The primary usage of public transit is 100% commuting. Malls are often used for bus hubs because they have ample parking. If you're seeing shoppers and students on the bus, then you're not riding the bus at rush hour.
Interestingly, it is not easy to find numbers on how many transit riders are commuters; rather, the surveys and statistics are all about things like the percentage of workers who commute by public transit.
Malls are not typically places where transit riders are encouraged to park. In fact, I believe that anyone who isn't shopping in a store at a mall would be subject to having their vehicle towed. There is no designated transit parking in malls. There are, however, designated "Park and Ride" centers with dedicated parking spaces that are not used for anything else, and are patrolled by transit security. Riders need a transit pass to park here, and overnight parking is generally not possible.
Malls want transit centers because they wish to attract more shoppers without cars, not clog their own lots with people who aren't shopping there. Capitalism, remember?
Anyway, I can safely concede that commuting is the top usage of public transit because it seems to be assumed by the sources. However, I do see students at rush hour. The HS and university students have deals for passes, and so if I board the bus around 8am or 3pm, they are dominated by the HS students (for a very short ride). Around 5pm, plenty of university students are boarding, if I find myself on or near campus. Evening classes are becoming really popular now, so some are even coming in at that point, to attend a class from 6-9pm or so.
In fact, there is a special class of passes for the university students; it was the first foray into NFC "tap" passes on the farebox. These students ride the train a lot, and they really crowd into the free neighborhood shuttles. To the point where some of the shuttle routes are practically exclusive for students, because, well, nobody who commutes to work rides a neighborhood shuttle because they hardly pass any places of employment.
The main selling point of the neighborhood shuttles is that they connect riders from their neighborhood to the main transit system. That's the theory. But in practice, due to their lack of fare, the homeless will fill up any space not taken by students, and head to the library, or park, or whatever.
Interesting. I have a pretty different experience. Where do you take public transportation ?
Also, don’t student start classes roughly at the same time as offices ?
It seems that traveling to a school is commonly known as "commuting". However, let's look at the way transit authorities structure bus and rail routes. Any given school, especially a public school and high schools, are really, really likely to be well-served by transit. While middle schools may be nestled in a residential or suburban neighborhood, they also tend to be nearer to the major arteries, and so you're likely to find a bus to ride. Also, the number of schools in a city is always smaller than the number of workplaces, so it's fundamentally easier for transit to serve schools than to cover all manner of possible workplaces.
I don't know about office workers. It's not easy to identify them by sight on a bus! There are a few types of commuters-to-workplaces that I can usually identify: construction workers, who have their vests, hard hats, and sometimes even a shovel on board with them; there are restaurant workers, who wear distinctive trousers and company tee shirts; hospitality workers, who are always headed way out to the resort hotels near the end of the line; and there are civil servants who are headed downtown to the Capitol and environs.
There were many, many office jobs I needed to turn down due to impractical or nonexistent commute. That's the reality. When data centers, call centers, tech offices, construction sites, and all sorts of workplaces are far from the reach of public transit, you're just not going to have those office workers ever consider public transit. That's a reality of the route planning and the limitations of a transit authority's funding and manpower.
Thank you for the link to MTA's statistics, but as I say, I regard NYC and environs as an outlier. They are not representative of other US urban centers in terms of adaptation to public transit. Denizens of NYC often eschew personal vehicle ownership and rely on subway/taxi/commuter rail sort of lifestyles. It's normal to see every walk of life on NYC transit.
