Startling reversal brings 50% Metrobus gains

Metrobus, which had been bleeding passengers for more than a decade, saw ridership soar a full 50% in the year ended Sept. 30 as total county mass transit use gained 39%, new figures from Miami-Dade’s Department of Transportation and Public Works show.

At least four factors played roles in the startling reversal of Metrobus from passenger flight to a passenger magnet.

Most obvious is the tail end of a bounce-back from covid, which had caused exodus from mass transit across the nation as businesses closed or sent many people to work from home. A second element was the late July start of the long-awaited Better Bus Network. A third was the impact of what is called the youngest bus fleet in the nation as a quality magnet as new buses entered service and older ones were retired.

Often unconsidered, however, is a new way of counting mass transit passengers that makes ridership comparisons with earlier years a highly imperfect measurement.

The county’s figures show 56,284,664 trips on Metrobus from Oct. 1, 2022, through Sept. 30, 2023. That’s 50% more than the 37,528,174 trips in the prior 12 months and 12.7% more than the 49,960,359 in fiscal 2019, the last year before covid send ridership plummeting.

The current figure is well below the 65,150,553 bus trips recorded as recently as fiscal 2016. But as the county’s population and roadway congestion both grew, bus ridership numbers had been falling from years, down from 73.27 million in 2009.

As bus ridership has been rebounding, however, less than 66% of bus service was actually on time in the first half of the past year, well below other transit modes, and a change in how passengers were counted skewed ridership figures upward, a transit official told the Citizens’ Independent Transportation Trust in June. Metrorail actually made 75.8% of trips on time for the first quarter of the year. Metromover, which loops constantly, is not rated for on-time service.

The 737-bus system had been losing riders for at least a decade until fiscal year 2022, when it recorded a 2% ridership gain from year to year. Now comes a 50% gain.

One reason for that sharp increase may not be more riders, but rather a different way of determining who is actually getting aboard transit. In the past, the system counted payments at the farebox to determine number of riders. But starting in the past year the transportation department began using passenger counters for greater accuracy. So the county has been comparing numbers counted one way with numbers determined in another way, which is one reason passenger numbers for last year have been reported above the trendline.

As for the age variable, Metrobuses now average 4.7 years old, one of the youngest bus fleets in the nation. Metrorail cars, which were replaced just before the pandemic, now average just 3.4 years. By comparison, the average age of a car on Metromover – which is ticketed for a system expansion linking to Miami Beach – is now 12.2 years.

Meanwhile, what is being touted as the “most significant improvement to Metrobus service in nearly four decades” was sent rolling into motion on three high-frequency corridors when the long-awaited Better Bus Network began service July 24. Plans for the network had been OK’d in 2021 but never enacted. Though the county lacked enough bus drivers, it enacted a broader but still scaled-back countywide upgrade on Nov. 13.

The non-profit Transit Alliance had spearheaded the bus routes redesign starting in 2018. It held more than 130 workshops and got more than 5,000 survey responses in pushing the plan forward. Now the alliance is subcontracted to work on the Better Bus Network.

As the network rolled out, the county substantially changed the entire transit system to encourage riders to stay loyal and others to come aboard by removing fares for the rest of this calendar year from both Metrobus and Metrorail – Metromover has long been free.

All those changes make comparing their collective impacts harder in the year that has just begun, with new bus routes, new frequencies, new ways of counting riders, more on-time trips under Better Bus Network schedules and a temporary no-fare operating environment all playing roles.

The other transit modes also recorded gains in riders last year, though not as large as Metrobus did. Metrorail ridership was up 15.9% to 13,261,255 passengers, and Metromover use was up 19.8% to 6,546,102.