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- UTA recorded nearly 40.5 million rides in 2024, a 15.5% increase from 2023.
- Transit authority leaders anticipate reaching pre-pandemic ridership levels this year, driven by new trends.
- UTA plans to expand services, including UTA on Demand and new bus routes.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Transit Authority leaders have hesitated to compare ridership to before-COVID-19 levels, choosing instead to focus on new ridership trends that emerged during the pandemic.
UTA's fleet of buses and trains generated more than nearly 40.5 million trips in 2024, up 15.5% from 2023 and within 4 million rides of what was reported before the pandemic. Agency leaders believe ridership may even catch up to 2019 levels this year.
"I feel like we're headed there this year," UTA Director Jay Fox told KSL.com on Tuesday after the agency revealed its 2024 ridership numbers. "At 15.5%, and it not slowing down through the year — we just kept seeing that regular rise month to month to month — I think it's just going to get higher and higher and higher."
2024 ridership
Buses — a mix of traditional and rapid-transit services — continue to be the largest driver in UTA's ridership. More than 20.1 million bus rides were calculated last year, accounting for nearly half of the network's ridership last year and a 10.5% increase from the previous year.
This included the Ogden Express, which completed its first full year of service in 2024. In August, agency officials said nearly 1 million people had already ridden the bus in its first year.
Fox said bus ridership spilled into other services, which is potentially why the agency's train services yielded larger increases last year, as well.
TRAX drew in more than 13.5 million rides across Salt Lake County, representing a 26.5% increase from 2023. The S-Line Street Car, between South Salt Lake and Salt Lake City, added another nearly 500,000 to that, up 24% from the previous year.
FrontRunner also experienced a ridership bump but to a lesser extent. More than 4.1 million rides were recorded on the commuter rail service that runs from Ogden to Provo — a 10.5% jump from 2023.
UTA reported all its other services also experienced increases to varying degrees, but none was larger than its UTA on Demand ridership. Nearly 570,000 people utilized the service last year, marking a nearly 37% increase from the previous year as the agency rolled it out to more locations.
A full recovery?
Ridership has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels, even though 2024 produced some of the first signs of recovery.
Last year's total public transit ridership was about 8.5% below the 44.2 million trips recorded in 2019, but it's also up 72% from what was reported in 2020. Ridership plummeted to around 23.5 million trips in 2020, particularly after pandemic shutdowns began in March of that year. As more people worked from home, UTA responded by cutting back on services.
It has slowly returned most of what was lost while adding to it, even increasing Saturday TRAX frequency in the summer of 2023 — a level that hadn't existed before the pandemic.
There were times last year when average weekday ridership, one of the datasets that the agency uses, surged past pre-pandemic levels. For instance, the agency recorded nearly 155,000 average weekday boardings in September 2024, which was its busiest month since February 2020 — busier than seven of the 12 months in 2019.
How people use transit is one reason it became difficult to compare the before-COVID and now. Commutes to work accounted for a major chunk of ridership before 2020. While it's still a major use, other uses emerged after the pandemic, including ridership surges in weekday evenings and weekends, Fox said.
"You don't get 40 million customers if they don't use it all day long," he said, adding that surveys are conducted at different times.
New offerings, however, are why Fox believes UTA is on the cusp of breaking pre-pandemic ridership levels. The agency is poised to bring UTA on Demand to Provo this year while bringing new bus service to southwest Salt Lake County and restoring faster frequencies to some of its routes.
Major projects like the Midvalley Express and a fourth TRAX line are also on the horizon, especially as the region prepares for the 2034 Winter Olympic and Paralympic games. However, Fox believes it will tackle major transportation needs, too.
"I just see it growing in the community parallel to the population here," he said.
