Anecdotally, tourists are probably pretty easy to spot.

They’re the folks with oversized cameras around their necks. They’re the folks carrying overstuffed, matched luggage. They’re the folks who are probably dressed just a shade improperly for the local weather.

And they’re the folks who are probably checking the stops and schedules obsessively and asking the most questions about where they’re heading.

Scientifically, tourists are a bit more difficult to peg down. None of the mass transit agencies reached for this article had hard numbers on the population or percentage of riders who were on their trains and buses merely for pleasure, instead of using them as a way to get to and from work.

VIA Metropolitan Transit serves San Antonio with roughly 450 buses, including 19 streetcars, however, they don’t track rider types.
“VIA does not track ridership based on type of rider, and previous rider surveys have not asked this question,” says Priscilla Ingle, vice president of public affairs. “However, since San Antonio has a large tourism market, we realize that many of our riders are most likely tourists.”

“I don’t know that we have hard data that tells us what share of our riders are tourists,” says Robert Smith, assistant vice president of service, planning and scheduling for DART in Dallas. “It’s not a large part of our ridership. We do have certain special event periods, the State Fair of Texas probably being the largest, where we have much larger volumes of tourist riders.

“We are in the middle right now of doing a comprehensive study of riders and trip purposes, but we won’t have those results until later in the year,” Smith says. “That may give us a better idea of how [tourists] fit into our daily ridership.”