Counting problem: Pittsburgh Regional Transit ridership has been overstated by at least 3%

Since the beginning of the year, Pittsburgh Regional Transit had been baffled each month by figures that show its bus ridership has been down 3% to 4% compared to 2023.

Drivers said they hadn’t noticed such a difference. Ditto ridership counters sent to bus stops. Ridership revenue stayed steady.

“We weren’t hearing from our drivers, and our fare revenue wasn’t down,” CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman said. “We weren’t sure what was going on.”

After months of analyses, Kelleman told a board committee last week, staff reached this conclusion: The agency’s previous automated passenger counters – which had been replaced about a year ago – apparently had been routinely overcounting bus ridership.

“By April or May, we thought it was a system problem,” she said. “Everything points to the previous system not counting properly.”

Transit agencies use three methods to determine ridership: automated passenger counters; fare boxes where each passenger is supposed to acknowledge they entered a vehicle and that collect a fare from paying customers; and employees who visit transit stops to manually count riders getting on and off buses. Agency officials then compare those numbers and massage them a bit to reach a figure they are comfortable submitting to the Federal Transit Administration on an annual basis.

Kelleman said the agency took interest in January, when the automated counters began showing a dip in ridership that wasn’t showing up anywhere else. It’s not unusual for the automated counter and farebox to record different numbers because passengers occasionally don’t swipe their card correctly, Kelleman said, but it is unusual for the human counters and farebox to be substantially different from the automated counters.

The problem with overcounting is limited to the bus side of the system because there are no automated counters on the light rail system.

The overcounting means PRT’s actual ridership numbers are even worse than it had been reporting. Like many transit agencies across the country, PRT’s ridership has been slow to rebound since the COVID-19 pandemic, especially on the light rail system.

Kelleman said the agency isn’t happy about the situation, but it shouldn’t have any real consequences because it is relatively small. The FTA uses certain levels of ridership to qualify for some grant programs, but a reduction of less than 5% wouldn’t put PRT in a different qualification category.

“We don’t change the numbers or anything like that,” Kelleman said. “You’re disappointed, but you fix it and move on.”

Even though the ridership numbers are lower than the agency had reported, Kelleman contended the agency remains busy.

“The numbers may say we have 130,000 instead of 138,000 [daily riders], but we know we still regularly have more passengers than seats on the P1,” Kelleman said, referring to the agency’s busiest route on the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway. “By any objective measure, we are still a busy system.”