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Welcome to the Department of Rail and Public Transportation’s Data Stories, and thank you for signing up! This monthly series aims to find the narrative in data DRPT collects and uses, highlighting Virginia’s rail and transit community. Like last month, Data Stories is branching out to a new source. Actually, to numerous new sources. This month’s Data Story highlights the data portals, hubs, dashboards, and more of Virginia’s public transit services. |
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Transit Data Portals
Virginia has forty public transit providers, covering all corners of the Commonwealth. Each collects a range of data on its services, many of which (such as ridership or time and distance a vehicle is in service) are reported to DRPT. Several of Virginia’s transit agencies have independently developed data portals to their websites, making their data available and accessible to the public. These transit agencies collect data at a far more granular level than those data reported to DRPT. Below, Data Stories covers each data portal and its transit provider, and includes a few additional data resources from the federal government or transit advocacy groups.
This Data Story does not include maps that show current locations of transit vehicles, nor ridership reports that are not in a format that visually represents and summarizes those data. So, PDFs or downloadable spreadsheets with performance measures included are not counted. Additional things not included in this Data Story are the GIS data published by local governments, like geospatial data visualizing bus stop locations, or General Transit Feed Specification data, which is used to provide transit schedules and routes to map applications.
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Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) Public Dashboard
Charlottesville Area Transit’s Public Dashboard is the inspiration for this month’s Data Story. CAT’s Public Dashboard visualizes ridership, on-time performance, trips per hour, and more in a highly detailed interactive dashboard.
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Hampton Roads Transit (HRT) Ridership Dashboard
Hampton Roads Transit’s Accountability Center features a broad range of data dashboards under its Performance Reporting page. HRT’s Performance Reporting includes ridership, paratransit, and service quality.
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Arlington Transit (ART) Service Performance Dashboard
Arlington Transit’s Service Performance Dashboard covers ridership, on-time performance, and more for its fixed-route bus system and its paratransit service, STAR. ART’s dashboard provides numerous years of data, visualizing its steady recovery from pandemic-era lows.
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Metro (WMATA) Data
Fittingly for Virginia’s biggest provider of public transportation, Metro (the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority) has an abundance of data visualizations on its Open Data Hub. WMATA’s MetroPulse dashboard provides live data for service updates, while the Service Excellence Dashboard provides a summary of performance indicators in detail, aggregating data like on-time performance for the past year. WMATA’s Ridership Dashboard displays interactive information on ridership for all its services.
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Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (NVTC) Transit Data Dashboard
The Northern Virginia Transportation Commission is the regional governmental entity to promote and improve public transportation in Northern Virginia, supporting WMATA, the Virginia Railway Express, and the six local bus transit providers in its service area. As a result of NVTC’s crucial role in the planning, funding, and coordinating of public transit in its region, NVTC collects and reports a plethora of data about its region’s transit providers. NVTC’s Transit Data and Analysis page provides these data among many more reports.
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U.S. Ridership Trends
The American Public Transportation Association is a non-profit association that represents public transit across the United States. Its operations range from representing the transit community to the US Government, to providing workforce training for future transit leaders, to research and technical support for public transit. Additionally, APTA prepares a quarterly ridership report, that, while not specific to Virginia, is an important resource in the transit community worth noting.
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Bureau of Transportation Statistics and National Transit Database
At the Federal level, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) and the National Transit Database (NTD) collect and provide data from across the country. The BTS reports data from the entire transportation industry, both freight and passenger, and in all modes, from the biggest cargo ships and jumbo jets to microtransit and micromobility! The NTD is specifically managed by the Federal Transit Administration and provides data for the Country’s public transportation services.
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A Data-Driven Commonwealth
Effectively communicating data in a heavily data-driven world is key to telling transit’s story, touting transit’s benefits, and highlighting improvements. Data Stories aims to do just that and promotes our partners in the transit industry as the promote their own story.
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 DRPT’s mission is to connect and improve the quality of life for all Virginians with innovative transportation solutions. The SYIP turns that mission into action, by funding rail and public transportation priorities. With funding from the SYIP, transit agencies across Virginia provide over 10 million trips per month on buses, light rails, and subways. Freight rail programs divert around 14 million trucks from Virginia’s roads and attract hundreds of new jobs. Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a Web page.
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