Metro Transit Ridership is Not as Bad, or As Good, as it Looks

[Red Line riders: the dawn of fast, frequent transit]

 Axios raised an alarm today in their newsletter about declining transit ridership. Here's what they said:

Metro Transit's sluggish post-pandemic recovery is growing even more concerning as ridership numbers are sliding in the wrong direction.

Why it matters: A 7% decline so far this year is especially worrisome considering the backdrop — Twin Cities employers have been tightening their remote work policies, which means more people commuting.

The big picture: National ridership was up 7% in the first quarter of the year and reached 85% of pre-pandemic levels.

• Metro Transit's pandemic recovery has fallen back to 57%, despite the addition of several speedier bus rapid-transit routes in the past five years that were meant to increase usage.

By the numbers: Year-over-year crime on the system was up 7% in the first quarter of 2025, also a reversal of 2024 trends.

The other side: "We believe our ongoing service improvements and the steps we're taking to provide a more consistently clean, safe, and welcoming experience on transit will lead more people to choose transit over time," Metro Transit general manager Lesley Kandaras said in a statement. 

• Eric Lind, director of the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies, told Axios that Metro Transit should be compared to other metro agencies with similar transit infrastructure and population, like Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas and Portland.
• He said those systems have 60 to 75% recovery rates, which means Metro Transit is not as far out of step as it may seem.

Reality check: That is true for some cities, but Dallas was already 78% recovered back in 2023 and Portland was at 68%, though Denver's transit recovery rate was only 62% last year.

Between the lines: Lind, who previously worked at Metro Transit, noted that a 2022 survey of riders showed 7% are primarily Spanish speakers. Even though Metro Transit police don't ask about immigration status, some riders may be trying to avoid contact with law enforcement after ICE ramped up arrests, Lind added. 

State of play: As a growing number of employers call workers back into the office, it's likely that freeways and parking ramps get jammed.

The bottom line: The next few months of ridership data will be ever more important in telling the story of Twin Cities riders' confidence in the system.

Two quick points:

1. Back to School

I looked a bit more deeply into the numbers. One big caveat here is that the State Fair and the return to school after Labor Day almost always sees spikes in transit usage. I expect that to be true this year as well. University students return in early September. 

(Of cousre, this is another reason to return light rail to its pre-COVID ten-minute frequencies. If you are only providing 80% of the light rail service to the system, you are kneecapping any ridership recovery right out of the gate. This is particularly important for lollygagging students on their way to their first class of the day.) 

[Green arrow = summer troughs, before September boosts ridership.]

2. Indeed, this is not great

If you look at the ridership data by mode, there's a plateau and decline starting last winter that seems to be ongoing. What happened? I don't know. The fact that the Green Line was running slow AF for months surely did not help. Maybe it's the fact that Hennepin Avenue South hasn't existed for the last two years?

I think the return to office narrative is a bit overblown; even under the ambitious RTO plans I am not seeing a lot of downtown businesses going to five-days-a-week. Anything less will be much more flexible, with workers coming in maybe part of the day or half of the week. 

Anyway, stay tuned. Not great news! I do think the E Line and B Line will be making a positive difference on these numbers and habits soon. It takes time for that to matter. But the best thing Metro Transit could do right away is hire more train operators and bring light rail back to where it should be. 

[What happened to transit during the winter of 2024-2025?]