What is this?

According to the FTA, the Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) bus system had a daily ridership of ~37,300 per weekday in the first quarter of 2025, with a service area of ~1.2 million residents. Columbus is one of the biggest cities in the U.S. without an intercity rail system, forcing residents wanting to use public transit to rely on the bus system. This makes it critical for COTA to identify bus stops which are underutilized and make predictions as to where demand for public transit may geographically shift in the future within central Ohio.

I identified, cleaned, and mapped various geodata files and datasets related to the Central Ohio Transporation Authority bus system and Columbus demographic data, with the goal of identifying underserved populations, possible locations for line or stop additions, and current usage trends. This included datasets about COTA ridership, poverty status, worker commute method, and MORPC TAZ geodata. I encourage you to check out the map yourself.

You can find all the datasets used in the GitHub, as well as all sources and the code used to generate the map.

How do you use the map?

You can find the map here. You can toggle different layers and basemaps on the top right. There's also a search bar you can use to find an address on the map.

Some notes: The COTA stops are colored based on ridership, with the most used stops being greenest. You can also see more information about a stop by clicking it. Finally, you may find it easier to see certain layers by switching the basemap in the layer control.

The map helps you see possible relationships between these different variables. For instance, the image on the left here is the TAZ 2050 job density forecast layer, and on the right is the percentage of workers who commute via COTA bus.

The highlighted area is predicted to have a high-density of jobs by 2050, but does not have readily accessible bus stops, and has no workers living in that area who commute via public transit. This could suggest that COTA should consider adding a stop to an existing line within this region to both allow those who work in that tract to travel there via bus, and to allow those that live there to access the COTA system to commute to work outside of that tract.

Thank you for checking out my project!

Please feel free to reach out to me at erolsonmeznj@gmail.com if you have any questions, suggestions, or feedback.