Analyzing the Impact of Service Frequency and On-time Performance on Transit Ridership in Miami-Dade County

TL;DR

This study analyzes how transit service frequency and on-time performance affect bus ridership in Miami-Dade, revealing that improving reliability and frequency can enhance ridership, especially post-COVID recovery.

Contribution

It introduces a panel data analysis that isolates the effects of OTP and frequency on ridership, emphasizing their combined importance during recovery periods.

Findings

Frequency consistently affects ridership.

OTP becomes more influential post-COVID.

Improving reliability boosts ridership on frequent routes.

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of transit service attributes, focusing on service frequency and on-time performance (OTP), on bus ridership in Miami-Dade County. We obtained route-level ridership from automated passenger counter (APC) data and service performance metrics from the General Transit Feed Specification Real Time (GTFS-RT) data. The panel dataset allows us to effectively isolate the independent effects of OTP and frequency on bus ridership, contributing to a better understanding of how to improve service quality and support ridership. Our analysis examines both a pre-COVID period (January 2018-December 2019) and a post-COVID recovery period (July 2021-July 2023). Descriptive analysis reveals a steady ridership decline before the pandemic, followed by a sharp drop during the pandemic and a gradual recovery to pre-pandemic levels by late 2022. This recovery, however, varied by route and was accompanied by significant temporal fluctuations in service performance measures. To analyze these dynamics, we developed two-way fixed effects (2FE) models. Model outputs show that while frequency consistently influences ridership over time, OTP becomes an increasingly important determinant in the post-COVID recovery period. The observed significant interaction between frequency and OTP in the recovery period further suggests that improving reliability is particularly effective on frequent routes. Our study also highlights the need for targeted ridership-boosting strategies that differ by time of day, with a focus on punctuality during AM-peak and frequency during midday and PM-peak, to better support ridership growth and improve network performance.