Performance Statistics
Metro tracks various metrics on a monthly and annual basis in order to measure the growth and performance of the system.
Ridership
Ridership Count
Metro ridership peaked in 2019 with over 2.1 million trips in the system. The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant shifts in commuting and travel behavior, including a significant shift toward working from home and avoiding crowded, enclosed spaces. As a result, ridership dropped dramatically beginning in March 2020, and has not fully recovered. Currently, Metro monthly ridership is about 64% of 2019.

Ridership Recovery
Like most transit systems across the US, Metro ridership is slowly recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and how it caused unprecedented and relatively sudden changes to how people work, commute, and recreate.
At the start of the pandemic, ridership plummeted as many offices were closed, restaurants became take-out only, and social events were canceled. METRO was fare-free from April to October 2020 as a public safety measure. When METRO resumed charging fares with its new fare payment system in October 2020, ridership settled at about 40% of prepandemic totals for about 8 months, before vaccines became widely available and people began to work in offices and socialize in person again.
Unfortunately, bus ridership has not recovered as quickly as other modes. Since the spring of 2021, ridership has recovered steadily but slowly.
Ridership Per Revenue Hour
While ridership is a useful metric for system performance, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The true performance of the system, and individual routes, accounts for ridership as well as the amount of service supplied. Routes that have high ridership per revenue hour are considered “efficient”, providing a large return on investment. Routes with lower ridership per revenue hour may not be as efficient, but they may provide other benefits, such as serving a more transit-dependent populations, or carrying passengers for a longer distance.