NTD ID 10130 · Full Reporter

Berlin CTTRANSIT

Berlin CTTRANSIT carried 557,304 boardings in FY2024 at $17.85 per ride and $17.18 in subsidy per ride. Ten years of NTD data, by mode.

Berlin, CT Hartford, CT Bus
Also known as Connecticut Transit, CDTCNB
FY2024 boardings
557.3K
+26.8% vs FY2023
Cost per ride
$17.85
-4.6% $17.85 in 2024 dollars
Subsidy per ride
$17.18
-6.5% operating cost less fares
Fare recovery
3.7%
+111.3% fares average $0.67 per ride
Passenger miles
3.51M
average trip 6.31 miles
Operating cost
$9.95M
$121.26 per revenue hour
Rides per resident
2.74
service area 203.6K people
Rides per revenue hour
6.79
82K hours operated
Passengers aboard
3.03
average at any moment, passenger miles over vehicle miles
Average speed
14.15 mph
in revenue service, stops and traffic included
Cost per vehicle mile
$8.57
what running a mile costs, before anyone boards
Seasonal swing
1.82x
busiest month against quietest, 2025

What those two numbers mean

Passengers aboard is passenger miles divided by vehicle miles: how many people are on board on average, at any moment. It is the missing term in cost per ride. A service carrying twenty people per vehicle mile and one carrying half a person can spend the same on fuel and wages and arrive at wildly different costs per passenger.

Average speed is vehicle miles divided by vehicle hours, including every stop and every red light. It is the hidden term in cost per mile, because cost per mile is cost per hour divided by speed. A bus network slowing from 13 mph to 11 becomes a fifth more expensive per mile with no change in wages and no change in service.

Profile

Agency profile

As filed with the National Transit Database.

Contact

Legal name
Connecticut Department of Transportation -CTTRANSIT New Britain
Doing business as
CTTRANSIT
Address
257 Woodlawn Rd
Berlin, CT 6037-1537

Organization

Organization type
Private Provider Reporting on Behalf of a Public Entity
Reporter type
Full Reporter
Fiscal year ends
June 30, 2024
Reporting since
FY2015

Service area

Population served
203,562 over 81 sq mi
Density
2,513 people per sq mi
Urbanized area
Hartford, CT · 977.2K people
Vehicles at maximum service
18 · 18 contracted

Services operated

Each mode has its own page, with its own ridership, cost and safety.

Ridership

Ridership

Monthly data through July 2026.

This year against the last five

Same months, stacked on one axis, so seasonality does not read as a trend

Annual boardings

Ten-year series

Every month since 2014

The whole series, unsmoothed

Recovery against 2019

Each month against the same month before the pandemic

Latest month at 97.1% of 2019.

Cost

Cost and subsidy

Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in current dollars.

Cost and subsidy per ride

As reported

In 2024 dollars

The same series with inflation removed

Why cost per ride moved

Indexed to FY2015 = 100

Cost per ride is the cost of an hour of service divided by the riders carried in that hour. It can only rise for two reasons: service got dearer to produce, or fewer people rode it.

Since FY2015 an hour of service costs +52% more and carries -60.4% as many riders. The two have pushed cost per ride up about equally.

Where the money goes

Operating cost by function

Who pays for it

Federal, state and local funding, 2011 to 2024

Operating and capital money together, in the dollars of each year. Fares are not in this file — FTA took them out of the funding series in 2022 — so "directly generated" here means advertising, concessions, park and ride and taxes the agency levies itself. The farebox is charted above.

Capital

Capital spending

What was spent on building, rebuilding and replacing, shown beside the cost of running the service rather than folded into it.

Operating subsidy per ride
$17.18
FY2024, cost less fares
Capital spent per ride
$0.00
that year's spending, not the cost of the assets
Both together
$17.18
public money spent that year, per boarding
Capital per ride, averaged
$0.00
mean of 2 years

Operating and capital, per ride

Stacked, but counted separately. The two are different kinds of number.

Who pays for what

FY2024. Running the service and building it are funded by different governments.

Total Federal State Local Fares and own revenue
operating $10M 0% 95.8% 0% 4.2%
capital $0

Fares offset the cost of running the service. They do not meaningfully offset capital, which is why subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays one.

