One of 26 Top Transit Cities Has Recovered Pre-Pandemic Ridership. The Rest Are Waiting.
The GAO’s March 2026 report on telework and travel patterns contains a data point that deserves to stand alone: as of fiscal year 2024, exactly one of the 26 cities the Federal Transit Administration designates as top transit cities had recovered ridership to 2019 levels. That city is Miami–Fort Lauderdale, at 104 percent. Every other major transit system in the country remains below the line.
The spread is wide. Salt Lake City recovered to 91 percent. New York to 83 percent. Chicago to 66 percent. Philadelphia to 65 percent. San Francisco to 63 percent. Denver to 61 percent. Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Atlanta sit at the bottom, ranging from 56 to 59 percent of 2019 ridership.
Large communities drove the bulk of the aggregate loss. GAO’s analysis of National Transit Database records shows that large urbanized areas lost over two billion unlinked passenger trips between fiscal years 2019 and 2024 — a 22.7 percent decline. Fare revenue in those same communities fell 31.7 percent, a loss of $4.7 billion. Medium and small urbanized areas saw similar ridership percentage declines but suffered far smaller fare revenue hits, because their systems were less dependent on fares to begin with.
That fare dependency is the structural problem. Top transit cities operate systems — primarily heavy and light rail — that historically relied on generating revenue directly. In 2019, top transit agencies covered about 39 percent of operating expenses from directly generated revenue. By 2024 that figure had recovered only to 26 percent, compared to 15 percent for remaining transit cities. The gap matters because these systems now face operating shortfalls with less flexibility to cut costs.
San Francisco’s BART is the clearest case: officials told GAO the system is facing an operating budget shortfall of $350 to $400 million per year beginning in fiscal year 2027. Philadelphia’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is projecting a deficit exceeding $200 million in fiscal year 2026, and raised fares 21.5 percent in 2025 as a partial response. One-time COVID relief funds — approximately $70 billion authorized by Congress across all transit — are now more than 97 percent expended.
Fixed rail makes adaptation harder. Station costs do not scale with ridership. Route changes are structurally constrained. Cutting service to save money risks accelerating ridership loss, the reverse of what agencies need. The systems best positioned to recover are those that redesigned operations. Cincinnati Metro, cited by GAO, rebuilt its bus network around weekend and evening service and cross-town routes. It surpassed 2019 ridership levels by fiscal year 2024 — one of the few bright spots in an otherwise flat recovery picture.
Telework is one contributing factor, not the only one. MPOs in large communities cited workforce shortages, on-time performance failures, and personal safety concerns as additional drivers of reduced ridership. But telework’s role is material: 70 percent of large-community MPOs that reported ridership declines identified telework as a contributing factor. The commute trip — the structural backbone of major urban transit systems — is simply taken less often than it was.