In the face of evolving ridership patterns and funding uncertainties, it is more important than ever for transit agencies to make data-driven planning decisions to provide the most efficient, impactful transit service for their communities.

Ridership in many ways is the bottom-line for transit agencies, and ridership data is critical to understanding the impact of service changes and infrastructure investments. But historically, planners have faced multiple barriers to truly ridership-aware planning: inaccurate or incomplete ridership data, inflexible reporting tools, and a lack of data visualization.

In working with executives, IT leaders, and planners at dozens of transit agencies, I frequently hear about staff lacking confidence in the data in front of them—or taking days or weeks to generate the insights they need. The move to APC-based ridership reporting unlocks the potential for more accurate and accessible data, but agencies are still limited by data quality challenges and legacy reporting tools.

I’m excited to announce new tools now available to help transit planners meet the moment with ridership-aware planning.

Hopthru Ridership by Swiftly offers transit agencies accurate ridership data and intuitive analytics tools. Today, we’re revealing enhancements to the Hopthru Ridership dashboard, enabling planners to better incorporate ridership data into their decision-making.

Request a meeting with our team for a live demo of the new and improved Hopthru Ridership platform, and read on to learn how agencies are using this tool for ridership-aware planning.

Why ridership data (and the right tools) are essential for smarter service planning 

First, we need to understand why ridership data is so critical to effective service planning.

Planners need reliable, accessible ridership data to:

• Identify opportunities to improve service efficiency
• Measure the impact of infrastructure improvements and service changes
• Communicate agency priorities with community stakeholders
• Monitor evolving trends in demand for transit

“Ridership feeds into a whole host of activities that planners are involved in,” says Ricky Cervantes, Senior Transit Planner at North County Transit District (NCTD). “Ridership factors into route modification, route re-alignments, stop consolidation, etc.—both for exploring and monitoring those changes.”

“The more accurate and reliable data we have, the more accurate ridership projections are going to be. This will have an impact on the service you plan to run in future years and feeds into the agency’s budget.”

—Ricky Cervantes, Senior Transit Planner, NCTD

Unfortunately, many planners today lack the tools to take advantage of the full benefits of ridership data. In addition to the many challenges to obtaining accurate ridership data, planners are often left trying to conduct complicated analysis in spreadsheets or with custom in-house dashboards. Existing processes require planners to download canned reports from legacy ridership tools that are difficult to use, lack geographic context, and do not support alerts to monitor changes in demand. 

“Prior to having Hopthru Ridership, it was tough to pull ridership data,” said Ryan Mayer, Senior Planner and Special Projects Manager at the Regional Transportation Agency of Central Maryland (RTA Maryland). “Someone might want data on a certain route, only on Saturdays. The confidence level and the way we got the data was challenging.”

“Using Hopthru Ridership, it’s a lot more simple. We can ask for any type of data and get it—weekends, by route, depicted on a map. We can feel confident giving that data over quickly. Confidence is key for the data you receive and distribute.”

—Ryan Mayer, Senior Planner and Special Projects Manager, RTA Maryland

Hopthru Ridership is Swiftly’s single solution for accurate, accessible ridership data and reporting tools—and the first map-based dashboard for ridership analysis.

We’ve worked with dozens of transit agencies nationwide to unlock the value of their ridership data. Through this collaboration, we’ve identified the critical categories of functionality that transit agencies need to ensure ridership-aware planning. Today, I’m also excited to announce new enhancements to Hopthru Ridership to further enable planners to conduct sophisticated analysis and integrate ridership data within their workflows.  

Read on to understand how planners are using ridership data to inform their decision-making today.

1. Intuitive data visualization

For too long, planners have been forced to moonlight as data scientists, creating custom reports from data in spreadsheets. This process has limited the speed, agility, and complexity of ridership analysis. It has also affected planners’ ability to communicate the impact of infrastructure investments, both internally and with stakeholders such as politicians, business owners, and community members in general.

