According to recent ridership data released by the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Austin’s public bus and rail system is gradually but steadily seeing an uptick in use.
Like almost all other transit agencies in the US, CapMetro had a sharp decline in ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nationwide, those figures have improved. The report’s findings were delivered to CapMetro’s Board of Directors on July 28 by executive vice president Sharmila Mukherjee, who noted that Austin’s recovery had surpassed that of other comparable metros by roughly 9%.
Overall, as of the most recent reporting of those figures in 2023, ridership is up over 42% from the 2021 low, even though it is still down roughly 20% from the 2019 pre-pandemic peak.
“It’s a compelling narrative that keeps getting told, and we’re keeping a careful eye on it to see if it holds true going forward,” Mukherjee stated.
Mukherjee also talked on the significance of data collecting for CapMetro’s operations and the range of methods the agency uses to get it, such as technology aboard buses that continuously records the location of the bus and when passengers board or disembark.
CapMetro’s Enterprise Data Analytics Platform, or EDAP, is one of the ways it gathers data. It functions as the agency’s kind of central nervous system, enabling products like the public performance dashboard.
“As an organization, we’ve made great strides in this area,” she said. Many of these data operations were mostly done by hand twenty years ago, but today they are nearly entirely automated.
Mukherjee said that month-to-month numbers for the year thus far had closely matched trends from prior years, and that ridership metrics for both train and buses had been extremely close to the agency’s projections.
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