The price of gas continues to rise, refusing to dip below a traitorous $6.85 a gallon, and the number of people riding the bus has seemingly risen in tandem as well. 

Bus ridership numbers are up by more than 20% compared to last year, the Humboldt Transit Authority’s General Manager Katie Collender told the Outpost. In June 2025, the HTA logged 23,806 rides spread across its 13 routes; it tallied more than 29,000 this June. (The stats this fall are roughly equal, Collender said, but June makes for a solid example.) 

Even more dramatic is the increase from the HTA’s last fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30: 329,303 rides during the fiscal year that ended in 2025 — 403,797 for the fiscal year that ended this July. 

People generally do ride the bus more when gas is more expensive, Collender said in March, only a month after the Iran War began and the price of oil skyrocketed like a fairground strength tester, but she said then it usually takes a few months before HTA notices a behavioral shift. That wasn’t the case. The numbers were already inflated in March: 35,462 rides vs. 2025’s 26,856. 

HTA’s number of riders had been increasing since the COVID-19 pandemic, which tanked the amount of people riding public transit for years. A recent audit of HTA noted that the amount of its users had exceeded the pre-pandemic amount from 2019. 

Other transit agencies across the country noticed a similar result. In San Diego, the number of bus rides increased 9% in March; in Los Angeles County, about 8%.