Monthly Ridership
FTA collects monthly transit service data from Full Urban Reporters (agencies with over 30 Vehicles Operated in Maximum Service (VOMS) or modes operating over Fixed Guideway). These service data include Vehicle Revenue Miles (VRM), Vehicle Revenue Hours (VRH), Unlinked Passenger Trips (UPT), and VOMS. For a description of these data, please review the most recent NTD Policy Manual.
In addition to the data published on FTA's site, NTD monthly ridership data is now hosted at data.transportation.gov. The NTD team has created the interactive visualization below to display a timeline of total monthly ridership. The funnel symbol at the top right is set to show bus and rail modes from 2023 to present, however, users can set their own filters or hover for more detail. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact NTDHelp@dot.gov.
Raw Monthly (No adjustments or estimates): Contains monthly-updated service information reported by urban Full Reporters, released without adjustments or estimates for missing data.
Complete Monthly Ridership (with adjustments and estimates): Contains monthly-updated service information reported by urban Full Reporters. This data release includes data values which differ from the Raw Database Time Series (no adjustments or estimates) as follows:
- Adjustments to historical data (report year 2002 to 2011) for specific agencies which changed data collection methodology and required data adjustments as a result (see Read Me tab for details).
- Estimates for recent months where no data is reported by an active NTD reporter (i.e., an estimate due to delinquent report submission). These estimates are based on mode-level ridership growth estimates developed by FTA. The strength of each estimate improves when the population of agencies reporting in the prior period is larger.