Ridership has taken on dramatically more importance at metros since the early pandemic, when public transport demand collapsed in an unparalleled way. Metro operators have observed notable changes to travel patterns since the COVID-19 outbreak and therefore have been closely monitoring ridership trends, adding ridership-related KPIs to strategic scorecards, and proactively marketing and promoting their services in new ways.
The study summarises the main enablers and barriers of ridership, metro expectations for long-term demand forecasts, and metro initiatives to drive ridership growth. The initiatives taken by metros before and during the pandemic to promote ridership growth were explored in the six key categories as shown below.
