The Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority presented new ridership numbers that continue to tell a story of a slow but steady revival in usage of Austin’s public bus and rail system.
CapMetro, like virtually every other transit agency in the United States, saw its ridership numbers plummet during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those numbers have improved across the country. Sharmila Mukherjee, an executive vice president at CapMetro, presented the findings of the report to CapMetro’s Board of Directors on July 28, noting that the recovery in Austin has outpaced other comparable metros by about 9 percent.
Overall, while ridership is still down about 20 percent from the 2019 pre-pandemic high, it’s up about 42 percent from the 2021 nadir, at least as of when those numbers were most recently reported in 2023.
“It’s a strong story that continues to be told, and we are closely monitoring to see if it holds true in the future,” Mukherjee said.
Mukherjee also discussed the importance of data collection to CapMetro’s operations and the variety of ways the agency collects it, which include technology on buses that automatically record when passengers get on or off, and where the bus is at all times.
One of the ways CapMetro collects data is through its Enterprise Data Analytics Platform, or EDAP, a kind of central nervous system for the agency that enables tools like the agency’s public performance dashboard.
“We’ve come a long way as an organization, in this space,” she said. “20 years ago, a lot of these data processes were largely manual, and now we’re almost fully automated.”
Mukherjee further noted that ridership metrics had been very close to the agency’s predictions for both rail and buses, and that month-to-month metrics for the year so far had closely followed trends from previous years.
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