Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030

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Journal of Public Transportation

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Transit Blues in the Golden State: Regional transit ridership trends in

California ]]
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Jacob L. Wassermana,
⁎,1
, Brian D. Taylorb,2
a
UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, United States
b
UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Public investment in transit increased following the Great Recession, yet transit use nationally mostly fell, even
Public transit prior to the 2020 pandemic. We investigate this troubling disjuncture by comparing transit ridership trends
Ridership during the 2010s in two of America’s largest regions: Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. While
Performance both California regions lost transit riders, we see substantial differences in the scale, timing, geography, and
modes of these declines. In the LA area, ridership fell longer and further, spread more across routes, times, and
sub-regions and concentrated on the region’s dominant operator. In both regions, increasing auto access appears
to have played a central role, albeit in different ways. Greater LA saw increased automobile ownership, parti-
cularly among high-propensity transit riders. In the Bay Area, as jobs and housing have dispersed, ridehail
services like Lyft and Uber may have eroded non-commute transit use.

Introduction
In many ways, the 2010s should have been boom times for public
transit. The economy was mostly growing, public support for transit
was considerable (Manville and Levine, 2018), and public investments
in transit were expanding. Driven by increases in both capital and op-
erating budgets, especially for rail, inflation-adjusted transit subsidies
per capita in the U.S. were at an all-time high in the late 2010s (FTA,
2020). Despite these reasons for optimism, public transit use nation-
wide fell each year since 2014 (before plummeting in 2020 amidst the
novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic). Overall, American transit
patronage declined 7.2% between 2014 and 2018, or 770 million an-
nual rides (FTA, 2020).
Perhaps nowhere in the U.S. was the divergence between transit’s
expectations and reality sharper than in the two largest regions in the
nation’s most populous state, California. For all their differences,
Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area each have ex-
tensive public transit systems. Both have invested heavily in improving
these networks and increasing their use; both have built substantial new
rail lines; and both lost transit riders—though to different degrees, over
different time frames, and with different contours. Given these simila-
rities and differences, we examine public transit in the Los Angeles and
Bay Areas, whose trends offer broader insights on the state of pre-
pandemic (and potentially post-pandemic) American transit.
Greater LA and the Bay Area are the second- and fifth-largest regions
in the U.S. Two-thirds of Californians call one these mega-regions
home. Their public transit and highway networks are planned as part of
the nation’s first- and fourth-biggest metropolitan planning organiza-
tion (MPO) regions (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b; FHWA, 2019).
In this article, we focus on trends in transit use and service across
these two regions in order to shed light on the many dimensions of
falling ridership and to consider factors behind the decline. This is, in
general, a “supply-side” analysis, which centers on systems and their
services rather than on travelers and their behaviors. Accordingly, we
examine trends by transit mode, sub-region, time of day and week, and
costs. We also highlight patterns and trends on the three largest op-
erators in these two regions, as they have a particularly outsized in-
fluence on overall ridership. We show that the pre-pandemic ridership
slump in Greater Los Angeles was both deeper and more geographically
and temporally widespread than in the Bay Area, which suggests broad-
based causes like region-wide increases in auto access (Manville et al.,
2022; Manville et al., 2018). The more recent Bay Area ridership de-
cline, by contrast, was concentrated at off-peak times, non-commute
directions, and outlying parts of the region; such patterns support more

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jacobwasserman@ucla.edu (J.L. Wasserman), btaylor@ucla.edu (B.D. Taylor).
1
ORCID: 0000-0003-2212-5798.
2
ORCID: 0000-0002-1037-2751.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubtr.2022.100030

Available online 21 April 2022

1077-291X/© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. CC_BY_NC_ND_4.0
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
targeted explanations like burgeoning ridehail or changing residential
patterns that disproportionately affect non-commute trips (Blumenberg
et al., 2020; Wasserman et al., 2020; Wasserman, 2019).
Previous research
In their review of research on the determinants of transit ridership,
Taylor and Fink (2013) discuss how a wide variety of internal factors
(like service levels and fares) under transit operators’ control and ex-
ternal factors (like employment levels and climate) beyond it affect
transit use. They conclude that, while external factors most importantly
shape the scope and scale of transit use, internal factors play important
roles at the margins.
Confirming earlier studies (Gómez-Ibáñez, 1996; Chung, 1997),
Taylor et al. (2009) find that that internal factors (specifically vehicle
revenue miles and fares) account for about 26% of the variation in
transit ridership per capita across U.S. urbanized areas, while the ex-
ternal factors population density, percent of zero-vehicle households,
and median household income explain far more. While Alam, et al.,
2015 and Boisjoly et al. (2018) find that an internal factor—vehicle
revenue miles per capita—is by far the most significant ridership de-
terminant, they do not account for the endogeneity of service supply
and demand. While the quantity and quality of service supply surely
affect ridership (Liu, 1993; Gómez-Ibáñez, 1996; Kain and Liu, 1996;
Kohn, 2000; Thompson et al., 2012), the amount of transit service
supplied is in turn largely a function of the demand for it. Indeed,
service supply was on the rise in both California regions examined here
just as ridership was falling, suggesting that the relationship between
service supply and use is far from a simple one.
Among external factors, traveler auto access and socio-economic
characteristics are strongly associated with transit use. Two of the most
significant of these, auto access and income, are particularly relevant in
California (Schouten et al., 2021). A number of studies find that in-
creased vehicle ownership and decreased zero-vehicle households de-
press transit use, because those with access to cars tend to ride transit
far less (Giuliano, 2005; Manville et al., 2022; Taylor et al., 2009; Kain
and Liu, 1996; Liu, 1993; Manville et al., 2018). Public transit is, in
economists’ parlance, an “inferior good,” in that households tend to
consume transit less as their incomes rise; this is likely because incomes
are positively associated with vehicle ownership as well (Liu, 1993;
Gómez-Ibáñez, 1996; Giuliano, 2005; Taylor et al., 2009).
