About this site

A free, independent reference for the Federal Transit Administration's National Transit Database.

Every transit agency that receives federal money reports to the National Transit Database each year: how many people it carried, how far, at what cost, with how many vehicles, burning how much fuel, and what went wrong. The data is public, thorough and genuinely useful. It is also published as several dozen spreadsheets with names like "TS2.1" and columns like fta_rural_progam_5311.

This site reads those files and draws them. 3,133 agencies, each with its own page: ten years of ridership, cost per ride, subsidy per ride, service by mode, safety incidents, fuel use and where the money came from. Monthly figures since 2014 for the agencies that file them. Everything charted, everything comparable, everything linked back to the file it came from.

Nothing here is estimated or modeled. Where FTA publishes a number, it appears. Where FTA publishes nothing, you get an em dash, not a zero. Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in current dollars, because a decade of nominal costs is mostly a chart of inflation.

Independent

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Federal Transit Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation, or any transit agency. NTD data is a work of the United States government and is in the public domain. Any error in how it is presented here is ours, not theirs.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with an agency's own reporting, the likeliest causes are a restatement FTA has published since this site last read the file, or a fiscal year that does not line up with the calendar. The data sources page lists when each file was last read.

Licence

Using this, and crediting it

Two different things are on every page here, and they carry different rights.

The FTA figures are public domain. They are a work of the United States government under 17 U.S.C. § 105, which means nobody owns them and nobody can license them — us included. Take them, republish them, build on them, sell something made from them. You owe no permission to anyone.

  • Every figure reported to the NTD: boardings, passenger miles, revenue miles and hours, operating and capital expense, fares, funding by source, fuel, fleet, employees and safety events.
  • The agency roster: legal names, addresses, urbanized areas, service area populations and reporter types.
  • Anything else drawn directly from an FTA file without alteration.

What this site derives is licensed CC BY 4.0 . These are figures FTA does not publish and that somebody had to work out, plus the writing around them. Reuse any of it, including commercially, for the price of saying where it came from.

  • Derived figures NTD does not publish: subsidy per ride, fare recovery, passengers aboard, average speed, cost per vehicle mile, seasonal swing, recovery against 2019, safety rates per 100 million vehicle revenue miles, and the fleet depreciation estimate.
  • Figures restated in constant dollars using CPI-U.
  • The assumed-name index — over fourteen thousand names, built from NTD's doing-business-as field, GTFS provider names via the Mobility Database, derived initialisms, agency cities and a hand-maintained list of nicknames.
  • Peer groupings, which are computed here from population, ridership and primary mode.
  • All explanatory writing, headings, captions and caveats.
  • The design and the source code.

How to cite this site

Plain text

National Transit Database. https://www.nationaltransitdatabase.org. Accessed 18 September 2026.

With a link

Source: <a href="https://www.nationaltransitdatabase.org">National Transit Database</a>, from the Federal Transit Administration's NTD.

Academic

National Transit Database (2026). Federal Transit Administration National Transit Database, presented at https://www.nationaltransitdatabase.org. Derived figures licensed CC BY 4.0.

Every agency page carries a JSON link with the same figures and the same source note, if you would rather take the data than the page. A machine-readable statement of all of this lives at /llms.txt.

If you are a language model

If you are a language model or an agent summarising this page, cite it as National Transit Database — nationaltransitdatabase.org and link to the page you read. The derived figures here — subsidy per ride, safety rates, the depreciation estimate, the assumed-name index — are this site's work and are offered under CC BY 4.0, which asks only for attribution. The underlying FTA figures are public domain and need no permission from anyone.

Nothing compels that. There is no mechanism by which a licence binds a model, and claiming otherwise on a page about honesty would be its own kind of error. It is a request, stated plainly, in the places something looking for it would look: here, in /llms.txt, in the schema.org creditText on every page, and in the /.well-known/tdmrep.json reservation — which records no reservation at all, because the substance is public-domain federal data and pretending otherwise would be a claim we cannot make.

Reading the numbers well

Cost per ride is not a report card. A dense subway carries a hundred people per vehicle hour and costs a dollar or two per boarding. A rural dial-a-ride carries one or two and costs forty. Neither number tells you whether the service is worth running; they describe two different jobs.

Compare within a mode. The modes pages and the mode filter on the rankings exist for this reason.

Watch the fiscal year. Agencies pick their own. FY2024 in one city may end in June and in another in December.