Arlington Transit (ART) in fiscal 2025 returned to service levels last seen immediately preceding the pandemic, according to county officials.
About 2.62 million passengers rode the local service between July 2024 and June 2025, on par with the period between July 2019 and June 2020.
Fiscal 2025 figures were presented at the September meeting of the county’s Transit Advisory Committee.
For fiscal 2025, nearly all ART routes showed year-over-year increases in passenger totals, with the total passenger count up 9% year-over-year, and on-time performance rose 3 percentage points.
ART Route 41, by far the largest on the network, saw a 6.1% increase to 667,407 riders. Route 41 travels between Columbia Pike and Courthouse via Ballston.
The only route posting a year-over-year decline was Route 45, traveling between Columbia Pike and Rosslyn, which was down 0.5% to 418,710 riders.
Ridership on Routes 43, 51, 55, 74, 75, 84 and 87 all increased by double digits, with the largest boost recorded on Route 84 connecting Douglas Park, Green Valley and Pentagon City at rush hour, up 31.4%.
Route 52, which connects the Ballston and East Falls Church Metro stations via VHC Health, saw a ridership increase of 30.9%.
Despite the overall increase, ridership levels remain below the 2.99 million passengers traveling during fiscal 2018, according to archived performance data.
The 13.8 passengers per route per hour across the system in fiscal 2025 was up from 12.4 a year before, but below the 17 recorded in fiscal 2018.
As with transit systems across the globe, ART was impacted by the arrival of Covid in early 2020. In fiscal 2021, which ran from July 2020 to June 2021, passenger counts bottomed out at 1.4 million before beginning to rise again.
Covid is largely in the rear-view mirror, but its impact on work patterns continues to create challenges for transit planners.
“We’re still working out those kinks in a post-pandemic environment,” said Lauren Breyer, a transit-management analyst for the county government’s Department of Environmental Services (DES).
The bus network is funded by the county government and operated by a private contractor. Clinton Edwards, the transit-services manager for DES, told committee members the county has added a number of new buses over the past year.
The fleet now stands at 75, most powered by compressed natural gas with four powered by electric batteries.
“It has definitely increased service reliability having the newer buses in the fleet,” Edwards said.
For the fiscal year ending June 30, a total of 183,208 bus-route trips were completed. The trip-completion rate of 99.81% was up from 99.63% the year before, and on-time percentage rose from 74% in fiscal 2024 to 77% in fiscal 2025.
Performance and other issues resulted in 262 complaints filed against the network in fiscal 2025, down from 281 a year before, county officials said.