Immigrants are more likely to ride transit than the native-born, so
immigration status, country of origin, and years in the U.S. all affect
transit use. Regions with large foreign-born populations, like Greater LA
and the Bay Area, have higher transit use, all else equal. In fact, im-
migration explains most of the increase in transit commuters in
California from 1980 to 2000 (Blumenberg and Evans, 2007). But dif-
ferent immigrant populations travel differently: recent immigrants from
Asia are far more likely to commute by driving alone than recent im-
migrants from Latin America. And recent immigrants, all else equal,
tend to ride transit more frequently than those who have been in the
U.S. for many years (Blumenberg, 2009).
Finally, there is a lively debate in the research literature and popular
press over the effects of ridehail services like Lyft and Uber on transit
use. Conceptually, ridehail may substitute for public transit by replacing
trips once made on bus or rail, may complement transit by bringing new
riders from trip origins to stops/stations and from stops/stations to
destinations, or some combination of the two. Or, they may have little
noticeable effect either way, as the two modes tend to serve different
travel markets. Surveys of ridehail passengers offer a wide range of
estimates of what share of ridehail trips replace transit (Schaller, 2018;
Feigon and Murphy, 2016; Circella et al., 2018; Clewlow and Mishra,
2017; Gehrke et al., 2018; Hampshire et al., 2017; Henao, 2017; New
York City Department of Transportation, 2018; Rayle et al., 2016;
Dong, 2020). Some studies find that ridehail use is high during periods
like Friday and Saturday nights that do not coincide with times of high
2
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
transit use (Rayle et al., 2016; Castiglione et al., 2017), though others
show that ridehail is also popular during transit’s traditional morning
and afternoon peaks (Castiglione et al., 2017). The services’ relative
newness and tight control over their data leave analyses relatively
scarce for such an important topic. But using differences in when Uber
entered various markets, Graehler et al. (2019) and Babar and Burtch
(2017) both find evidence that ridehail increasingly substitutes for
transit the longer it has been operating in a given metropolitan area,
though Hall et al., (2018) dissent. “Our research…suggests,” the former
conclude, “that past research findings that [ridehail] and other emer-
ging modes either increase or do not affect transit ridership are likely
incorrect” (Graehler et al., 2019, 15). At the least, if ridehail is sub-
stituting for transit anywhere, it would be in its first and most estab-
lished home, the Bay Area and California. Indeed, in a recent study of
San Francisco, Erhardt et al. (2021) used a unique dataset scraped from
ridehail application programming interfaces (APIs) and found that ri-
dehail depressed bus ridership ten percent below expected levels
(though ridehail had little effect on rail).
Synthetic studies have begun examining how these various factors
have contributed to recent transit ridership trends. Berrebi and Watkins
(2020) analyze stop-level bus patronage data between 2012 and 2018
and find that the effect of nearby socio-economic factors on ridership
vary across the four cities studied (Atlanta, Miami, Minneapolis, and
Portland); the most consistent effect is that the proportion of nearby
white residents is negatively correlated with change in bus patronage.
In an analysis of national ridership trends between 2012 and 2018,
Watkins et al. (2020) classify U.S. metropolitan areas into five clus-
ters—with metropolitan Los Angeles one of those classes by itself—and
find that 1) changes in transit service are associated with changes in
ridership, with the exception of bus service in large metropolitan areas,
2) population growth is not associated with ridership growth on service
operating in mixed traffic (like most bus service), 3) change in the
proportion of zero-vehicle households is weakly associated with rider-
ship change, and, 4) bus patronage declines foreshadowed subsequent
drops in rail ridership.
With respect to that outlier, Greater Los Angeles, Manville et al.
(2018, 2022) attribute patronage drops through 2017 primarily to a
dramatic increase in auto access and ownership since 2000. They find
that neighborhood change and residential displacement may also play a
role, while fares, service levels, gas prices, and ridehail did not have
substantial effects. Since the Bay Area’s decline in transit trips was more
recent, there has been little research on it. Erhardt (2016) examined
Bay Area transit use immediately prior to the late 2010s ridership
downturn and found that employment growth between 2009 and 2013
explained most of the increased ridership on Bay Area Rapid Transit
(BART) and had a strong positive effect on San Francisco Municipal
Transportation Agency (Muni or SFMTA) patronage as well. Slight cuts
to service miles had a lesser, though statistically significant, negative
effect on BART’s and Muni’s patronage. More recently, the study by
Erhardt et al. (2021) discussed above found that ridehail had the largest
effect of any factor modeled on SFMTA bus ridership, depressing it
significantly. Thus, limited recent research suggests that the drivers of
ridership changes differ between the two regions, though in both, fac-
tors external to transit systems appear to predominate.
Research design
Research motivation
The research on declining transit use in the U.S. during the 2010s
suggests that beneath topline patronage trends is a complex set of causes
that likely vary substantially from place to place. Studies that are national
in scope do not typically allow for disaggregated analyses of ridership or
service by time-of-day, line, or stop, while highly disaggregated analyses
are typically of a single system or metropolitan area, though Berrebi and
Watkins’ (2020) stop-level analysis of four cities is a notable exception.
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030

Table 1
Comparing Greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Metric Year Greater Los Angeles San Francisco Bay Area United States

Population 2008 17.8 mil. 7.0 mil. 304.1 mil.

2014 18.6 mil. 7.5 mil. 318.3 mil.
