Rethinking mission and service delivery, rethinking fare policy, giving transit priority, careful partnering with shared-use mobility providers, and encouraging transit-oriented density are among the strategies transit agencies can employ to increase ridership and mitigate or stem declines in ridership that started years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program's TCRP Research Report 231: Recent Decline in Public Transportation Ridership: Analysis, Causes, and Responses provides a deep-dive exploration of the ridership losses already being experienced by transit systems prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and explores strategies that appear to be key as we move to the new normal of a post-pandemic world.
Supplemental to the report are TCRP Web-Only Document 74: Recent Decline in Public Transportation Ridership: Hypotheses, Methodologies, and Detailed City-by-City Results and an overview presentation.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Recent Decline in Public Transportation Ridership: Analysis, Causes, and Responses. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/26320.
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