Traffic from planes, trains and automobiles has returned to pre-pandemic levels in Iowa, but there’s one area that hasn’t fully recovered. The Iowa Department of Transportation’s Stuart Anderson says ridership on public transportation still lags.
Public transit ridership in 2019 was 23.8 Million, and then it dropped to around 10 million in 2021. The ridership includes buses and some ride-share systems. Anderson says public transit ridership has been up in each of the last three years, but is still not all the way back.
He says the number of miles where people pay to ride public transit hasn’t increased in the last three years.
Anderson says they don’t know exactly why public transit ridership hasn’t rebounded, but one of the reasons could be that more people are working from home since the pandemic.