2018 18.9 mil. 7.8 mil. 326.7 mil.
Real annual household income 2008 $69,717 $91,183 $60,681
(National median income and population-weighted average of counties’ median 2014 $63,299 $90,673 $56,914
incomes, in 2018 dollars) 2018 $71,661 $109,732 $61,937
Vehicles per capita 2008 0.60 0.65 0.66
2014 0.59 0.64 0.65
2018 0.63 0.66 0.68
Percent of households with zero automobiles 2008 7.6% 9.4% 8.8%
2014 7.5% 9.9% 9.1%
2018 6.6% 9.1% 8.5%
Transit boardings per capita 2008 41.5 72.2 34.1
2014 39.2 68.6 33.4
2018 31.8 65.0 30.2
Transit revenue service hours per capita 2008 1.15 1.82 0.95
2014 1.15 1.57 0.94
2018 1.19 1.74 0.97
Jobs per capita 2008 0.41 0.46 0.42
2014 0.41 0.47 0.43
2018 0.44 0.52 0.44
Share of regional jobs in City of Los Angeles or City of San Francisco 2008 21.7% 17.0% N/A
2014 22.7% 18.7% N/A
2018 22.5% 18.7% N/A

Data source: U.S. Census Bureau (2019a,b, 2021), BLS (2020), FTA, (2020).

While we gathered considerable data for this paper, they are from a wide
array of sources, are organized in varied ways and aggregated to different
geographies, and in several cases cover slightly different time periods.
Because the incompatibility of these data and unavailability of other re-
levant datasets do not allow us estimate multivariate statistical models
that meaningfully consider all relevant factors examined here across all
relevant axes, the analysis we present below is a largely circumstantial
one; we compare and contrast the West’s two largest regions to explore
the potential roles of both internal and external factors in explaining these
ridership losses. We focus in particular on the degree to which the re-
gions, their transit systems and service, and patterns of transit use are
similar and different.
Scope and definitions
We define the Greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area regions
by the extent of their metropolitan planning organizations. “Greater Los
Angeles,” “Greater LA,” and the “Los Angeles Area” refer to six counties
covered by the Southern California Association of Governments—Imperial,
Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura (but notably
not San Diego). The “San Francisco Bay Area” or “Bay Area” represents the
nine counties covered by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
(MTC)—Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo,
Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.
We analyze transit ridership and the factors related to it at three key
points in time: 2008, the last year of rising ridership nationally before
the Great Recession; 2014, the post-Great-Recession peak in ridership;
and 2018, the most recent year of available data for all relevant data-
sets, as of writing. For some comparisons across large operators, we use
2015 or Fiscal Year 2015 (the earliest years of comparable ridership
data) instead of 2014.
Data and methods
To compare and contrast transit ridership trends, we analyzed pa-
tronage and service trends in each region and on their largest transit
operators. Our analysis serves as an important check with which the
timing, geography, and scale of any proposed explanation for transit
patronage changes should agree.
This analysis draws primarily on ridership, service, and performance
data from the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) National Transit
Database (NTD), to which essentially all public transit agencies that
receive federal transit funding report (FTA, 2020). Following the lead of
other scholarly publications, we reference annual NTD data by calendar
year in graphs and text, though technically the data are the aggregate of
each operator’s fiscal year (whose start and end dates vary among op-
erators) (Wasserman and Taylor, 2021). When measuring annual transit
costs, we sum operating expenses with a ten-year rolling average of
capital expenses. Since capital costs often rise and fall dramatically as
agencies incur one-time expenses for large projects every few years, a
rolling average smooths out costs for more even comparisons.
Using these data, we examine the timing and scale of the ridership
decline in the two regions and its relationship to service and spending.
To dive deeper, we also compare patronage trends on the largest transit
operator in Greater Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority (LA Metro), and the two largest Bay Area
operators, Muni and BART, using their internal datasets (LA Metro,
2019a; SFMTA, 2018; BART, 2021).
Analysis
The regions, compared
The Los Angeles Area and the Bay Area differ, but in many ways that
run counter to conventional wisdom. Greater Los Angeles actually
contains the mostly densely populated urbanized area in America—not
because the region has a particularly populous or compact central area,
but rather because its other urban neighborhoods and its suburbs are
relatively densely populated (Manville and Shoup, 2005). “The New
York and San Francisco urbanized areas look like Hong Kong sur-
rounded by Phoenix,” write Manville and Shoup, “while the Los Angeles
urbanized area looks like Los Angeles surrounded by...well, Los An-
geles” (Manville and Shoup, 2005, 238).
In theory, Greater Los Angeles’ higher average density should sup-
port high transit use. Despite its auto-centric reputation, the Los
Angeles Area also has fewer cars per capita than the Bay Area (See
Table 1). However, the more significant difference between the regions
is how auto access has changed in recent years. Per the American

3
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Community Survey, from 2008 to 2018, vehicles per capita increased
by 31 autos per 1000 people in the Los Angeles Area, compared to an
increase of just 13 per 1000 in the Bay Area. The share of households
with no automobiles, which as discussed above is an especially im-
portant predictor of transit use, fell by over 12% in Greater Los Angeles,
but changed relatively little in the Bay Area over the same period (U.S.
Census Bureau, 2019a,b).
