Despite San Francisco's awful traffic, data shows transit ridership hasn't increased

Click ahead to see transit ridership from 30 major cities in the US. Click ahead to see transit ridership from 30 major cities in the US. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 37 Caption Close Despite San Francisco's awful traffic, data shows transit ridership hasn't increased 1 / 37 Back to Gallery

By now you may have heard that San Francisco’s traffic is so horrible that it ranked fourth worst in the world. Despite the hellish conditions for commuters by car, though, recent data shows that transit ridership between 2015-16 didn’t increase by much.

Data gathered by the Federal Transit Administration found that in 2016 transit ridership was at 455 million. That wasn’t a significant change from the previous year.

Astonishingly, the majority of the cities listed had drops in their transit ridership, including San Jose which saw a 8.8 percent decrease.

In 2016, BART estimated about 430,000 trips during weekdays and 129 million trips annually, a decrease in ridership from the year before. According to an article by the East Bay Times, overcrowding on trains may be to blame.

The agency reports that ridership through December was 5.2 percent below what it projected for the 2016-17 fiscal year. Also, weekend trips saw a big drop as they were 9 percent lower than anticipated.

In the slideshow above, we broke down the growth of transit ridership in 30 major metro regions. The numbers include annual trips (not necessarily riders, but single trips) and the percent change from 2015.

Take a look at the slideshow above to see how 30 metropolitan cities increased or decreased their transit ridership between 2015-16.