Each year in the United States, more than 6 billion trips are taken across more than 3,000 public transit agencies. In many cities and towns, these public transportation systems provide critical links to jobs and public services, especially for lower-income families who may not be able to serve all their needs with a single car (or who may not own a car at all). Expanding the use of public transit can also help decrease congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and support the development of more housing.
Most public transit agencies have great data when it comes to calculating total ridership. After all, each rider buys a ticket, swipes a card, or taps their phone. But when it comes to answering some of the most important questions these agencies have — How do we better serve lower-income residents? How could changes to our routes and schedules better serve the needs of our population? Why do riders use our system for some trips and not others? — it’s important to have more detailed data.
At Replica, we’ve invested years into creating data and tooling that help agencies answer those questions. It’s why public transit trips — bus, train, subway, ferry, and others — in the Replica platform have just as much detail as private auto trips, so that customers can query and filter trips by purpose, start time, origins and destinations, and boarding and alighting stop, as well as traveler income, race, age, and employment status.
Replica’s seasonal outputs include calibrated, line-level transit trip data for hundreds of operators. Agencies around the country both big (Metropolitan Transportation Authority in NY, Chicago Transit Authority) and small (BJCTA in Birmingham, CDTA in the Capital District, New York) depend on Replica to study changes pre and post pandemic, forecast the economic impact of new rapid-bus-lanes, assess regional transit demand and equity, enhance short range transit, and support bus network redesigns.
With the launch of Spring 2024 data, we’re sharing 5 things we want everyone to know about Replica Public Transit Data.
- Replica produces trip data with trip purpose, time of day breakdowns, ODs, and trip-taker demographics for over 400 agencies and 11,000 unique routes. Collecting route-level transit ridership counts allows Replica to answer the most basic question: How many people took this route? But when these counts are integrated into Replica’s comprehensive transportation models and calibrated against, they are augmented with land-use, demographic, and economic activity information. The questions that can be answered not only grow, but become more significant: Who are the people that take this route? Are they part of an underserved community? Do they depend on this service for job access or essential services? Is this route serving them well?
- It’s accurate. Each year, we collect ground truth from 435 agencies for calibration, including line level data from 73% of agencies covering 96% of ridership. Nationally, Replica data has a 99.9% correlation with ground truth.
- You can request to add a transit operator into our pipeline, or ask that we calibrate against your own ground truth data. You just need to ask. Replica can multiply the benefits of transit agencies’ own transit data collection systems to help make better, more informed decisions about their systems– ultimately leading to seamless and convenient Monday morning commutes. But all of this starts with acquiring granular, recent data in the first place. Each time we produce data, we integrate additional transit agencies and ridership data to our nation-leading database. We’ve added 22 agencies in the last year alone. Simply reach out (data@replicahq.com) to make a request and we can make sure the agencies that are important to you are included in the Replica platform.
- Replica produces transit data in an integrated multi-modal pipeline that makes it possible to study transit trips versus all other modes in a given jurisdiction. Because all modes are comparable against each other, it makes it easy to study where transit is most and least competitive against other modes, or to see demographic differences in mode choice for specific origins and destinations.
- We’re working on our first generation of transit-specific applications. We’re looking to our customers to help us scope and prioritize the most important set of applications, be it transit competitiveness tools, stop-level demand and equity scores, transit shed studies, last mile demand, microtransit studies, and park and ride analysis, and beyond. If you have an idea you’d like to collaborate with us on, reach out to sales@replicahq.com.