Beyond transportation and built form, the demographics of each region
differ as well. Greater Los Angeles is, on average, the poorer region, with a
median household income 65% of the Bay Area’s (See Table 1). The Bay
Area has a greater share of non-Hispanic white residents. While both re-
gions have nearly the same share of foreign-born residents, a majority of
immigrants to the Bay Area come from Asia, while a majority of im-
migrants to the Los Angeles Area come from Latin America (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2019b) and are less likely, on average, to drive alone. Again, prior
research suggests that these demographic factors would support higher
levels of transit use in Greater Los Angeles (Liu, 1993; Gómez-Ibáñez,
1996; Taylor et al., 2009; Valenzuela, 2000; Blumenberg and Evans, 2007;
Blumenberg, 2009). However, pre-pandemic transit ridership per capita
was in fact far higher in the Bay Area than the Los Angeles Area—in part
because transit operators in the former supplied around 1.5 times more
revenue service hours per capita (See Table 1) (FTA, 2020).
Overall ridership trends across the two regions
While transit systems in both the Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles
lost ridership in the half-decade before the pandemic, the timing and
scale of these declines differed substantially (See Fig. 1). After losing
patronage during the Great Recession, both areas had more or less re-
covered riders in absolute terms by 2014. By then, Los Angeles Area
ridership had nearly returned to its pre-Great-Recession high, and Bay
Area patronage had exceeded it. Thereafter, the regions’ ridership fates
began to diverge. In 2014, transit ridership peaked in the U.S., Cali-
fornia, and Greater Los Angeles. Since then, trip numbers in the Los
Angeles Area fell every year, each more than the last. Between 2014
and 2018, Greater Los Angeles lost 128 million annual riders, a drop of
18%. But in the Bay Area, ridership continued to climb into 2016. Like
Houston and Seattle, the Bay Area appeared at the time to be one of the
few U.S. regions immune to the ridership crisis plaguing the rest of the
nation. In 2017, though, the Bay Area too fell ill. In 2017 and 2018
combined, regional ridership declined five percent, a loss of nearly 28
million annual boardings (FTA, 2020).
Why the difference in timing? In part, high ridership on Muni and
especially growth on BART propped up Bay Area ridership as the rest of
the region’s operators experienced declines similar to much of the
country. More broadly, two possibilities emerge. Perhaps the same factors
were at play in Greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area (and, indeed, the
rest of the country), but some other force, like the Bay Area’s white-hot
economy, delayed the decline there for two years. Alternatively, a set of
factors different than in Greater LA may have caused the Bay Area’s
Fig. 1. The different timing of changes in ridership by region.
Data source: FTA (2020).
4
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
Fig. 2. Mostly falling boardings per capita predated absolute ridership declines.
Data source: FTA (2020), U.S. Census Bureau (2019b).
ridership to fall, or the most influential factors in the Los Angeles Area
had far less effect in the San Francisco Bay Area, or vice versa. The evi-
dence below offers support, albeit not proof, of the latter explanation.
In both regions, though, worrying signs predate the drop in absolute
ridership. While both regions grew their absolute ridership numbers in
the years after the Great Recession, transit use failed to keep pace with
population growth (See Fig. 2). Even before the collapse of national
transit ridership in the mid-2010s, boardings per capita in each region
were lower in 2014, after years of economic recovery, than in 2008
(FTA, 2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b).
Again, the contours and timing of this downward trend differed
between the regions (See Fig. 2). In the Los Angeles Area, aside from
two years of slight upticks, ridership per capita slid throughout the
2010s, with the slump of the second half of the decade accelerating the
downward trend. In the Bay Area, in contrast, ridership per capita after
the Great Recession grew at a higher rate and for longer than in its
southern neighbor. Boardings per person inched up between 2011 and
2016, though those gains were erased in a single year, 2017. Before the
recent pre-pandemic downturn, boardings per capita were already
much higher in the San Francisco Bay Area, but by 2018, the Bay Area
had over twice as many boardings per person as the Los Angeles Area:
65.0 to 31.8. All the while, the Bay Area experienced a higher rate of
population growth than both Greater Los Angeles and the nation as a
whole (FTA, 2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b).
Falling ridership across time, space, and operators
Transit patronage, in general, tends to vary by day of the week, time of
day, area, mode, direction, route, and stop; periods of falling ridership are
no exception. In Greater LA and the Bay Area, ridership declines did not
occur evenly across sub-regions or the agencies that serve them. In broad
strokes, operator data show that the declines in Greater Los Angeles were
broad-based, across days of the week and the region as a whole, while
ridership losses in the Bay Area were highly concentrated at off-peak times,
on non-commute-oriented routes and services, and on smaller operators.
Both regions, though, saw a widening gap between bus and rail ridership.
Ridership trends by mode
Across California, rail ridership grew dramatically as bus ridership
stagnated or fell. The difference was particularly pronounced in Greater Los
Angeles (See Fig. 3). Rail patronage in the region peaked in 2017, a 29%
increase since 2008, while bus trips plummeted 26% over the same period.
In the Bay Area, the divide was less stark but still noticeable. In neither
region did bus ridership recover from its Great-Recession-era losses, but
only in the Los Angeles Area did bus ridership fall so sharply since 2014
(FTA, 2020). The most acute factors behind all of California’s ridership
decline were thus those behind Greater LA’s bus patronage slump.
Some part of this modal divergence in both regions was due to riders
shifting from buses to often new or extended train lines. Indeed, the fact
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Fig. 3. Modal differences in ridership trends in both regions.
Data source: FTA (2020).
that Greater Los Angeles’ rail network was growing far faster than the
Bay Area’s already substantial rail transit system likely explains some of
the regional differences by transit mode. However, these modal shifts
cannot account for much of the losses from buses. Bus ridership was
down on many routes in the Bay Area and Greater Los Angeles that do
not parallel rail lines (Manville et al., 2022; Manville et al., 2018;
Wasserman et al., 2020). And the sheer scale of bus losses, especially in
Los Angeles, is far greater than the shifts to rail.
As stark as the modal gaps are, it is nonetheless noteworthy that both
bus and rail ridership have been falling since around 2014–2016.