What these capital figures are not

Spending is not the same as cost
NTD reports what an agency spent on capital in a year, not what its capital cost it that year. Those differ: a system opened in 1904 spends almost nothing on tunnels while consuming an enormous inherited asset every day, and an agency that bought a fleet last year spent a fortune once and will spend nothing for a decade.
Vehicles can be depreciated. Everything else cannot.
FTA's capital series runs from 1992, which covers a bus fleet's working life more than twice over, so averaging rolling-stock spending across one replacement cycle gives a defensible figure for what the fleet costs each year. Track, tunnels, bridges and stations last forty to a hundred years or more. Thirty-three years of spending on those measures recent investment policy, not consumption, so no figure is published for them.
The vehicle figure is an estimate
Cost per ride including vehicles is arithmetic on published spending rather than a published number, and it assumes the agency has been replacing vehicles at roughly the rate it wears them out. Each agency's page says how far that assumption holds for it. It covers vehicles only: no track, no tunnels, no stations.
Year-by-year capital is lumpy
Capital arrives in bursts. A single year of it says more about where an agency sits in its replacement cycle than about the cost of carrying a passenger, which is why the per-ride averages here run across every year available.
Fares do not pay for it
Fare revenue offsets operating cost. It does not meaningfully offset capital, which is funded almost entirely by government. Subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays that way.

Capital spending by year and use

Year Guideway Stations Vehicles Maintenance buildings Fare collection Other Total
2024 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0
2023 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0 $0

Peers

Compared with similar systems

45 agencies serve an urbanized area of similar size, carry a similar number of riders, and run bus as their main service.

Cost per ride
$17.85
better than 44% of peers
Subsidy per ride
$17.18
better than 46% of peers
Fare recovery
3.7%
better than 24% of peers
Rides per resident
2.74
better than 53% of peers

Cost per ride against peers

This agency in blue, peer median dashed

Rides per resident against peers

How much the place uses what it has

Peer detail

Agency Urbanized area Population Boardings Rides / resident Cost / ride Subsidy / ride Fare recovery
Berlin CTTRANSIT this agency Hartford, CT 977.2K 557.3K 2.74 $17.85 $17.18 3.7%
Richmond, VA 1.06M 471.5K 6.49 $9.15
Raleigh, NC 1.11M 478.6K 2.66 $20.25 $20.13 0.6%
McAllen, TX 779.6K 673.8K 5.19 $7.97 $7.53 5.5%
McAllen, TX 779.6K 457.4K 0.85 $9.25
Milwaukee, WI 1.31M 429.8K 3.03 $15.98 $14.86 7%
Kansas City, MO--KS 1.67M 530.9K 1.38 $32.08 $31.72 1.1%
Cincinnati, OH--KY 1.69M 584.6K 1.48 $17.10 $16.23 5.1%
Providence, RI--MA 1.29M 777.1K 1.29 $28.26 $26.83 5.1%
Hartford, CT 977.2K 292K 3.95 $20.39 $19.71 3.3%
Mission Viejo--Lake Forest--Laguna Niguel, CA 646.8K 705.2K 30.41 $7.00
Peer median (45 agencies) 2.6 $17.10 $16.23 6.9%

By mode

By mode

Each service this agency runs, for FY2024. Directly operated and purchased service are summed.

Boardings by mode

Annual, stacked

Cost per ride by mode

FY2024

Mode detail, FY2024

Mode Service Boardings Passenger miles Revenue hours Operating cost Cost / ride Subsidy / ride Fare recovery
Bus Purchased transportation 557,304 3,513,852 82,025 $9,946,552 $17.85 $17.18 3.7% Detail →

Safety

Safety

Collisions, fires, derailments and security events reported to NTD. Only complete years are shown.

Events by year

All event types, all modes

Events per 100 million revenue miles

This agency against the national rate, on the same axis

Miles rather than boardings, because this series covers 2020: service kept running when riders stopped coming, and a rate per boarding would read that as a collapse in safety. Sitting above the national line is as likely to mean careful reporting as dangerous operation — and rail systems report events on their own right of way that a bus operator never encounters.

