Athens Transit reports ridership boom in 2025

Athens Transit is set to report a massive ridership boom for 2025, tripling the reported number from 2024. 

On October 31, Athens Transit will be reporting over 2.1 million rides to the National Transit Database for fiscal year 2025, the highest number in Athens Transit history. The previous record of 1.95 million rides was set in 2011, before the COVID-19 pandemic crushed transit ridership numbers in Athens and around the country.

Three different methods of counting ridership

Ridership seems to have recovered entirely from the pandemic here in Athens, but that’s not the only reason for the record-breaking 2025 numbers. There are at least two other factors that may help account for the unusual dip and spike seen in the graph above from 2021 to 2025.

The first factor is that Athens Transit has used three different methods to count ridership numbers over the years, with one method being used for the first time in 2025.

The traditional farebox method

Until 2020, Athens Transit relied on the farebox to count ridership (these numbers are shown in blue above). Every rider who boarded the bus was recorded when they paid their fare. Similarly, UGA riders were asked to swipe their UGA cards into the farebox when boarding. While accurate, the farebox method was limited in that it could only determine how many passengers boarded a particular route, not where they got on or off the bus.

Counting by hand

The farebox method of counting passengers suddenly became unavailable in March 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of concern for the health of bus drivers, then Athens Transit Director Butch McDuffie (with the support of the ACC Commission) decided to let everyone board the bus free of charge through the rear door. That allowed bus drivers to have a full six feet of social distancing from potentially sick passengers, a separation that was considered essential at the time.

Without the availability of the farebox as a counting method, bus drivers had to manually record passengers as they entered the bus. According to Pope, this method of manual tallying was unreliable and resulted in a significant undercount of passengers for years.

“It was reliant on the operator pressing a tally button and actually seeing somebody get on and off the bus. Since we were allowing rear door boarding, it’s not always easy for them. Bus drivers’ main focus is operating the vehicle safely and looking out for external threats, so sometimes they miss people getting on or off,” Pope said. “Another thing that played into the inaccurate count is that we had great turnover since 2020 in our transit vehicle operators. A lot of the newer employees struggled to follow the processes we needed them to, including counting passengers.”

Pope acknowledges that transit ridership was greatly reduced during the pandemic, but it might not have been reduced by as much as the manual count would indicate.

As a side note, the ridership numbers Athens Transit reported for fiscal year 2020 (which ended on June 30, 2020) were mostly counted using the farebox. The last four months of the year used the manual count method. This is why 2020 is colored in blue in the graph above, although perhaps it should be a bluish shade of purple.

Automated passenger counting system

When Pope became the director of Athens Transit last year, one of his main priorities was to reestablish an accurate count of the number of passengers his agency serves. The easiest way to do that, without fareboxes, was to finally go through the process of certifying an automated counting system that they actually had installed on every bus back in 2016.

This automated passenger counting system uses dual infrared beams, installed at both doors, that can tell when a rider enters or exits the bus. Depending on which beam breaks first, the system can tell if a passenger is getting on or off. This data is recorded for every bus at every stop, giving lots of useful information to transit planners.

“One of my goals, stepping into the director position, was to get the APC system certified because it is the gold standard throughout the transportation industry,” Pope said. “It’s somewhat helpful to know that, say, route 1 has a high service level, but now we know geographically where that ridership is located and we can better target those hotspots specifically. We can look at how we could better align our routes to provide a higher level of service to those areas.”

While this system has been installed and active since 2016, it could not be used for federal reporting until it was certified for accuracy, which just happened this year. Pope says the certification process involved his team testing the system on 150 randomly selected bus trips. They compared the automated system’s count to that obtained by watching bus surveillance footage. They found that the system is 96.9% accurate, a bit higher than the 95% accuracy required for federal reporting.

After certification, the system was used for the official ridership count this year for the first time. This new system gave numbers that were much higher than projected based on the manual counting method, which had expected only 1.06 million rides in 2025 as reported in the ACC budget for fiscal year 2026.

Fare-free transit

Fare-free transit is the other major factor that may have caused a boost in ridership in 2025 when compared to numbers reported before 2020. When transit systems ditch the farebox, they nearly always see a large increase in ridership, usually between 20% and 60%.

From 2005 to 2020, Athens Transit gave an average of 1.62 million rides a year. In 2025, Athens Transit ridership increased by 30.3% compared to this average, right in line with the expected increase from going fare-free.

However, the increase seen this year is likely due to several factors, including a slow recovery from depressed ridership during the pandemic.

Are automated counting systems accurate?

The accuracy of automated counting systems has been studied by transit experts. Researchers found these systems to be reasonably accurate except in certain situations when they can undercount passengers (for example, a parent carrying a child might only be counted once) and in other situations when they overcount (for example, passengers who rock back and forth in the entryway could be counted multiple times).

ACC Auditor Gavin Hassemer found in a recent audit that the automated system now in use by Athens Transit undercounts passengers in 97% of error cases. While Hassemer did not perform a rigorous analysis of the automated system, his observations indicate that, if anything, the real passenger count for 2025 may be even higher than reported.

UGA Transit, also a fare-free system, has used infrared-based automated passenger counters for data reporting in the past. Currently, UGA Transit uses a camera-based model, which the agency considers to be more accurate. 

“While no system is perfect, the camera-based system is much more accurate than the infrared system,” said James Hataway, the senior director for integrated media communications at UGA.

Despite being used for reporting this year for the first time, Athens Transit’s infrared system is now almost ten years old. Pope says that he will ensure the system is regularly tested for accuracy during its lifecycle until it can be replaced with a newer model.

Going forward, Athens Transit will use some type of automated passenger counting system even if the mayor and commission decides to bring back fares, according to Pope. That’s because these devices are accurate and provide more detailed data for transit planners as described above.

“We’re trying to ensure that we have the highest accuracy in our data and that we are maintaining industry standards in our data collection,” Pope said.

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