Whatever the factors behind their past divergence—modal differences
in investment and service provision, for two—the factors behind the
late 2010s ridership slump affected both modes. The usual reasons
proffered for the bus/rail divide thus do not neatly align with the rea-
sons for the recent overall transit use decline.
Comparing the largest operators
One agency dominates transit in California: LA Metro. LA Metro, which
operates buses across much of the Los Angeles Basin and in the San
Fernando Valley, along with a rapidly expanding rail network, carried 65
out of every 100 pre-pandemic transit trips in Greater Los Angeles and 30
out of every 100 trips in the entire state. But its share of the state’s ri-
dership losses is even larger. Between 2014 and 2018, LA Metro’s annual
ridership fell by 85 million boardings, or 18%. This loss accounted for over
half of the state’s ridership decline—dwarfing any other California oper-
ator—and was 11% of the entire nation’s patronage losses (FTA, 2020).
While the Bay Area lacks a single operator with so much market
share and geographic spread, the region’s two largest agencies, Muni
and BART, together carried 70% of Bay Area trips in 2018 (FTA, 2020).
Muni runs buses and light rail (as well as cable cars and historic
streetcars) in San Francisco, the densest American county outside of
New York City and the densest transit service area in the state (FTA,
2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b). In this very transit-supportive en-
vironment, Muni lost less than two percent of its ridership between
2014 and 2018, accounting for only two percent of statewide losses.
Meanwhile, BART—the Bay Area’s regional metro system—actually
gained riders over this period, with patronage growing three percent,
though it too was on the decline after 2016. On LA Metro, many bus
trunk lines and the two busiest rail lines both lost substantial ridership,
while Rapid buses on Muni and a number of track segments on BART
gained trips. These two Bay Area agencies were by no means on firm
footing with respect to ridership, but unlike in Greater Los Angeles, Bay
Area patronage losses were not concentrated on the largest agencies
5
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
(FTA, 2020; LA Metro, 2019a; SFMTA, 2018; BART, 2021).
Without BART and Muni, the Bay Area’s transit use trends look si-
milar to Greater Los Angeles and the rest of country. Returning to Fig. 1,
Bay Area ridership fell considerably further and faster when its two
largest operators are excluded (FTA, 2020). Unlike in Greater Los An-
geles, where the largest operator faces the largest patronage problems,
the Bay Area’s biggest transit agencies held aloft the region’s topline
ridership. This comparison offers insight for other regions across the
country: even in areas where ridership totals remained steady, the
trends of the operators serving the densest neighborhoods or serving
commute trips into and out of large business districts may obscure ri-
dership losses on smaller agencies.
Temporal and spatial aspects of falling ridership
A major reason the Bay Area’s biggest operators avoided ridership
declines at the scale of Greater Los Angeles, or even the U.S. as a whole,
is that transit use at peak times and in commute directions remained
strong. By contrast, patronage losses on LA Metro were more wide-
spread geographically and temporally.
Take ridership by day of the week. In both regions, daily ridership
was far higher on weekdays than weekends. On LA Metro patronage fell
roughly evenly across the week: weekday trips were down 12% be-
tween 2015 and 2018, down 17% for Saturday trips, and down 13% for
Sunday trips. But on BART, weekday ridership nearly held steady, down
only four percent. Saturday BART ridership, though, dropped 16%, and
Sunday ridership 17%. To be sure, BART is a more commuter-oriented
system than LA Metro, but that was the case before the decline as well.
Weekday trips, especially to the huge job cluster in downtown San
Francisco, held steady in the Bay Area but not Greater Los Angeles and
its downtown (LA Metro, 2019a; BART, 2021).
Likewise, ridership fell all across the Los Angeles Area geo-
graphically, but more spatially unevenly in the Bay Area. Figs. 4 and 5
map ridership losses on routes with declining patronage on major op-
erators between 2015 (the earliest year of available, comparable data
across operators) and 2018 (between Fiscal Years 2015 and 2018 for
some operators), with line widths scaled the same on each map.3 As
3
Each individual route is depicted with the same ridership along its
length—except on BART, whose origin-destination matrices allow for ridership
to be shown between each pair of stations (BART, 2021). However, where
multiple routes of the same operator run on the same street, the line width for
that segment reflects the sum of those routes. Routes with a loss in annual
ridership of under 100,000 boardings were rounded up for visibility.
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Fig. 4. Ridership losses on the eight largest Bay Area operators, 2015–2018 or Fiscal Year 2015–2018. Data source: SFMTA (2013, 2018); BART (2019, 2021);
AC Transit (2018, 2019); VTA (2018, 2019); Caltrain (2018, 2019); SamTrans (2019a,b); GGBHTD (2019a,b); County Connection (2019a,b); U.S. Census Bureau
(2019c); CaliDetail (n.d.).
shown in Fig. 4, Bay Area ridership absolute losses were relatively
modest, occurring most notably in the northern portions of the East Bay
including North Oakland and Berkeley, in San Francisco and northern
San Mateo County southwest of downtown San Francisco, and in the
suburban job centers of San José and Silicon Valley, with additional
relative losses on smaller lines in outlying areas.
Fig. 5 tells a far different story for the Los Angeles Area. Significant
losses occurred across the region, on major trunk lines as well as more
minor routes. The declines were of a much greater magnitude than even
the worst performing lines in the Bay Area. Indeed, just 21 routes in
Greater Los Angeles—20 LA Metro lines and one Orange County
Transportation Authority line—accounted for a quarter of the entire
state’s ridership losses from 2015 to 2018, despite carrying only 14% of
the state’s trips in 2015. Almost one in nine lost trips in California came
from five LA Metro routes alone, though they only carried one in 14
6
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
statewide trips in 2015. Lines passing through a single block of down-
town Los Angeles accounted for 11% of the state’s losses. Of course, the
routes with the largest ridership totals do tend to have larger absolute
ridership losses, but even so, the losses on major lines in Greater Los
Angeles were disproportionate. On 25 of the 30 busiest LA Metro lines
in 2015, for instance, the share of California’s 2015–2018 ridership
losses for which they accounted was higher than the share of 2015
boardings they carried (FTA, 2020; LA Metro, 2019b; OCTA, 2020).
