Past research has shown that transit passengers’ fears and concerns about safety influence their travel decisions. While the relationship between women’s fear of crime and public space has been the focus of considerable research, transit environments—which are especially threatening to female passengers—have received much less attention. This study examines the issue of women’s safety on transit through a survey of U.S. transit operators. The findings show that most respondents believe women have distinct safety and security needs, but most do not think agencies should put specific programs into place to address these needs. In addition, only a handful of agencies currently have programs that target the safety and security needs of women. This survey suggests that there is a significant mismatch between the safety and security needs and desires of female passengers and the types and locations of strategies that transit agencies use.

The literature on travel demographics and mode choice provides information about individuals and their travel patterns at the aggregate level and by using variables such as income, race/ethnicity, gender, and age. These findings provide useful insight into the modes that travelers use and the purpose, duration, and distance of trips. However, we know much less about the ways people experience travel, both physically and emotionally, and the effects these experiential aspects can have on individual travel decisions. This research uses ethnographic fieldwork methods to examine the experience of bus travel, and particularly behaviors, types of interactions, and social expectations on buses.

This study focuses on five bus lines in Los Angeles running along several of the city's main thoroughfares as part of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) transit network - three established local (Metro Local) routes and two newer bus rapid transit (BRT or Metro Rapid) lines. The findings suggest that life on buses includes a myriad of complex social and interpersonal interactions. Bus riding involves established norms and rules of behavior around waiting, boarding, riding, and alighting. Behaviors and incidents that occur outside this scope of normalcy are identified and considered disruptions. Regular disruptions to the social order can be characterized in several dimensions: 1) negative and positive disruptions, 2) the impact of disruptions on individuals and groups, 3) their quality as brief or more sustained, 4) routine and more unusual disruptions, and 5) the intimate to stranger relationships among those involved in a disruption.

A comparison of the Local and Rapid lines shows that they differ in terms of the consistency of branding and the physical features and amenities along the routes. This study also introduces the idea of "experiential reliability," or the consistency of experience. Fewer disruptions occur in the tighter social space of the Rapid buses, while the Local bus experience includes ongoing disruptions to the social order. Lastly, various types of stigma management occur in bus spaces. Riders both respond to and ignore particular stigmatized riders - the outcasts, the disruptors, and the freeloaders. People also manage the modal stigma of buses through such strategies as complaining, commiserating, destigmatizing the bus-riding experience, and reconceptualizing the bus-rider identity.

What explains transit ridership? The answer to this simple question is both obvious and complex. Public transit systems carry large shares of person travel in older, larger metropolitan areas around the globe, but in most places – old and new, large and small – transit is losing market share to private vehicles. Nationally, only 2.1 percent of all trips were on public transit in 2001, compared to 85.8 percent by private vehicle, 9.9 percent by foot and bicycle, and 2.2 percent by other means (2001 National Household Travel Survey).

Even the most casual observer of cities can offer informed speculation on why the share of year 2000 commuters using public transit in metropolitan San Francisco (19 percent) in nearly five times higher than in metropolitan Atlanta (4 percent). Population density, levels of private vehicle ownership, topography, freeway network extent, parking availability and cost, transit network extent and service frequency, transit fares, transit system safety and cleanliness, and so on all surely play a role. But the relatively importance of these various factors, and the interaction between them is not well understood. Yet understanding the relative influence of these factors is central to public policy debates over transportation system investments and the pricing and deployment of transit services. But the research literature on explaining transit ridership is surprisingly uneven, in some cases poorly conceived, and the results are often ambiguous or contradictory.

The goal of this paper is to review the literature on explaining transit ridership, critique the sometimes significant weaknesses in previous studies, draw conclusions from the more rigorous studies on the factors which most influence transit use, and recommendations on the steps needed to better understand and explain transit ridership. To do this, we begin by offering a taxonomy of public transit ridership research.

Much transportation research has sought to understand the factor's influencing people's decisions to travel via one mode or another. Bodies of literature, overwhelmingly quantitative, exist about mode choice and the demographics of travel behavior. Most of this research has focused on the who, what, when and why aspects of travel. Little research has sought to explain how people travel, particularly the experiential aspects of travel. This project seeks to fill this gap in the transportation literature by examining travel behavior and decision-making using firsthand visual accounts of transit users in Los Angeles.

Understanding the factors influencing transit ridership is central to decisions on transportation system investments and the pricing and deployment of transit services. Yet most previous analyses of transit ridership have examined one or just a few systems, have not included many of the control variables thought to influence transit use, and have not addressed the simultaneous relationship between transit supply and demand. This study addresses the shortcomings in the previous research by (1) conducting a cross-sectional analysis of transit use in 265 urbanized areas, (2) testing an array of variables measuring transit system characteristics, auto system characteristics, geography, metropolitan economy, and population characteristics, and (3) constructing two-stage least squares regression models to account for simultaneity between supply and demand. We find that most of the variation in transit ridership can be explained by (1) the size (population and area) of the metropolitan area, (2) the vitality of the regional economy (median housing costs), and (3) the share of the population with low levels of private vehicle access (carless households). We find further that transit patronage is to a lesser extent, explained by transit service levels and fares. The observed influence of fares on ridership is consistent with the literature. Likewise, the relative influence of transit service levels on ridership is greater than the influence of transit fares. Finally, our separation of transit service supply into two variables – an instrumental control variable and a residual policy variable – allows for more nuanced assessments of the ridership effects of changes in transit service.

Public subsidy of transit services has increased dramatically in recent years, with little effect on overall ridership. Quite obviously, a clear understanding of the factors influencing transit ridership is central to decisions on investments in and the pricing and deployment of transit services. Yet the literature about the causes of transit use is quite spotty; most previous aggregate analyses of transit ridership have examined just one or a few systems, have not included many of the external, control variables thought to influence transit use, and have not addressed the simultaneous relationship between transit service supply and consumption. This study addresses each of these shortcomings by (1) conducting a cross-sectional analysis of transit use in 265 US urbanized areas, (2) testing dozens of variables measuring regional geography, metropolitan economy, population characteristics, auto/highway system characteristics, and transit system characteristics, and (3) constructing two-stage simultaneous equation regression models to account for simultaneity between transit service supply and consumption. We find that most of the variation in transit ridership among urbanized areas – in both absolute and relative terms – can be explained by factors outside of the control of public transit systems: (1) regional geography (specifically, area of urbanization, population, population density, and regional location in the US), (2) metropolitan economy (specifically, personal/household income), (3) population characteristics (specifically, the percent college students, recent immigrants, and Democratic voters in the population), and (4) auto/highway system characteristics (specifically, the percent carless households and nontransit/non-SOV trips, including commuting via carpools, walking, biking, etc.). While these external factors clearly go a long way toward determining the overall level of transit use in an urbanized area, we find that transit policies do make a significant difference. The observed range in both fares and service frequency in our sample could account for at least a doubling (or halving) of transit use in a given urbanized area. Controlling for the fact that public transit use is strongly correlated with urbanized area size, about 26% of the observed variance in per capita transit patronage across US urbanized areas is explained in the models presented here by service frequency and fare levels. The observed influence of these two factors is consistent with both the literature and intuition: frequent service draws passengers, and high fares drive them away.