Try Transit Week as celebrated by the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation has come and gone for another year, but this newsletter’s desire to report on alternate modes of getting around has not yet waned.
On Thursday, the agency sent out an information release announcing that ridership data is now available for review for the Commonwealth’s 41 agencies.
“During Fiscal Year FY2026 (July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026), Virginia’s public transit agencies provided a combined total of over 156 million trips – an increase of 4.9 percent and almost 7.3 million rides over FY 2025,” reads the release with the subject heading “Tracking Transit.”
This marks five straight years of ridership increases following the COVID-19 pandemic which neared 50.85 million in FY2021. Metrics for all 41 agencies can be viewed on a dashboard.
The report also notes that Blacksburg Transit was the sixth most-used agency in the Commonwealth with nearly 4.85 million rides provided. BT serves Virginia Tech and Montgomery County. The Harrisonburg Department of Public Transportation was tenth with over 2 million rides.
The Greater Richmond Transit Company was 2nd with just over 12 million trips but all agencies were greatly eclipsed by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority which had ridership of nearly 93.3 million which includes heavy rail in the form of the Metro.
The dashboard also has records for Charlottesville Area Transit and Jaunt but it should be noted that a methodology change that began three years ago that makes it more difficult to make comparisons to years before.
Prior to then, the DRPT split rides into two categories: “Bus – All” and “Paratransit.”
Beginning with FY2024, the bus category was further delineated as either “Bus – Demand Response” or “Bus – Demand Response (Public)” and Paratransit was kept as a stand-alone measure. Charlottesville Area Transit also subcontracted with VIA to begin providing on-demand service in Albemarle County under the MicroCAT brand.
CAT’s overall ridership has increased from 685,219 in FY2021 to 1,621,820 in FY2026. That figure includes 101,219 paratransit rides and 79,383 on-demand rides, leaving a fixed-route count of 1,441,218. That’s 4.23 percent above the FY2025 count of 1,382,686.
On August 24, CAT Director told members of the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority that Route 2 would be split into two segments in February. That is part of CAT’s Transit Strategic Plan from June 2024. Have you seen it? CAT implemented a first set of route changes in November of that year as I reported.
I requested confirmation and clarifications in an email on September 17 and sent a follow up the morning of September 21 but did not receive a response. One of the questions is whether CAT provides paratransit rides or whether Jaunt provides that service. The two entities are organizationally separate with two different management structures.
As for Jaunt, overall ridership according to the DRPT dashboard has increased from 71,935 in FY2021 to 228,443 in FY2026. The latter figure is made up of 66,939 commuter trips and 161,504 on-demand trips.
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Paid subscribers cover the cost of conducting research for this article which was originally published in the September 22, 2026 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. You can either subscribe through Substack or make a charitable contribution.
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