Over the last three years of available data as of writing, 93% of LA
Metro lines had fewer boardings, compared to 59% of Muni lines with
fewer weekday boardings. In fact, many of the Muni routes that lost the
most trips are local lines on corridors also served by fast-growing Rapid
buses, suggesting a shift of riders onto express service, not off transit
altogether. The BART stations with the highest ridership, located in
downtown San Francisco, are among the few that gained trips, which is
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Fig. 5. Ridership losses on the two largest Greater Los Angeles operators, 2015–2018 or Fiscal Year 2015–2018. Data source: LA Metro (2020, 2019b), OCTA (2019,
2020), U.S. Census Bureau (2019c), CaliDetail (n.d.).
not the case for LA Metro’s downtown services. Though LA Metro’s
declines are certainly not uniform across the system, Greater LA’s
transit woes are more widespread than the Bay Area’s (LA Metro,
2019a; SFMTA, 2018; BART, 2021). Instead, off-peak and non-commute
services accounted for most of the Bay Area’s patronage decline
(Wasserman et al., 2020).
As a consequence, Bay Area ridership is increasingly concentrated in
peak periods, particularly on BART. BART trips to and from destina-
tions outside of downtown San Francisco accounted for 56% of the
system’s 2015–2018 ridership losses but made up only 34% of 2018
ridership. Similarly, ridership outside of rush hour fell 11%, while peak-
hour trip counts remained virtually level. Even in the years prior to the
ridership decline, BART’s off-peak and counter-commute trip types had
relatively flat ridership, while BART’s peak and commute trip types
provided most of the growth for the entire region. To a lesser extent,
Muni experienced similar disparities, with lines with frequent service
7
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
gaining ridership and those with less frequent service losing patronage.
While we lack access to temporally disaggregated Muni ridership data,
we do find a split by mode: weekday local bus boardings fell three
percent between Fiscal Years 2015 and 2018, while weekday Rapid bus
patronage rose 24% and light rail six percent. Yet on LA Metro, 16 of
the top 20 lines with the most trips lost between 2015 and 2018 lie
along major arterials in Central and South Los Angeles (BART, 2021;
SFMTA, 2018; LA Metro, 2019a). Thus, increased geographic and
temporal peaking was a waxing feature of transit use in the Bay Area
but not in Greater LA.
Are transit operators driving away customers?
Ridership trends in the two regions may have followed in the same
downward direction, but they took different routes and moved at very
different speeds. To shed light on both the nature of the declines and
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Fig. 6. The divide between ridership and service trends. Data source: FTA (2020), U.S. Census Bureau (2019b).
their differences, we focus here on popularly-cited internal, or supply-
side, explanations: changes in service supply, fares, and spending
(Zilliac, 2019; Freemark, 2017; Tinoco, 2017; Baldassari, 2017). As we
will see, each of these is either not correlated with ridership trends or at
least are unlikely to have accounted for the scale of recent ridership
declines, leaving the likely causes to external factors beyond the control
of transit managers.
Service supply
In both regions, we can rule out one major potential cause: service
cuts. In other American cities like New York and Washington, reports
suggest declines in service—both service levels as well as service
quality—depressed ridership (Meyer, 2016; Colon, 2018; Rabinowitz,
2016; Aratani, 2016). Fewer riders and falling fare revenue can then
lead to further service cuts, in a vicious cycle.
Before the pandemic, as ridership began falling in both the LA and
Bay Areas, transit service actually increased, as measured by both ve-
hicle revenue hours and miles. Per capita, as service supply went up,
boardings went down (See Fig. 6). In the Los Angeles Area, service per
capita rose since 2011, resulting in a widening chasm with boardings
per capita. Most of the service increase came on rail. But in the Bay
Area, service on all modes only began increasing in 2015, a far longer
delay in recovering from Great Recession service cuts. In fact, the Bay
Area still had not restored service hours per person to pre-Recession
levels in 2018 (FTA, 2020; U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b).
The situation for policymakers in both regions was arguably worse
than a vicious cycle of service cuts and patronage losses. The new
service added was not attracting ridership. Indeed, service-effectiveness
(measured in terms of boardings per service hour) fell 22% between
2014 and 2018 in Greater Los Angeles and 15% in the Bay Area (FTA,
2020). Either new service was not having the desired effect or other
factors were overwhelming its benefits.
Fares
When riders decide whether to take transit, they weigh many per-
ceived costs, like the costs of time and discomfort. But of course, most
riders pay an actual monetary cost: the fare. Despite fares’ undoubted
influence on transit use, this most visible cost of transit does not appear
to have significantly influenced changes in California transit ridership
during the period studied. Over the past decade, the average fare per
boarding—less than the “sticker price” fare listed on fareboxes, due to
discounts and bulk passes (Yoh et al., 2016)—remained flat in Greater
LA, adjusted for inflation. In the Bay Area, the fare per boarding
8
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
increased modestly but steadily, with no substantive relationship to the
ups and downs of ridership since 2008. In both regions, inflation-ad-
justed fares charged per mile traveled have hardly changed in the last
decade (FTA, 2020; BLS, 2020).
