ABSTRACT
: Transit ridership has decreased steadily each year from 2014 to 2017 despite increasing urban populations and transit service investment. Many studies have addressed the reasons for this changing ridership, examining trends in national transit ridership levels or within specific agencies or regions. However, the magnitude and causes of ridership changes are likely to vary from place to place. Thus, comparing transit agencies and the areas they operate in to similar peers may yield more informative results than examining national trends or only the large agencies. There is a wide range of transit agencies that serve different populations, operate different services, and have drastically different budgets. These factors, which are structurally related to transit ridership but outside of agencies’ control, provide a framework to cluster metropolitan regions in groups of peers. In this research, we grouped metropolitan areas that operate transit service into groups on a set of variables that affect ridership but are outside of agencies’ control: total population, density, percent of zero vehicle households, and transit agency operating expenditures. Using Ward’s method, metropolitan regions were clustered by mode family, separating mixed and dedicated right-of-way. Using this categorization, ridership trends can be analyzed in a more meaningful way.