The longer record, 2012 to 2024

FTA's threshold-adjusted time series, which reaches back further than the incident file and is built to be compared across years

NTD's reporting threshold changed in 2010, 2015 and 2023. FTA publishes this series adjusted for those changes so the years can be read against each other; the unadjusted counts jump by a third in 2015 on the rule change alone.

Injuries, latest full year
3
Fatalities, latest full year
0
Total events, latest full year
5

Individual incidents

NTD publishes every major event on its own, with a time and usually a place. 19 of them for this agency since 2014, including 0 assaults on transit workers.

Where incidents were reported

The most recent 1,500 events carrying a location

Collision Assault Security Derailment Fire Other Larger circles mark incidents with injuries or deaths.

Points are where the agency reported the event, which for a moving vehicle is approximate.

By hour of day

Every reported major event since 2014

More service runs in the afternoon than at dawn, so the shape follows the timetable as much as anything else.

Where

Reported location type

Most serious recent incidents

Events that killed or seriously injured someone, newest first

Date Event Mode Location Conditions Injured Killed
June 9, 2023 2:15 PM Non-Rail Collision Bus Revenue facility: terminal center Cloudy, Daylight 2 1

Fleet

Fleet, workforce and reliability

How old the vehicles are, how many people run them, and how far they get between breakdowns. NTD publishes all three from 2022 onward.

Revenue vehicles
24
FY2024
Average age
14 yrs
weighted across the fleet
Past useful life
66.7%
16 vehicles at or beyond FTA's benchmark
Miles between failures
13,988
all mechanical failures, revenue miles

How the fleet has aged, 2011 to 2024

Average vehicle age, weighted across every mode the agency runs

A rising line is not automatically bad and a falling one is not automatically good: a fleet gets younger the year an agency takes delivery, and older every year it does not. What the shape shows is whether replacement is steady or comes in bursts. The table below says how many vehicles are actually past the life FTA expects of them.

Vehicles, and how many are accessible

Active revenue vehicles against those meeting the ADA standard

Fleet age

FTA's default useful life benchmark for each class, from the Transit Asset Management rule

Vehicle type Count Average age FTA benchmark Past FTA benchmark Past own benchmark
Bus 24 14 yrs 14 yrs
66.7%

Miles between failures

Revenue miles divided by mechanical failures. Higher is better.

NTD counts a failure as major when it stops the vehicle finishing its trip.

Reliability by mode

Mode Service Revenue miles Major failures All failures Miles between failures
Bus Purchased transportation 1,161,033 70 83 13,988

Fuel and energy

What the fleet burned in FY2024.

Miles by fuel

Comparing miles avoids any energy-equivalence assumption

Fuel by mode

Mode Diesel (gal) Gasoline (gal) CNG (gal eq.) Electric (kWh) Diesel mpg Zero-emission
Bus 297,443 0 4.5 0%

All years

Full annual series

Every year this agency reported, as published.

Year Boardings Passenger miles Revenue miles Revenue hours Operating cost Fares Cost / ride Subsidy / ride Fare recovery
2024 557,304 3,513,852 1,161,033 82,025 $9,946,552 $370,867 $17.85 $17.18 3.7%
2023 439,346 2,590,317 1,033,384 74,881 $8,217,920 $144,991 $18.70 $18.37 1.8%
2022 399,775 2,350,771 788,201 61,302 $6,111,129 $66,302 $15.29 $15.12 1.1%
2021 364,034 2,146,289 793,955 61,232 $5,618,561 $208,830 $15.43 $14.86 3.7%
2020 545,705 3,217,394 794,538 61,454 $5,308,161 $306,677 $9.73 $9.17 5.8%
2019 645,308 3,804,638 804,659 61,753 $4,973,549 $426,370 $7.71 $7.05 8.6%
2018 686,105 4,045,171 806,163 61,423 $4,847,987 $480,564 $7.07 $6.37 9.9%
2017 680,443 4,011,789 799,469 61,430 $4,837,084 $526,352 $7.11 $6.34 10.9%
2016 692,230 5,004,823 786,002 60,741 $4,478,925 $538,221 $6.47 $5.69 12%
2015 749,428 5,418,318 656,243 43,658 $3,483,800 $564,718 $4.65 $3.90 16.2%