Why public transit trips matter
Higher use of public transit can help to reduce the number of people using cars. According to the National Vision Zero Network, fewer cars on the road lead to fewer crashes, injuries, and fatalities among all types of people traveling on the road. The annual public transit trips cover all trips taken across all age and demographic groups.
Public transit systems usually have a larger service area than the city's boundaries. For each of our peer cities, we identified the primary transit system and the total population served by the transit system. This allows us to normalize the number of trips taken across the cities.
How to use this dashboard
The dashboard covers public transit trips for the population served by that transit system for 2012 to 2022. To add or remove cities from the visualization, click on the city names below.
As mentioned above, the transit systems often cover a broader area than just the peer city. We used the following transit operating systems:
- Boston: Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority
- Chicago: Chicago Transit Authority
- Long Beach: Long Beach Transit
- Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority
- Miami: County of Miami-Dade (Miami-Dade Transit)
- Minneapolis: Metro Transit
- New York: MTA New York City Transit
- Portland: Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon
- Oakland: Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District
- San Francisco: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (Muni)
- San Jose: Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority
- Seattle: King County Department of Metro Transit
- Washington D.C.: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority
Annual public transit trips
Data notes and sources
Data notes and sources
All public transit ridership data comes from the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database (NTD). We used the monthly adjusted ridership rates for the transit agencies covering our peer cities.
The populations served by the transit system are collected by the NTD. We accessed these populations from the Urban Integrated National Transit Database, which provides the data in a more accessible format.
A technical limitation of the dashboarding software (Microsoft PowerBI): When all cities are selected in the filter, not all city names may show in the dashboard. Use the legend to confirm the city by color, the tooltip (if available), or change the filters to view fewer cities at once.
To view the full dataset, visit the DataSF Open Data Portal.
Key takeaways
San Francisco has the second-highest number of annual public transit trips among the population served by its transit system. With 143 trips per person per year, San Francisco is only below New York, with 259 trips per person per year. The other peer cities have 70 or fewer trips per person per year.
Public transit rates declined during the pandemic and are slowly rising. San Francisco had between approximately 250-275 trips per person per year from 2012 to 2019. Rates dropped to just under 100 in 2020 and 2021, and are showing an increase in 2022. All transit systems saw similar declines and slow improvements.
Explore other metrics
Visit the Vision Zero Benchmarking home page to learn more about the effort and explore other metrics.