Spending
Even with stable fares, operators in both regions poured more money
into transit. Amidst the ridership downturn, operators in Greater Los
Angeles spent $5.3 billion in 2018, around 1.5 times more than a decade
earlier. A substantial share of this investment went into new rail transit
service in LA County. The San Francisco Bay Area followed close behind
with $4.7 billion, with a comparable increase over the past decade. Just
as with service, both California regions avoided a cycle of under-
investment and falling ridership—only to instead fall into a pattern of
increasingly expensive subsidies per boarding. These subsidies—spending
minus fare revenue—rose much faster in Greater Los Angeles, squeezed
by both falling trip numbers and rising expenses (FTA, 2020; BLS, 2020).
But in both regions, the possible causes of rising costs (e.g., changes in
material, equipment, land, labor, and environmental review expenses) all
appear independent of ridership trends.
Because LA Metro is entering the fourth decade of an
ambitious—and expensive—rail transit construction program and
because bus and rail service levels were increasing across the region
overall, declining transit use pushed per rider subsidies higher, particu-
larly on rail services—perhaps a sign that the issues raised in the 1994
civil rights lawsuit against LA Metro are still at play (Brown, 1998).4
Findings and implications
Vehicle access and transit use
While both regions lost transit riders in recent years, we have shown
substantial differences in the scale, timing, geography, and modes of
4
That lawsuit, filed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, was brought by the
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of coalition of plaintiffs,
including the Bus Riders Union, in response to a proposed fare increase. The
plaintiffs alleged that LA Metro was raising fares and short-shrifting bus service,
which served higher proportions of low-income riders and people of color,
while devoting disproportionate resources to their new rail services, which
served higher shares of higher-income and white riders. The plaintiffs and LA
Metro eventually settled the case in 1996, with LA Metro agreeing to make
substantial improvements to bus service and to limit fare increases, but keeping
its rail transit expansion program on track. The settlement, supervised by the
court under a consent decree, expired in 2006 (Brown, 1998).
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
Fig. 7. The growing length of transit trips in the Bay Area.
Data source: FTA (2020).
these declines. In Greater Los Angeles, absolute transit use fell longer
and further than in the Bay Area, spread more across routes, times, and
parts of the region and concentrated substantially on the region’s one
dominant operator. What was behind these alarming patronage losses
in Greater Los Angeles? As noted above, increasing private vehicle ac-
cess appears to have played a central role, as motor vehicle access in-
creased dramatically in Greater Los Angeles (See Table 1). Between
2008 and 2018, the region added more than one new vehicle for every
new resident, compared to one new vehicle for every four new residents
in the 1990s. Recent research has found that auto access has increased
most dramatically among the exact demographic groups that tend to be
frequent transit riders (Manville et al., 2022; Schouten et al., 2021;
Manville et al., 2018). This is especially true for groups that tend to be
frequent bus riders and helps explain why the Los Angeles area may
have a greater modal divergence in ridership trends. While auto own-
ership grew substantially over the past decade, it rose even more
sharply in the 2000s. We note, however, that while overall transit use in
Greater Los Angeles did not start declining year-over-year until 2014
(See Fig. 1), per capita transit use in the region has fallen most years
since 2007 (See Fig. 2), suggesting that the effects of increasing auto
access on transit use may have preceded absolute patronage declines by
several years (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019a,b; FTA, 2020).
We and co-authors (Taylor et al., 2020) calculated the effect of auto
ownership on transit in both regions by modeling predicted transit use
with and without accounting for changes in vehicle access, controlling
for a host of other socio-economic factors. In Greater Los Angeles, we
estimate that transit use per capita would have fallen only slightly be-
tween 2000 and 2015 if auto access had remained constant, but was
predicted to fall (and in fact fell) dramatically when actual changes in
vehicle ownership were factored in. In contrast, the far more modest
changes in private vehicle ownership in the Bay Area did not, in our
models, depress predicted transit ridership there. The results of this
analysis dovetail with the different contours of each region’s ridership
discussed above.
Since the vibrant Bay Area economy and transit commuting into and
out of downtown San Francisco were so robust, what might instead
have been behind the recent patronage downturn outside of San
Francisco’s central business district? While private vehicle ownership
has not changed much in the Bay Area (See Table 1), auto access there
is rising and potentially depressing transit ridership in another way: via
ridehail services like Lyft and Uber. Ridehail was born in the Bay Area
and was extensively and increasingly deployed there. Ridehail services
employed a greater share of Bay Area workers than in any other region
in the U.S. (Farrell et al., 2019), and more ridehail, taxi, and livery
“establishments” (for which each Lyft or Uber driver/contractor counts
as one) existed in the Bay Area than any other California MPO region,
including Greater LA (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019b). The growing scale of
ridehail and the fact that limited available data and previous research
find that ridehail is used extensively on weekend evenings in cultural
hubs are congruent with observed transit ridership losses (Rayle et al.,
9
Journal of Public Transportation 24 (2022) 100030
2016). This issue warrants careful scrutiny, but until the public gains
access to spatially and temporally specific ridehail data currently not
disclosed by firms, we are left to hypothesize the effects of ridehail on
transit based on both the nascent literature in this area and fragmentary
evidence of ridehail’s extent in these two regions.
Changing patterns of jobs and housing
Where we do have more data is in employment and the spatial re-
lationship among residences, jobs, and other destinations. The number
of jobs per capita in the Bay Area rose almost nine percent in the decade
after the Great Recession, compared to five percent in the Los Angeles
Area (See Table 1). The share of regional jobs in San Francisco itself
also increased, more so than the share of regional jobs in the City of Los
Angeles (See Table 1) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021). This job growth,
especially downtown, was a large and significant determinant of ri-
dership on BART, as we found in a multi-variate analysis of BART
(Wasserman et al., 2020), and hence is one major reason why Bay Area
commuter ridership stayed higher than in the Los Angeles Area and
most of the U.S.
