Rhythms of Rochester Ridership
Regional transit service (RTS) is recognized as one of the best-run transit systems in the US, providing public transportation to over 10 million people in the Greater Rochester Area annually.
This infographic explores trends and changes in RTS ridership, focusing particularly on seasonal patterns and how public transportation ridership in Rochester has changed prior to, during, and post-COVID pandemic.
For this project, I used data from Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority (RGRTA) Rider Volumes: Beginning 2006, provided by RGRTA via Open Data NY (data.ny.gov). This dataset includes the total number of riders for each of the eight subsidiaries that RGRTA operates in the multi-county, Greater Rochester Area; I specifically focused on data for the Regional Transit Service (RTS) subsidiary, which serves bus lines in Monroe County (where the city of Rochester is located).
Ridership is defined as the total number of riders, passengers, or boardings– it is measured daily and the dataset provides the monthly total, spanning from April 2006 to December 2023.
After cleaning up the exported CSV file from the open data portal, I sorted the data in two different ways to reveal particular trends:
Organizing the rows in chronological order allowed me to see how ridership changed over time
Organizing the rows in ascending order of ridership allowed me to see which months and years had the lowest public transportation usage versus which had the highest
I created two sets of data visualizations, one showing ridership over time and the other exploring seasonal trends. When designing the graphs I used narrowly spaced thin bars that, together, show broad ridership patterns and also stylistically resemble audio waveforms.
To more closely tie the graphs to the subject matter, I used colors and graphic elements inspired by the blue and green RTS buses on Rochester’s roads.
Photo credit: Regional Transit Service (RTS)
