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

Public investment in transit increased following the Great Recession, yet transit use nationally mostly fell, even prior to the 2020 pandemic. We investigate this troubling disjuncture by comparing transit ridership trends during the 2010s in two of America's largest regions: Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. While 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.

Automated summary

This study investigates the transit ridership trends in the Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area during the 2010s and highlights the differences between these two regions. While both regions experienced a decline in transit ridership, the patterns and factors behind the decline varied. The Greater Los Angeles area had a longer and more substantial decline, affecting a wider range of routes, times, and sub-regions, and was mainly concentrated on the dominant operator. In contrast, the decline in the Bay Area may be attributed to the dispersal of jobs and housing, as well as the popularity of ridehail services like Lyft and Uber.