However, employment growth continued in the last years of the
2010s, yet transit patronage started falling. A related but countervailing
force may explain this: in the Bay Area in particular, jobs and housing
have increasingly dispersed from one another. This decentralization, in
the context of the region’s affordable housing crisis, is increasing
commute trip lengths and making transit less competitive as more
people reside in outlying residential areas. Recent research by
Blumenberg and King (2021) finds that employment and housing in Bay
Area cities are becoming more imbalanced. As a result, the average
commute of a Bay Area worker over the road network—11.4 miles in
2015, just shorter than in Greater Los Angeles—has grown sub-
stantially. Between 2002 and 2015, mean Bay Area commute distances
increased 1.2 miles, compared to 0.5 miles in the Los Angeles Area. This
comports with transit system data in the region. The average length of a
transit trip (for any purpose, not just commutes) in the Bay Area grew
by a mile in the past decade, outpacing modest increases in Greater Los
Angeles and little growth in the U.S. overall (See Fig. 7) (FTA, 2020). In
part, transit commute trips are getting longer as people and jobs move
farther apart; also, as residents disperse they are less likely to make
shorter trips like shopping, errands, and socializing on transit in sub-
urban than urban areas. The same forces may be at work in Greater Los
Angeles, where housing affordability is also a serious problem, but to a
lesser extent. While auto ownership and access have increased much
more in Greater LA than the Bay Area, a less sharply defined combi-
nation of factors like rapidly increasing separation of where people live
and work and nation-leading levels of ridehail are more prominent in
the Bay Area.
Conclusion
Public transit planners in the Los Angeles Area seemingly might
envy the position of their neighbors to the north. There, prior to the
pandemic, peak-hour patronage into and out of downtown San
Francisco on Muni and especially BART proved robust and propped up
Bay Area transit ridership in much of the 2010s, when patronage on
systems across the nation, in California, in Greater Los Angeles, and,
indeed, throughout much of the Bay Area were in decline. But while the
substantial numbers of transit commuters into San Francisco’s central
business district were good news for overall Bay Area transit patronage
in the 2010s, depending on peak ridership while shedding off-peak trips
does not bode well for costs, trip subsidies, or rider satisfaction.
Research shows that peak transit service is much more expensive to
provide and in particular that adding capacity at the peak can be dra-
matically costlier than adding off-peak service, when both vehicles and
workers to operate them are typically on hand (Taylor et al., 2000).
Indeed, BART plans to increase peak-period frequencies into and out of
J.L. Wasserman and B.D. Taylor
downtown San Francisco post-pandemic and is studying whether to
build an additional tunnel under San Francisco Bay, for a total esti-
mated cost of $20 billion (in 2021 dollars) (MTC, 2017; Watry, 2021).
In the meantime, pre-pandemic peak service was frequently over-
crowded, greatly eroding rider satisfaction (BART and Corey, Canapary,
and Galanis Research, 2019). These issues and the high costs of ad-
dressing them suggest a need for strategies beyond those under the
control of the transit systems themselves. For example, given the trends
in rising housing costs, employment concentration, and lengthening
commute patterns in the Bay Area, regional policymakers should con-
sider strategies to increase the supply and affordability of housing near
jobs and transit (Blumenberg et al., 2020).
While both Greater Los Angeles and the Bay Area (and the nation as
a whole) lost riders in the late 2010s, we have shown that the contours
and possible explanations for this decline differ considerably between
these two California mega-regions. The different factors associated with
falling transit use in Greater LA and the Bay Area observed here are
consistent with the findings of Watkins et al. (2020), who find that both
U.S. transit systems and the factors associated with their ridership
losses vary substantially across different types of regions.
Greater Los Angeles’ pre-pandemic ridership troubles were wide-
spread and deepening, while in the Bay Area relatively robust peak-
hour ridership downtown backfilled more LA-like patronage woes in
the rest of the region. While the factors behind falling ridership are
surely many, increased auto access looms large in both regions—in the
form of increased auto ownership and use in Greater LA and increased
activity and use of ridehail in the Bay Area. Whatever the reasons, ri-
ders in both regions (outside of San Francisco’s central business district)
were abandoning public transit services, just as they were being im-
proved and expanded in the years leading up to the 2020 pandemic,
which poses a substantial challenge to transit managers as they seek to
recover riders in 2022 and beyond.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded jointly by the California Department of
Transportation (64A0262), the State of California’s Statewide
Transportation Research Program and the Southern California
Association of Governments (UC-ITS-2017-04), the San Francisco Bay
Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (20185051), and the
U.S. Department of Transportation’s Dwight David Eisenhower
Transportation Fellowship Program (693JJ31945011). The authors are
grateful for this support and are responsible for any errors or omissions.
We also thank Evelyn Blumenberg, Mark Garrett, Andrew Schouten,
Hannah King, Julene Paul, Madeline Ruvolo, Tiffany Chu, Ryan
Kurtzman, Joseph Marynak, and Trevor Thomas for their contributions
to the larger research projects from which this paper is drawn, as well
as the editor and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments
and suggestions on earlier versions of this article.
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Jacob L. Wasserman is a Research Project Manager at the UCLA Institute of
Transportation Studies. His research focuses on public transit and the intersections of
mobility with equity, land use, housing, finance, and labor. He formerly worked for the
Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation
Agency, and Bay Area Rapid Transit Director Lateefah Simon.
Brian D. Taylor is a Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the UCLA Luskin
School of Public Affairs and Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. His
research and teaching center on transportation equity, finance, history, and politics, as
well as travel behavior and public transit.