US rail transit and other "fixed guideway" systems carry more than 11 million riders (rider-trips) each weekday. That's the conclusion of a Light Rail Progress analysis of data from the National Transit Database (NTDB) of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for 2001 – the latest complete year presently available.

As the table below indicates, average weekday ridership (unlinked trips) for all US rail transit and fixed-guideway systems (monorails, automated peoplemovers, etc.) totalled 11,447,400 in 2001. (For this tabulation, Jacksonville's automated monorail is counted as monorail, not automated guideway transit. Regional "commuter" rail is simply listed as regional rail.)

Weekday Ridership – US Fixed-Guideway Systems
(2001)

The overwhelming bulk of this ridership – 99.7% – was carried on standard, two-rail systems (with about 9% of it on light rail systems). Monorail systems carried less than 0.1%, while the Detroit and Miami automated-guideway systems carried about 0.2%.

Since many of these rider-trips were round trips, and some involved transfers, the American Public Transportation Association estimates that actual, individual passengers (persons) constitute approximately 45% of unlinked trips. By using this factor, it can be calculated that approximately 5.2 million individual people, on average, actually rode US rail transit and fixed-guideway services on a typical weekday. That's a number of individuals approximately equal to the entire population in a major metropolitan area such as Dallas-Ft. Worth, Detroit, or Boston.

And it should be noted that that's only the average number of passengers for a single day. Local system surveys repeatedly show that the total number of people who use public transit (and, presumably, rail systems where they are available) intermittently – i.e., those who depend on these services to be there when they need them – is several times greater.