State of Transit: progress, but room for improvement

In November 2021, RIDE New Orleans released its annual State of Transit report.

New Orleans regional transit has taken big steps forward in recent years. Regional leaders have pushed forward new regional connections, slow but steady service increases, reinvented the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority (RTA) as a fully publicly controlled agency, and, of course, started and completed the ambitious New Links regional transit network redesign process.

However, the report also found that there is still a lot of work to be done:

The average New Orleanian can only reach 37.4 percent of the region’s jobs in an hour or less in the middle of the day via transit.

• The average Jefferson Parish resident can only reach 16.3 percent of the region’s jobs in an hour or less in the middle of the day via transit.

• A pronounced racial equity gap remains. Over half of Black workers are in the worst category of access to jobs – not able to reach any more than five percent of the region’s jobs in 30 minutes or less via transit. Less than 1/3 of white workers are in that lowest category of access.

To learn more, you can read the full report here.

Transit and transportation access and equity will be an essential part of the discussion at the WJP’s Summit on Building a More Equitable New Orleans on April 22, 2022.