Public transport is essential for both residents and city planners because of its environmentally and economically beneficial characteristics. During the past decade climatechange, coupled with fuel and energy crises have attracted significant attention toward public transportation. Increasing the demand for public transport on the one hand and its complexity on the other hand have made the optimum network design quite challenging for city planners. The ridership is affected by numerous variables and features like space and time. These fluctuations, coupled with inherent uncertaintiesdue to different travel behaviors, make this procedure challenging. Any demand and supply mismatching can result in great user dissatisfaction and waste of energy on the horizon. During the past years, due to recent technologies in recording and storing data and advances in data analysis techniques, finding patterns, and predicting ridership based on historical data have improved significantly. This study aims to develop forecasting models by regressing boardings toward population, time of day, month, and station. Using the available boarding dataset for blue bus line number 4 in Stockholm, Sweden, seven different machine learning algorithms were assessed for prediction: Multiple Linear Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Bayesian Ridge Regression, Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, K-Nearest Neighbors. The models were trained and tested on the dataset from 2012 to 2019, before the start of the pandemic. The best model, KNN, with an average R-squared of 0.65 in 10-fold cross-validation was accepted as the best model. This model is then used to predict reduced ridership during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. The results showed a reduction of 48.93% in 2020 and 82.24% in 2021 for the studied bus line.