(Radio Iowa) – Traffic from planes, trains and automobiles has returned to pre-pandemic levels in Iowa, but there’s one area that hasn’t fully recovered. The Iowa Department of Transportation’s Stuart Anderson says ridership on public transportation still lags. “Of all modes of transportation, this is the one that has not recovered fully from the pandemic and the impacts,” he says. Public transit ridership in 2019 was 23-point-eight million, and then it dropped to around 10 million in 2021. The ridership includes buses and some ride-share systems. Anderson says public transit ridership has been up in each of the last three years, but is still not all the way back.

“We’re still in fiscal year ’24 at about four and a half million less rides per year than we had in the year before the pandemic,” Anderson says. He says the number of miles where people pay to ride public transit hasn’t increased in the last three years. “Basically what that means is the routes are basically flat, but we are seeing more density, more rides served on those routes. So we’ve seen growth, ridership growth, but not growth in the system of public transit service that’s out there,” he says.

Anderson says they don’t know exactly why public transit ridership hasn’t rebounded, but one of the reasons could be that more people are working from home since the pandemic.