Massachusetts Department of Transportation
Massachusetts Department of Transportation carried 222,418 boardings in FY2016 at $3.18 per ride and $2.01 in subsidy per ride. Ten years of NTD data, by mode.
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.
By the numbers
By the numbers
FY2016 unless noted. Each figure is computed from what the agency filed with NTD, and set against something to read it by.
On an average van mile, 5 people aboard for 8 seats — about half the seats taken.
U.S. vanpool: 63%. An all-day average; rush hour runs fuller.
Fares were 22% of all the money that paid for operations. That is lower than the 37% fare recovery on this page, because these funding figures also cover depreciation and pension costs that operating cost leaves out.
- Fares 22%
- State 14%
- Other directly generated 64%
Revenue hours bought from a private operator or another agency rather than run in-house. Nationally, much of this is paratransit.
U.S. transit: 25% of service hours
A journey with a transfer counts as two rides, because NTD counts each boarding.
The year's boardings divided by 365. Weekdays run higher, weekends lower.
Profile
Agency profile
As filed with the National Transit Database.
Contact
- Legal name
- Massachusetts Department of Transportation
Organization
- Organization type
- —
- Reporter type
- Full Reporter
- Fiscal year ends
- —
- Reporting since
- FY2015
Service area
- Population served
- —
- Urbanized area
- Boston, MA-NH-RI · 4.18M people
- Vehicles at maximum service
- —
Services operated
Each mode has its own page, with its own ridership, cost and safety.
Ridership
Ridership
Monthly data through June 2016.
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
Cost
Cost and subsidy
Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in 2024 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, in constant dollars
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.
Where the money goes
Operating cost by function
Who pays for it
Federal, state and local funding, 2015 to 2016
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.
FTA publishes the capital files from 2022 onward, and this agency does not appear in them.
Peers
Compared with similar systems
269 agencies serve an urbanized area of similar size, carry a similar number of riders, and run unknown as their main service.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts Department of Transportation this agency | Boston, MA-NH-RI | 4.18M | 222.4K | — | $3.18 | $2.01 | 37% |
| Pennsylvania Non-UZA | 4.2M | 232K | — | $25.90 | $18.68 | 27.9% | |
| Pennsylvania Non-UZA | 4.2M | 212.5K | 0.4 | $20.31 | $11.61 | 42.8% | |
| Ohio Non-UZA | 4.13M | 238.3K | — | $37.09 | $36.56 | 1.4% | |
| California Non-UZA | 4.36M | 210.7K | — | $22.71 | $20.93 | 7.8% | |
| California Non-UZA | 4.36M | 241.6K | — | $16.08 | $14.91 | 7.3% | |
| North Carolina Non-UZA | 4.51M | 238K | — | $12.45 | $10.93 | 12.2% | |
| Boston, MA--NH | 4.38M | 201.9K | 3.08 | $24.61 | $23.88 | 3% | |
| Pennsylvania Non-UZA | 4.2M | 262.5K | — | $26.53 | $18.68 | 29.6% | |
| Michigan Non-UZA | 3.42M | 228.7K | — | $17.18 | $16.50 | 3.9% | |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 5.12M | 229.9K | — | $4.79 | $-1.20 | 125.1% | |
| Peer median (269 agencies) | 0.66 | $24.37 | $22.55 | 6.3% | |||
By mode
By mode
Each service this agency runs, for FY2016. Directly operated and purchased service are summed.
Boardings by mode
Annual, stacked
Cost per ride by mode
FY2016
Mode detail, FY2016
| Mode | Service | Boardings | Passenger miles | Revenue hours | Operating cost | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vanpool | Purchased transportation | 222,418 | 8,638,548 | 43,112 | $708,180 | $3.18 | $2.01 | 37% | 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
Against the U.S. rate for the same mix of service
The dashed line is not the national average. It is what the national rate would be for this agency's own service: each mode it runs, charged at that mode's U.S. rate for the year, in proportion to its miles. Rates differ tenfold between modes, so a railway read against a national figure made mostly of buses and vans would look dangerous for running rail.
Miles rather than boardings, because this series covers 2020, when service kept running and riders did not come. And sitting above the line is as likely to mean careful reporting as dangerous operation.
The longer record, 2014 to 2016
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.
Fleet
Fleet, workforce and reliability
How old the vehicles are, how many people run them, and how far they get between breakdowns.
How the fleet has aged, 2015 to 2016
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 and reliability
NTD publishes the vehicle age and breakdown files from 2022 onward, and this agency does not appear in them.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2024 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2023 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2022 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2021 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2020 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2019 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2018 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2017 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| 2016 | 222,418 | 8,638,548 | 1,711,788 | 43,112 | $708,180 | $261,862 | $3.18 | $2.01 | 37% |
| 2015 | 200,450 | 8,067,198 | 1,362,665 | 34,143 | $958,054 | $726,923 | $4.78 | $1.15 | 75.9% |