“We receive so many ‘side quests’: requests from local jurisdictions and consults for ridership data. It was really difficult when you didn’t have the information, because you want to be helpful to local partners. But sometimes it wasn’t so easy,” says Cervantes at NCTD.

“With Hopthru Ridership, you’re able to pull up systemwide data, route-level data, stop-level data. There are options to filter out a certain route or create groups. You can group the data by service date, service date type.”

—Ricky Cervantes, Senior Transit Planner, NCTD

“One of the things I like is being able to see the data first, and then export it. Something that can be frustrating is downloading a dataset without knowing whether it contains all the information you want.”

Map-based data visualization showcases insights in a way that effectively communicates what’s happening with your service. With Hopthru Ridership, planners can conduct analysis in seconds and minutes that used to take days and even weeks.

2. New: Analyzing geographic layers

Planners frequently need to understand ridership data across a specific area, independent of a single transit line. Historically, conducting this analysis has involved exporting ridership data, merging it with schedule information to get geographic metadata, and uploading it to a GIS tool.

Hopthru Ridership now supports filtering and viewing ridership data by census tracts, census block groups, and custom geographies such as corridors, municipality borders, school zones, proximity to a landmark, etc.

This gives planners an intuitive tool to contribute to Title VI analysis, equity studies, and analysis for targeted service changes. For example, planners can analyze ridership data for all of the stops near a landmark such as a school or along a main street to evaluate whether there is demand for additional service—or whether to relocate service to an area with more demand.

“The 347 is a route that had the same alignment for a very long time, and there was a major commercial corridor very close to the route that we knew could be a ridership boon for the agency. But we didn’t have the granular data to support that before,” Cervantes said. “We ended up making the change based on Hopthru Ridership's datasets.”

“We saw a 47% increase in ridership on that line. With Hopthru Ridership, we monitored and communicated to our board how great this change was.”

—Ricky Cervantes, Senior Transit Planner, NCTD

3. Comparison across different metrics and time ranges 

Map-based visualizations are critical for a snapshot of ridership data, but planners may need to dive deeper into the data to understand historical trends or compare multiple metrics. In the past, it has been difficult for planners to compare ridership data over time or across multiple service changes.

The new table-based reporting in Hopthru Ridership allows planners to narrow in on specific time windows and metrics to conduct deeper analysis and refine their decision-making.

4. New: Alerts and subscriptions

Agencies set standards and monitor results for critical system metrics such as on-time performance. They now have the opportunity to just as vigilantly keep a finger on the pulse of how their service is consumed.

Hopthru Ridership allows planners and executives to subscribe to reports and be notified of spikes or drops in ridership within specific parameters. With this capability, transit agencies can receive early warning of ridership drop-offs, monitor crowding on a heavily-used route, identify areas for continued investment, or track progress on recent initiatives. For example, planners may set up an alert to monitor ridership trends related to a new service change or to understand the scale of ridership increases as the school year begins.

Cervantes shares how NCTD monitors ridership increases and cross-references the data with rider anecdotes to inform service decisions: “Having confidence in stop-level ridership data is super useful. For example, school ridership has been increasing, but we’ve also seen an increase in full-bus pass-ups when we have heavy loads. Having this reliable load data is very useful in addressing the complaint and in fixing the issue through changes to frequency and changes to scheduling.”

Facing uncertainty with trustworthy data

In a world of rapidly changing transportation patterns and funding uncertainties, transit agencies need to be dynamic in their ability to analyze and interpret ridership trends.

I’ve witnessed firsthand how leading transit agencies are empowering planners to incorporate ridership data throughout their planning processes. The results are more agile staff, data-informed decisions, and confidence-inspiring communication across departments and external stakeholders.

Our latest enhancements to Hopthru Ridership are driven by our firsthand experiences working with leading transit agencies like NCTD, RTA Maryland, PalmTran, and the Alexandria Transit Company.

Request a demo of our new tools and learn how your agency can spend less time validating data and more time measuring impact.