Tech agenda for transit’s comeback: reinvesting in customer experience

Rider pain points map to technology-first fixes that agencies can phase in quickly compared with other types of capital investments.

In brief

• Nationally, transit ridership has plateaued at approximately 82% of 2019 levels, with further gains limited by sticky remote work trends. 
• As agencies face the end to emergency federal funding, new local dollars needed to fill the gap are being tied to better efficiency and customer experiences.
• Tech investment can help agencies notch quick wins and capture market share by addressing top rider wants: safety, reliable service and convenient payment.

What riders say they want (and will drive increased ridership) 

With ridership growth from additional return-to-office mandates effectively capped, recovery now depends on what agencies can control — so it’s worth asking what riders actually want. There is no shortage of data available to answer this question. Onboard surveys conducted by transit agencies, both large and small, consistently elevate the same three pain points:

These findings are national and backed by statistically significant sample sizes, not merely regional or anecdotal.⁴ The Bay Area’s Snapshot Survey, for example, reached more than 16,500 riders across 23 agencies, underscoring that these pain points are to some extent universal and not limited to aging “legacy” transit systems.⁵

Refocusing on the customer experience

Cost-saving measures, while necessary to stabilize agency finances in the short term, are not a credible long-term turnaround strategy. If anything, service cuts made in the name of fiscal belt-tightening can trigger a “death spiral” of declining ridership, worsening operating deficits, followed by more cuts and less reliable service — the exact opposite of what riders say they want.

Taken together, the feedback from onboard surveys points in the same direction: improve the customer experience, and ridership will follow. While this may seem obvious, a laser focus on CX represents something of a mindset shift in the arena of public transportation.

For too long, transit has been viewed as a mobility means of last resort — a view reflected in the language used by transportation planners to describe one of their key rider demographics: “transit-dependent households.” This term typically refers to low-income households for which car ownership is unaffordable and no alternatives exist for transit use for their mobility needs. It treats transit riders as a captive audience, not customers whose loyalty must be earned and retained.

If planners and policymakers assume people will ride transit regardless of service quality, it blunts the motivation — and political support for funding — to compete on CX. This mindset also narrows the focus of transit agencies to a narrow sliver of the overall traveling public, as the percentage of “zero car” households — whether by economic circumstance or choice — is exceedingly small in all but a handful of American cities, such as New York and San Francisco.

There are other, more structural reasons, too, why CX has not historically been front and center for transit operators:

• Muted financial incentive to win market share. When transit fares cover only approximately 17% of operating costs, additional ridership has a minimal impact on an agency’s bottom line.⁶ This undermines the traditional business case for CX-focused investments and operational improvements that might otherwise help transit operators capture additional market share.⁷
• Government grant program biases toward hardware over software. Major discretionary programs prioritize “hard” physical assets, such as guideways, vehicles and stations, and often designate funds in restrictive ways for highly specific uses. Meanwhile, flexible formula funds are spread too thin to address the needed fixes to CX challenges.

An eye-opening statistic: Of approximately $29 billion in average annual spend on transit capital nationally, only about 1% to 2% has typically gone toward rider-facing technology upgrades (digital payment systems, real-time information, mobile apps, etc.).⁸ When these types of upgrades do occur, they are often a once-in-a-generation investment that is then left to fade into obsolescence rather than being frequently refreshed and maintained to deliver the CX capabilities that riders want and expect.

The lack of investment in CX is not a case of deliberate neglect; it’s the product of the transit funding and policy ecosystem. The good news: This is changing, if transit agency organizational charts are a leading indicator. The burgeoning number of chief customer experience officer (CXO) roles at major regional agencies suggests that executive leadership is getting the message and doing something about it. Since 2019, agencies in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, northern New Jersey and Boston, among others, have added a CXO role or equivalent with direct lines of reporting to the CEO. Titles vary, but the direction is clear: Customer experience is now a C-suite responsibility. 

A CX-first technology transformation

When riders complain about long waits, unreliable schedules, confusing transfers or payment glitches, those symptoms point directly to gaps in data, integration, payments and operations —gaps that often require technology-driven solutions. 

