Last week the TransitCenter foundation (a Streetsblog Chicago sponsor) released the latest version of the big transit rider survey that they put out every two years, asking thousands of transit riders in seven major cities how their travel habits have changed and why. The 2019 edition of “Who’s on Board," authored by Mary Buchanan, provides insight on why people are riding transit less today than they were a few years ago. Chicago is one of the seven cities they surveyed, and their finding shed light on the current state of stagnating CTA ridership, and what can be done to improve the situation.
With transit ridership falling in most major U.S. cities, transit agencies and experts have tried to pinpoint the causes for the slump. To gather info, Transit Center used an online survey of a total of 1,704 respondents in seven regions, including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Pittsburgh, and New Orleans. 274 of them were in our region.
They also conducted focus groups in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle to gather more info about factors influencing people's travel decisions. In out city, focus group participants were recruited from a CTA customer mailing list.
Respondents were categorized based on how they ride transit, using the categories of all-purpose, commuter, and occasional riders. (About a third of Chicagoans were all-purpose riders.) Two other categories looked at riders who changed their transit use over the past two years: "increaser riders," who took transit much more, and "decreaser riders," who took it much less.
The study found that over the past two years, 9% of respondents stopped using transit altogether, and 24% of respondents substantially decreased their transit use. As time went by, fewer respondents were all-purpose
and commuter riders, and more were occasional riders. So, general, people were cutting down on their transit use, but not abandoning it altogether.
Respondents who gave up on transit altogether or substantially scaled back their ridership overwhelmingly replaced the trips with increased private car use. Moreover, people who reported an increase in their access to a private car over the past two years said their transit use had fallen by more than seven days per month. In contrast, people whose private car access stayed the same only reported a transit ridership decline of about one-and-a-half days per month.