We recently announced that C-TRAN ridership increased for the fourth consecutive year in 2025. Total ridership was 5.28 million—an increase of 6.3 percent over the previous year, continuing a strong upward trend. We’re also trending upward so far in 2026.

That’s good news. It continues to underscore the importance of public transportation in our region. Local routes within Clark County continue to perform well, but we saw growth across the board—Local, Regional, Express, The Current and C-VAN all saw higher ridership in 2025 compared to 2024. There are also some interesting highlights within those numbers.

Let’s dive in.

Systemwide, C-TRAN generally carries about 16,000 to 20,000 passenger trips per day on weekdays, and about 8,000 to 12,000 per day on weekends. Those numbers can vary by season. Spring and fall tend to be the highest ridership months, while summer and winter are a bit lower.

Numbers can fluctuate even on a single trip. As a result, there are some misperceptions about transit ridership. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before:

“Sometimes I see a bus and there are only three people on it! Why have all these buses if only a few people are using them?”

Just like there are times when roads or parking lots are empty, in transit there are peak times when more people ride and off-peak times when fewer people are traveling. Some buses are full. Some aren’t. More often, people get on and off throughout the route, so the number of people on board constantly changes. As an example, check out this recent trip on Route 30:

At the beginning and end of the route, there are only a few people on the bus. At times in the middle of the route, it’s closer to 15 or 20. Seeing one bus at one time and one location doesn’t define an entire route or system.

At the route level, both Vine corridors remain the busiest in the C-TRAN system by far. The Vine on Fourth Plain carried 1.1 million passenger trips in 2025, followed by The Vine on Mill Plain with nearly 780,000. These were the top five routes by ridership in 2025, according to preliminary data:

• The Vine on Fourth Plain: 1,125,663
• The Vine on Mill Plain: 779,861
• Route 71: 359,855
• Route 60: 326,141
• Route 80: 287,938

Honorable mention goes to Route 30, which came in just behind Route 80 with a ridership of 287,174. It’s also worth noting that our third-busiest route, the 71, is about to become C-TRAN’s third Vine corridor. The Vine on Highway 99 is now under construction, scheduled to open in 2027.

Some of C-TRAN’s strongest ridership growth in recent years has occurred where we’ve invested additional service. That’s not a coincidence. Weekend ridership has made large gains as we’ve added more trips to numerous routes. Route 74, which saw a significant expansion in 2023, has more than doubled its ridership since. And The Current, C-TRAN’s on-demand service, carried more than 50,000 rides in 2025 as it also expanded to Battle Ground for the first time. That was a 48 percent increase from the previous year, and ridership on The Current is up another 35 percent so far this year.

It’s encouraging to see transit ridership continue to grow, even as travel patterns have shifted in recent years. Some Local routes have surpassed pre-pandemic levels, with higher ridership in 2025 than in 2019. As Clark County continues to evolve, C-TRAN will evolve with it.