Review of Factors Affecting Public Transportation Ridership

The use of different transport modes is affected by several factors such as economic, sociological, and geographical factors. To study the factors affecting public transport ridership, many studies have examined the influence of several parameters within those categories on public transport ridership. These studies focused on understanding the main factors affecting the usage of public transport systems from two standpoints, the first is from the user perspective, and what makes people use transit mode. In this group, the focus is on examining how people’s socio-demographics, accessibility measures and built environment, and mainly infrastructure affect the use of transit mode. The second is from the transit system perspective, which focuses on the system-level attributes affecting transit usage. The purpose of this paper is to review and summarize some of the studies focusing on the transit system perspective to identify the different variables used such as dependent variables, independent variables, and catchment areas.