Monthly count of passengers transported by São Paulo metro, aggregated by metro line. Data covers January 2016 through 2026 for Lines 1, 2, 3, and 15; January 2016 through August 2018 for Line 5; and January 2012 through 2026 for Line 4. Sourced from the METRO SP transparency portal and the Insper Dataverse.
Format
A data frame with the following columns:
- date
First day of the month (Date).
- year
Calendar year (integer).
- line_number
Metro line number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 15 (integer).
- line_name
English name of the metro line (character).
- line_name_pt
Portuguese name of the metro line (character).
- metric
Metric code (character). One of:
"total","mdu","msa","mdo","max".- metric_name
Measurement type in English (character). One of:
"Total","Average on Business Days","Average on Saturdays","Average on Sundays","Daily Peak".- metric_name_pt
Measurement type in Portuguese (character). One of:
"Total","Média dos Dias Úteis","Média dos Sábados","Média dos Domingos","Máxima Diária".- value
Passengers transported (numeric).
Source
Companhia do Metropolitano de São Paulo (METRO SP). https://transparencia.metrosp.com.br/dataset/demanda
Details
A transported passenger is one who boarded a train on that line, whether through a turnstile or by transferring from another line at an interchange station. METRO's term is passageiros transportados: turnstile entries plus transfers between lines. Transported counts therefore run above entry counts for the same line and month. Do not sum this dataset to estimate unique network passengers: a journey using multiple lines is counted once on each line. See the Metro Demand Data article for details: https://viniciusoike.github.io/metrosp/articles/metro-demand-data.html.
Line 4 (Amarela/ViaQuatro) comes from the Insper Dataverse, January
2012–2026, all five metrics, summing both Bloqueio (turnstile) and
Integracao (transfer) boarding types. Line 5 (Lilás) is available
from the METRO portal only for January 2016–August 2018: the line was
handed over to ViaMobilidade in August 2018 and the portal stopped
reporting its transported counts afterwards. The Dataverse feed for Line 5
records turnstiles only, so no transported measure exists for it after the
handover. August 2018 covers only the days before the handover: its
total is a partial month, and msa and mdo are
NA.
METRO SP publishes these counts in thousands of passengers. They are
multiplied by 1000 here, so value counts individual passengers like
every other demand dataset and carries METRO's rounding to the thousand.
Line 4 comes from the Dataverse in individual passengers.
METRO published January–September 2017 only as PDFs, with no machine-readable equivalent. Those months were transcribed from the reports and reconciled against the published totals.
Metrics:
total: Total passengers in the month.mdu: Average daily transported passengers on business days (Média dos Dias Úteis).msa: Average daily transported passengers on Saturdays (Média dos Sábados).mdo: Average daily transported passengers on Sundays (Média dos Domingos).max: Daily maximum (Máxima Diária).
Months beyond the last published data point for each line are trimmed
during assembly; interior NAs (e.g. operational outages) are
preserved.
Data vintage
This dataset is a fixed snapshot, current through July 2026. It ships with the package so examples, vignettes, and offline analysis always have data to hand. The snapshot moves only when the column schema changes or a release deliberately carries new data, not when new months are published upstream.
METRO SP publishes on an irregular schedule and revises already-published years, so the numbers here will drift from the source over time. Freshly rebuilt data is published on every pipeline run at https://github.com/viniciusoike/metrosp/releases.
See also
line_entries_monthly for entry counts,
station_transported_monthly for station-level weekday averages.