See how AC Transit ridership recovered from the pandemic
While AC Transit ridership has increased from the worst lows during the pandemic, recovery has been uneven. Some neighborhoods have reached prepandemic levels of ridership, while many have yet to reach half of their peak.
Through a public records request, The Daily Californian was able to obtain trip-level data on AC Transit’s ridership from January 2019 to May 2026. Ridership is counted through automatic people counters, sensors on AC Transit buses that detect when people leave and enter.
However, counter data was not recorded prepandemic. The Daily Cal filled in gaps in the data using statistical methods which sampled route-level total ridership estimates from AC Transit. Estimated rides make up about 40% of rides in 2019, but decline to under 8% of rides after 2021. For new routes created after the Realign service changes in 2025, 100% of rides are estimated.
This is the city of Berkeley’s AC Transit ridership in February 2020. Each dot represents a cluster of stops within a specific radius, and each line is one or more AC Transit routes. The size of the dots represent the number of people who boarded or left a bus.
During the pandemic, ridership sharply declined by 80% throughout the city. In stops near UC Berkeley, ridership declined by as much as 97%.
San Pablo Avenue’s transit corridor remained at 51% of prepandemic ridership.
Even as Berkeley public schools partially reopened, ridership was largely stagnant.
When UC Berkeley returned to in-person instruction in August 2021, routes near campus returned to 60% of prepandemic ridership.
During school breaks and the summer, ridership on campus stops falls to pandemic levels. Lines outside the university in West Berkeley are unaffected by these breaks.
Ridership at stops near UC Berkeley only reached prepandemic levels at the start of the 2023-24 academic year.
After campus relaxed COVID-19 restrictions, ridership slowly recovered throughout the city.
Six years on, the landscape of ridership in Berkeley looks very different. Ridership is up in Central and Downtown Berkeley and down around the edges of the city. In particular, ridership in the Berkeley Hills sits at 30% of prepandemic ridership.
Berkeley fared similarly to the rest of the East Bay. Ridership in Berkeley this year is at 75% of prepandemic ridership, while Oakland is at 85%. Southern Alameda County communities hang between 55-70%.
AC Transit’s Tempo bus rapid transit system, completed during the pandemic, led to an increase in local ridership along International Boulevard.
Transbay service has remained at around 48% of prepandemic levels.
High-income areas saw the largest post-pandemic decline, at 50.1% of prepandemic ridership.
Low-income areas saw the best recovery, at 85.8% of prepandemic ridership.
Where do people go on AC Transit?
Current data doesn’t collect the trips that riders make, only that a certain number of people entered and exited the bus at a given stop. Using iterative proportional fitting, a statistical method that fits a distribution of trips to the known number of boardings and drop-offs per stop, the Daily Cal estimated the origins and destinations of bus riders.
Like all estimation methods, it’s not perfect. When tested against BART, which does collect these trips, our model achieves a 77% forecast accuracy. It’s important to note that the model can’t simulate some facets of bus usage, like transfers to other buses or BART.
These are stops that estimated riders travel from on their way to UC Berkeley on weekday mornings.
Commuters to UC Berkeley are estimated to come from UC Village more than other places.
This is where AC Transit commuters are estimated to live. Riders leave there in the morning and come back in the evening.
This is AC Transit commuters as a percentage of all commuters, according to the U.S. Census’ LODES survey. In some areas, more than 5% of commuters commute via AC Transit.
AC Transit is used heavily in Oakland and Alameda, but in southern Alameda County communities such as Fremont, less than 0.5% of commuters use AC Transit.
To see estimated trips, select “commute pattern” and select one or more block groups, census tracts or stop groups.
Traffic
Because we collected information per trip, we know the time stamp and location of each stop. We derived the speed, in miles per hour, at which buses travel on Berkeley streets. This figure is slower than the speeds cars would experience traveling through Berkeley, because buses must stop for passengers.
During the pandemic, bus speeds weren’t as affected as bus ridership. Traffic spots, such as areas near campus, remained at low speeds, while arterial roads eased up.
Bus speeds differ vastly throughout the day. Surface speeds at night and at rush hour differ by 48.5%.
To see traffic speeds throughout the East Bay, select “speed per corridor.”
See the data →See the methodology →
Transitland was used to obtain historical GTFS bus schedules