Youth Opportunity Pass

SANDAG has partnered with MTS, NCTD, and the County of San Diego to offer free transit rides to young people under 18 through the Youth Opportunity Pass program. SANDAG funds the Youth Opportunity Pass as part of the Transit Equity Pilot program, which aims to make transit more accessible for the region's equity-focused communities.
For more information about the program, contact YouthOpportunityPass@sandag.org.

Highlights

  • Since launch, the Youth Opportunity Pass has provided 19 million free transit rides to San Diego County youth. 
  • Routes 4, 44, 709, 856, 303, and 350 have seen large increases in youth ridership. These routes have all more than doubled their youth ridership over the course of the Youth Opportunity Pass and have provided more than 70,000 combined monthly youth rides in 2024. 
  • Youth ridership gains have been spread throughout the region, in addition to popular routes in the urban core. Those with high increases include Routes 303 and 350 within several North County communities, Route 856 in East County, and Route 709 in Chula Vista.  
  • Youth have been taking more than 240,000 average monthly youth rides on the Trolley since January, contributing to more than 6.5 million rides over the course of the program. 
  • Since January 2024, average youth ridership on the COASTER and SPRINTER has seen a 261% increase compared to before the program started. 

Overview

The charts below show the total number of rides taken and miles traveled on bus and rail routes by youths in the San Diego region. These data range from when the program started in May 2022 to April 2024. This page will be updated on a quarterly basis.
Use the chart filters below to select a month.

Monthly Youth Ridership

Use the global filter to compare monthly data ride category, community, service, and route.

Resources

Data Limitations

Please note that the data are collected by another agency. As such, SANDAG does not perform data validation procedures on this data set. Although SANDAG makes efforts to identify and address potential issues, users and analysts should exercise their professional judgment when relying on the data.