February 2026 Transit Was 80.9% of 2019

from The Antiplanner | April 8, 2026

America’s transit systems carried 80.9 percent as many riders in February 2026 as during the same month in 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Ridership has been hovering around 81 percent since September, 2024, and it doesn’t appear likely that it will increase much in the foreseeable future. Ridership in February 2026 failed to grow from February 2025, for example, and in fact was actually down 0.4 percent.

Driving data will be posted here when they are made available by the Department of Transportation.

These numbers are only preliminary and are subject to correction in the next monthly report. According to this report, for example, ridership in January 2026 was 79.8 percent of January 2019, while the January report indicated just 77.8 percent. In my post on the January report, I noted that numbers were missing for Indianapolis and a few smaller urban areas. Looking at February’s data by urban area, however, doesn’t show any major gaps in the numbers, so any corrections are likely to be small.

Looking at the major modes, commuter rail is below average at 74.5 percent; light rail is 78.3 percent; and heavy rail is above average at 83.1 percent. Conventional bus (which the FTA calls “motor bus”) is 80.4 percent while commuter buses are 88.2 percent and rapid buses are 110.4 percent, mainly because of the opening of new bus rapid transit lines since 2019.

Above average urban areas include New York at 85.7 percent, Los Angeles 83.3 percent, Miami 81.6 percent, Houston 87.0 percent, and Washington 87.1 percent. Among below-average urban areas are Chicago at 71.3 percent, Philadelphia 70.8 percent, Dallas 79.2 percent, and Atlanta 63.6 percent. Also below average are Boston (73.8%), Detroit (72.9%), Phoenix (63.8%), and San Francisco (71.7%). We are used to thinking of Detroit as a devastated city, but from a transit point of view it is doing better than Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

I’ve been arguing since late 2020 that transit agencies and transportation policy makers have to accept a new reality that ridership is not going to get much better than they are doing now. Agencies have so far refused to accept that, as the data show they offered 97.2 percent as many vehicle revenue miles of service in February as in February 2019 and 1.2 percent more miles of service than in February 2025. Transit agencies all over the country are crying about lost fare revenues, but few if any have been willing to cut service or other expenses in response.

As usual, I have posted an enhanced spreadsheet that has totals by year (back to 2002) in columns KO through LM; mode total in rows 2360 through 2381; transit agency totals in rows 2390 through 3390; and urban area totals in rows 3392 through 3881. Column LN compares February 2026 with February 2019 and LO compares February 2026 with February 2025.