MARTA had one of the worst rail ridership drops in 2024 of any transit agency in the country, new data from the Federal Transit Administration show.
Only two cities — Cleveland and Los Angeles — saw ridership fall more compared to the prior year, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of monthly ridership reports from the FTA through the end of 2024. Ridership locally fell 6% while rising an average of 24% nationally.
With the recent drop, metro Atlanta rail ridership is now back to less than half what it was in 2019 — before travel cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic that began five years ago this month.
MARTA officials say the rail data doesn’t tell the full story, however. They believe the decline is largely an accounting issue and the reported numbers don’t reflect actual ridership. Officials blame a persistent combination of fare evasion and broken fare gates that aren’t counting paying customers.
“We are confident that the observed decrease in rail ridership is not real,” MARTA spokesperson Payson Schwin said in a statement.
MARTA reported almost 62 million passenger trips on its trains in 2019 before falling to a low of 23 million in 2021. Ridership started slowly climbing back up in early 2022.
The transit agency believes the reporting problems began in late 2023. Until then, both rail and bus ridership had been trending up and were closely aligned.
Rail ridership started falling then. Upon investigation, MARTA discovered a growing number of fare gates weren’t recording trips even when paying customers tapped their Breeze cards, Schwin said. That was in addition to frequent instances of physically broken fare gates, which allow people to enter without tapping at all.
Bus and rail ridership are tracked differently. The fare gate issue only affects rail ridership data. Bus ridership rose in 2024, as did the number of trips taken on the Atlanta Streetcar.
Unless the gate is physically broken, the system is still collecting a fare payment when riders tap their Breeze cards even if the trip isn’t recorded for ridership purposes, Schwin said.
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
Schwin said MARTA has been working with its fare gates vendor, Cubic, to fix the issue. The agency is still working to uncover why the problem began and Schwin said it’s too soon to tell if it’s fully corrected.
“We are encouraged by a noticeable decrease in the number of fare gates not reporting data in the past month,” Schwin said. “Our teams will continue to track this issue going forward.”
Long-term, MARTA plans to introduce a new payment system and new fare gates at every station that will let customers tap to pay their fare with a debit or credit card or a mobile wallet. New fare gates are still a ways off — MARTA hopes to have them installed before the FIFA World Cup in 2026. The gates and a 10-year operating contract is estimated to cost $245 million.
Regular MARTA riders routinely encounter broken fare gates, with many posting on social media to complain. “Why am I paying my fare if the doors are just going to be left open?” one rider asked in January.
City Council President Doug Shipman himself posted on X, formerly Twitter, to report broken fare gates at both ends of a trip he took in August.
Shipman said Monday the broken gates are only part of MARTA’s issues with ridership recovery.
Shipman said he regularly hears complaints from riders about limited weekend service, safety concerns, broken ticket machines and bus route cancellations, all of which leads those with other options avoiding MARTA.
“The unreliability and low customer experience that occurs for too many Atlanta residents daily across MARTA has eroded the trust riders desire to place in our transit agency,” Shipman said.
Schwin said MARTA is making a series of changes aimed at improving the riding experience, including increasing service levels. In December, MARTA increased weekday frequency to every 10 minutes during peak hours and 12 minutes during midday hours.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
New train cars will debut later this year, along with an updated train control system. The new train features conveniences like charging stations and a design intended to improve safety.
The transit agency is also in the process of renovating train stations.
MARTA also hopes to benefit from the return-to-office orders given to federal workers last month. Officials have repeatedly emphasized the region’s continued high work-from-home rates as another reason for its comparatively low ridership, and they are encouraging those who are commuting again to use public transit.
“Let MARTA do the driving,” General Manager and CEO Collie Greenwood said last week.
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