Transit Data

The Guide to the American Dream

Transit

Transit Data

The standard source for most transit data is the National Transit Data Base, which is compiled each year by the Federal Transit Administration. The American Public Transportation Association has summarized information for 1990 through 2005 in its Transit Fact Book (opens as PDF). ADC has transcribed many of the numbers in the Fact Book into a spreadsheet, including trips, passenger miles, capital costs, operating costs, and fares by mode (bus, light rail, etc.). The spreadsheet also uses GNP price deflators to convert dollar amounts to constant dollars.

For those who want more detail about one particular transit agency, ADC has transcribed data from the 2004 (744-kb spreadsheet), 2005 (1.6-mb spreadsheet), and 2006 (2.1-mb spreadsheet) National Transit Databases. These data include:

For every transit agency and every mode of transit (light rail, heavy rail, bus, etc.), trips, passenger miles, operating costs, capital costs, fares, vehicle revenue miles, and other indicators of transit performance.

When data are available, the 2005 and 2006 files also include the BTUs of energy and the 2006 file includes pounds of CO2 emitted by each agency and mode.

The spreadsheets summarize, for every major urbanized area, the total number of trips, passenger miles, and other transit information.

The 2004 and 2005 spreadsheets also have, for every major urbanized area, the total miles of driving in that area, from which the spreadsheets calculate the share of travel in that area that uses transit.

Complete data for the years 1997 through 2006 are available on line.

The table below shows transit's 2001 share of motorized travel and commuter travel in the nation's largest urban areas. The urban areas that stand out with high rates of transit ridership tend to be ones with high concentrations of downtown jobs, not ones that have invested in rail transit or have particularly high population densities. The Los Angeles, Miami, and San Jose urban areas have higher densities than the New York urban area, for example, but they don't have the job concentrations so they don't have high transit usage.

Transit and Rail Transit's Share of Motorized Passenger Miles and Transit's Share of Commuter Travel in Major Urban Areas Transit's Rail's Transit's Share Share Commuter Share New York 9.7 7.4 30.6 Los Angeles 1.8 0.5 5.8 Chicago 3.7 2.7 11.9 Philadelphia 2.6 1.6 9.7 Miami 1.0 0.3 3.6 Dallas-Ft. Worth 0.7 0.2 1.9 Boston 3.1 2.5 11.6 Washington 4.1 2.9 15.7 Detroit 0.4 0.0 1.7 Houston 1.0 0.0 3.2 Atlanta 1.1 0.6 4.0 San Francisco-Oakland 4.2 2.9 15.9 Phoenix-Mesa 0.6 0.0 2.3 Seattle-Everett 2.5 0.1 7.6 San Diego 1.3 0.5 3.1 Minneapolis-St. Paul 1.1 0.1 4.8 St. Louis 0.8 0.3 2.8 Baltimore 1.5 0.3 7.5 Tampa-St. Petersburg 0.3 0.0 1.4 Denver 1.4 0.1 4.3 Cleveland 1.3 0.3 4.9 Pittsburgh 1.4 0.1 7.3 Portland-Vancouver 2.2 0.9 7.6 San Jose 0.9 0.3 3.3 The second and third columns are transit's and rail transit's share of motorized passenger miles. Transit passenger miles are from the 2005 National Transit Data Base; highway passenger miles are from the 2005 Highway Statistics, table HM-72, with vehicle miles multipled by 1.6 to account for average auto occupancy. The last column is transit's share of commuters, based on the Census Bureau's 2005 American Community Survey journey-to-work data for urbanized areas. Taxis are excluded from transit.

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