions in the South and Midwest have seen declining transit shares of the nation’s transit commuters." Cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington, D.C. actually have more commuter traveling by transit now than they did in the 1970s.

Freemark also ties the transit ridership data to economic growth (i.e., venture capital investment) and also mines the trend data for lessons about how to get more people on transit.

An article by Tony Frangie Mawad for Bloomberg CityLab picked up the news of Freemark's research.