Transit Bounces Back in Europe and Asia, Lags in Americas
Also today: National Portrait Gallery director fired by Trump is still on the job, and a nuclear plant threatens Miami’s drinking water.
The Madrid Metro’s ridership is higher now than it was before the pandemic.
Photographer: Rudy Sulgan/The Image Bank RF via Getty Images
Earlier this year, I was working on a story with my colleague Sri Taylor about the fiscal crisis facing US transit agencies because ridership is still well-below pre-pandemic levels. An editor asked if transit agencies everywhere faced this problem. I found data from a few international systems but struggled to find a global perspective. So I decided to answer the question myself and set out collecting ridership data for as many major metropolitan transit agencies as I could.
Overall, I collected data from 33 cities on four continents, with the help of Bloomberg colleagues around the world. Some data I couldn’t use because it wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison. And I decided to focus only on rapid transit metro systems, not commuter railroads or buses, because those are harder to compare between cities and countries. Ultimately, I was able to use data from 15 different systems, which my graphics colleague Marie Patino visualized.