Patronage (transportation)
For other uses, see Patron (disambiguation).
In public transportation, patronage or ridership refers to the number of people using a transit service. It is often summed or otherwise aggregated over some period of time for a given service or set of services and used as a benchmark of success or usefulness. Common statistics include the number of people served by an entire transit system in a year, the number of people severed each day by a single transit line, etc.
The concept should not be confused with the maximum capacity of a particular vehicle or transit line.