Who Does RTA Serve?

RTA is in dire straights. It is caught in a spiral of declining tax subsidy forcing higher fairs and reduced service, making the system less and less appealing to riders. But people do use it.

The Dayton Daily News posted a 2007 table that provides some analyses of daily rides. This is an invaluable bit of information if one wants to study the demand or usage of the system.

Here's a graph of RTA routes ranked by number of weekday riders. This isn't the only way to measure use (the table also uses riders-per-hour), but we'll use this as the breaks in numbers are more obvious. The routes are grouped by breaks in the numbers, with an arbitrary cut-off of 1,000 riders per day to establish this as RTA's primary market or service area. Interestingly, this group of routes handles 2/3rds of RTA's daily riders.


The top of the chart has different line weights for different riders/day, as a way to show volume. Mapping this out on a grayed-out RTA routemap one can see that RTA runs a lot of lines that don't have high volumes, and that most of these are crosstown routes or serve the south suburbs.


Stripping out the RTA map the pattern becomes quite obvious. RTA's highest volume routes are on Salem, Main, and two routes that snake through West Dayton. For the remaing routes the service areas generating the highest volumes are in West Dayton and the Northwest Side.

For the east side the route to Ohmer Park and Belmont seems to also be heavily traveled, but there is somewhat lighter use on the parallel 5th (to the Linden hub) & 3rd (to WSU) routes. Heavy use on these might not extend to the end of the respective lines.


(click on this and the other charts to enlarge for the text)

Again the lack of high volume lines to the south suburbs are apparent (and this includes the Far Hills corridor; which has some the lightest local service traffic). The only suburban lines to exceed 1,000 riders/day head north to Englewood, Huber Heights, and Vandalia/Northridge. Vandalia/Northridge has the highest volume. The only high-volume line south is to northern Kettering, ending at the Woodman/Dorothy Lane shopping area.


RTA= Regional Transit for Africans? Blacks and RTA.

There is an unstated assumption that RTA is primarily a transit system for blacks, hence some of the coded racism in the comments relating to RTA issues at the DDN, or local racist jokes about what RTA stands for (yer humble hose has also heard RTA= return to Africa).

Using the admittedly outdated 2000 census numbers and maping out minority (i.e. non-white) census tracts it does seem that RTA's most heavily traveled routes are in or very near minority neighborhoods, so one can safely infer that the black community is indeed RTA's best customer, or they at lease use the routes in their neighborhoods.

Route numbers and riders per day are labled and provided in a table.

Carlessness and RTA.

Another measure is to use the 2000 census numbers for housing units without access to a vehicle, which is another way of saying carless households. There is an extensive post here at Dayonology discussing carlessness in Dayton, which might be worth reading in conjuction with this post.

Mapping out the census tracts with the highest carlessness, one can see an overlap with the minority areas, but also extending beyond them into East Dayton and certain suburban areas (Drexel and Northridge). So carlessness is probably the obvious reason people take the bus. It just so happens that a lot of the carless are apparently black, too.

Adding this dimension might explain the heavier traffic on the Northridge/Vandalia and West Third line. It might seem that some part of carless East Dayton are not served that well; in the case of Twin Towers, the Xenia Avenue route just misses getting counted as it is just below 1,000 riders/day, so there's the correlation.


The map notes that W 3rd is a high-volume transit corridor, if one adds up the volume of riders on the various routes that are on 3rd for all or part of the time.

Policy Implications

One can see why the RTA board doesn't want to raise taxes to increase the subsidy of the system since there are racial and socioecomic issues involved. The question would be "why am I paying for this and who rides the bus anyway? " The answer would be that 2/3rds of the riders are on lines serving black and carless areas, which are also areas of the poor (not mapped but there is an overlap).

The usage implys where worst-case cuts could occur. The lowest ridership routes are the ones that serve the three outlying villages: Brookville, Germantown, and Farmersville. These probably could be cut and not even missed. The next lowest routes are the suburban and crosstown routes, particularly the ones serving the Dayton Mall area. These could be cut too.

The lines shown here are the ones that really are the core of RTA and should be protected and enhanced at the expense of suburban service to points south. Given the volume on some of these runs the possibility of suburban or outer-neighborhood retrofit making things more transit-oriented are a real possibility. Good test areas for this would be Drexel, Northridge, North Main, and Salem.

So, maybe a smaller, but more relevant RTA with better service for the areas it does serve? And a planning strategy to retrofit suburbia along routes that could already be generating a higher volume of suburban riders.