Business Requirement:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is the largest transportation network in North America. I am assigned a role of Data Visualization Specialist for the Data & Analytics Team at the MTA. I have to create an interactive visual or dashboard that illustrates post-pandemic ridership recovery trends across the MTA's services.

MTA is responsible for public transportation of 12 counties of New York and southwestern of Connecticut. Below are the list MTA's services

• Bridges and Tunnels
• Buses
• Long Island Railroad (LIIR)
• Metro-North Railroad
• Paratransit (Access-A-Ride)
• Staten Island Railway (SIR)
• Subways

The data contains daily ridership record from 1st March 2020 to 31st October 2024.

Key Insights:

We can see a positive ridership recovery trends, however it has not yet reached the post pandemic levels.

In 2020 there was a major drop in the ridership when covid -19 pandemic hit New York. Until March 6 there was no major changes in the ridership, and it was the last normal week before pandemic which was only 10% compared to pre-pandemic.

In October 2024, ridership reached its highest level since the pandemic, with 198 million passengers, a significant recovery from the 23 million recorded in April 2020, which is 75% to pre-pandemic. I did some research on this and found that Sir Michael Carrasquillo was the billionth customer.

Here is a reference link to an article. Click here

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hit one billion trips on the New York City subway in 2024. The billionth customer was identified as Sir Michael Carrasquillo from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn who tapped into the subway system at Atlantic Av–Barclays Ctr 2 3 4 5 B D N R Q Station at 1:45 p.m. Mr. Carrasquillo received four weeks of unlimited rides on an OMNY card, and an OMNY hat and T-shirt. This milestone follows the busiest Sunday since the pandemic with the subway carrying 2.6 million riders during the New York City Marathon and comes nearly two months earlier than in 2022. October was the busiest October for New York City Transit since the pandemic, with nearly 114 million subway rides and over 40 million bus rides, 10 million more subway rides and 3 million more bus rides than the previous year.

The demand for paratransit services, such as MTA's Access-A-Ride, has grown substantially to 120% since the pandemic. This increase reflects a preference among customers with disability for safer travel options compared to traditional public transportation.

Traffic on bridges and tunnels has surpassed pre-pandemic levels to 101%. MTA manages 7 bridges and 2 tunnels linking NYC boroughs and beyond. MTA has taken great majors that has resulted in positive outcome such as promoting road safety and cash less tolling that has reduce customers traveling time.

Subway service within New York City and it is busiest and largest transit system. Out of all the services, 54% ridership are observed by subways. We can see that subway ridership has recovered to 70% by October 2024.

Whereas other MTA's services are showing steady growth, The Staten Island Railroad (SIR) is showing very slow recovery trend.

Even though ridership has not reached to the pre-pandemic levels, we see 75% has been recovered. After pandemic several factors has affected New York ridership to reduce such as companies started work from home for employee, crowd gatherings were limited for safety of people and many more reasons. Over the period, things started improving as vaccine was available for everyone, people started to feel safer.

MTA has taken several steps to improve and safer commute option like sanitization, contact less payment for Toll collection, OMNY and MetroCard payment for ridership, scheduling trip in advance, etc.