Each of the three rider pain points identified earlier — reliability, fare payment convenience and security — maps to technology-first fixes that agencies can phase in quickly compared with other types of capital investments. 

Here’s what a CX-first technology transformation agenda might look like:

• Make real-time information honest. Installation of a clean data pipeline aligns what riders and dispatch see, such that arrivals in apps and the control room match reality. For transit operators offering microtransit or other flexible/on-demand services, real-time information can be published in a format that enables those services to appear alongside buses and trains in mainstream trip planners (GTFS-Realtime, GTFS-Flex).
• Manage reliability in the moment. If the control center has access to a simple dashboard that monitors average and 90th percentile waits, service disruptions can be quickly flagged and transfer protection enabled when a rider is about to miss a connecting train or bus. These changes get noticed — and they’re measurable.
• Manage reliability on the back end. Reliability isn’t only operations — it’s also core infrastructure and asset condition. Maintenance data from sensor feeds, onboard diagnostics, defect logs and work histories can be synthesized into a “single source of truth.” Artificial intelligence (AI) can handle the “too much data” problem: Anomaly detection models flag which assets are trending toward failure; supervisors can then convert high-confidence flags into work orders. Fewer in-service failures translate into more on-time arrivals — and higher customer satisfaction. But this information flow can only become a reality if the core digital backbone that supports data transmission isn’t itself outdated or suffering from “end of support” issues (whereby the software vendor stops providing updates, bug fixes and other forms of maintenance.)
• Reduce payment friction. A pivot from closed-loop stored value to open-loop tap-to-pay eliminates the need for physical, dedicated fare payment cards, making transit equally accessible to both infrequent and frequent riders. In New York City, a modernized system for contactless payment has scaled rapidly — approximately 87% of subway and bus trips were already using tap-to-pay prior to the phaseout of traditional fare payment media at the end of 2025 — demonstrating that when payment gets easier and fairer, riders adopt it en masse.⁹ Another customer-friendly approach is account-based ticketing (ABT), which identifies riders through a linked payment method and thereby enables frictionless inter-operator transfers.¹⁰
• Leverage data to improve security and safety where riders feel it. Many agencies already deploy station-based intercom help points and mobile “see something, say something” apps with precise geolocation to enable reporting and two-way communication, while security cameras also generate mountains of CCTV and incident data. The key is synthesizing app reports, intercom calls, and dispatch and incident logs into effective hotspot deployment. AI-assisted anomaly detection can flag behaviors (crowding, trespass, altercations) and even objects (weapons, track obstructions, abandoned belongings); generate staff review alerts; and direct resources where they are needed most. Technology upgrades to facilitate interoperable communication channels with local police and fire departments can also enhance coordination and response times.

Together, these fixes can drive a virtuous circle of ridership gains: When riders see a more visible security presence and faster responses to incidents, the perceived level of safety also increases. Combined with the added convenience of payment modernization, this perception draws more riders, which lifts fare revenue and justifies more service — shorter waits, better transfers — which in turn reinforces safety in numbers. 

Rebalancing future investment

With the looming revenue cliff, time is of the essence: Transit agencies need quick wins —ideally, pilot projects that can be tested and scaled quickly using available resources rather than new resources that need to be sourced through a lengthy public procurement process.

If each of the 20 largest urban transit systems rebalanced just one percentage point of annual transit capital spend toward the digital backbone over the next five years, the resulting set-aside would be sufficient to implement the core CX-first agenda described above — namely, upgrades to real-time information, day-of operations dashboards, predictive maintenance and AI-assisted deployment of transit security. (If payment modernization were included, a larger but still modest two-and-a-half percentage point reallocation would be needed.)

Such investments can unlock outsized gains in reliability, security, convenience and customer loyalty, provided they are accompanied by a parallel commitment to retire outdated systems so operational funding can be reallocated to cover the ongoing cost of maintaining these new investments. That’s an accelerated path to rebuild trust — and the strongest argument to the voters and legislators who control the purse strings that transit agencies are committed to improving the customer experience as we approach September 2026 and contemplate a post-IIJA funding world.