Comment from Jacob Wasserman

Comment submitted on my own behalf, not representing my employer or any other affiliation: Adapted from: Wasserman, J., and Taylor, B. (2021, January 20). Sources of and Gaps in Data for Understanding Public Transit Ridership (UC-ITS-2020-33). UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. https://doi.org/10.17610/t66893. Recommendation: Trip counts by time of day and day of the week Collect temporally disaggregated trip counts in the NTD; provide operators methodology and resources from FTA to do so A gap in temporally disaggregated transit data is by day of the week and time of day. In research on transit ridership trends in California, UCLA scholars found (in analyzing non-NTD data) significant variation in ridership at different times and days across agencies and regions. Researchers obtained the data to do this analysis directly from the operators (in variously compatible formats) because data broken down by time of day are not available from a central source. The NTD does include service and ridership estimates on an average weekday, Saturday, and Sunday from "full reporter" operators. However, neither small nor rural agencies are required to provide such estimates, nor are these figures included in the main annual time series spreadsheets or monthly data releases. The NTD also asks their full reporter operators for the start and end times of their A.M. peak, P.M. peak, and midday services but does not ask for ridership or service supply data for those time periods. As operators generally collect temporally disaggregated data already, I suggest that the FTA work with its reporting operators to investigate the feasibility of collecting and including in the NTD a full set of transit use and supply data categorized by day of the week and time of day, particularly as automated data collection systems make such data easier to gather.