•We compare transit use of residents in LRT corridor and control corridors well served by bus transit.•People moving into LRT corridor before its opening use transit more than those in control corridors.•Transit use of people moving into LRT corridor after its opening is similar to that of urban controls.•LRT-related land use and transportation policies are necessary for ridership growth. Rail transit is often implemented in the corridors already with high transit demand. When evaluating its ridership benefits, previous studies often choose the city/county/region as control groups, rather than comparable corridors without rail, and hence overstate its impacts. In this study, we employ propensity score matching to explore the impact of Hiawatha light rail transit (LRT) on transit use. We find that compared to residents in similar urban corridors, the Hiawatha LRT promotes transit use of residents who have lived in the corridor before its opening, and that residents who moved to the corridor after its opening use transit as often as new residents in the comparable urban corridors without LRT. We conclude that besides LRT, land use and transportation policies are necessary for ridership growth.