Project Summary
Despite several policy interventions, bus ridership in Southern California is continuing to fall. For example, the bus ridership of the Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA) dropped by almost 19% although some improvement was observed recently on some revamped lines. A number of factors have been invoked to explain this decline, including changes in employment, demographics, housing, technology, and possibly an increase in vehicle registrations tied to California Assembly Bill 60 (AB 60). However, there has been no scholarly analysis of the impact of AB 60 on bus ridership in Southern California. The objective of this study is to analyze how recent (2014 to 2017) changes in OCTA bus ridership can be explained by changes in vehicle registrations in Orange County resulting partly from the implementation of AB 60 in 2015 and from the introduction by OCTA of its mobile ticketing App, after controlling for changes in transit supply, socio-economic variables, gas prices, and the built environment.
