| Earlier this year, I was working on a story with my colleague Sri Taylor about the fiscal crisis facing US transit agencies because ridership is still well-below pre-pandemic levels. An editor asked if transit agencies everywhere faced this problem. I found data from a few international systems but struggled to find a global perspective. So I decided to answer the question myself and set out collecting ridership data for as many major metropolitan transit agencies as I could. Overall, I collected data from 33 cities on four continents, with the help of Bloomberg colleagues around the world. Some data I couldn’t use because it wouldn’t be an apples-to-apples comparison. And I decided to focus only on rapid transit metro systems, not commuter railroads or buses, because those are harder to compare between cities and countries. Ultimately, I was able to use data from 15 different systems, which my graphics colleague Marie Patino visualized. To my surprise, the data painted a very clear picture: North and South American transit agencies are struggling while European and East Asian agencies are thriving. But the ridership data alone couldn’t tell me why. So we spoke to representatives of five of those agencies, plus independent experts, to learn what is going on. There is no one definitive answer, but some factors that determine whether a system bounces back include flexibility in their design, government support and — as always — the quality of service. Check out the full article and graphics today on CityLab: Where Public Transit Systems Are Bouncing Back Around the World — Aaron Gordon | 
