Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Ridership Away!

Light rail is up 12% from a year ago, higher than all other modes.

Find your light rail city here.

Find your heavy rail city here.

Find your commuter rail city here.

Nothing of big interest. The next quarter is going to be where the sparks fly. But Portland and San Diego are at 113,000. Not bad for 3 line systems. Imagine 6 lines and a streetcar network. Then we're getting somewhere closer.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it quite interesting that Buffalo's small, truncated 6.2 mile system was able to get the largest 2nd quarter change of almost 46%!

Unknown said...

Buffalo's system is probably the shortest length that can actually be meaningful to people. At 2 dollar gasoline Buffalo's relatively minor traffic issues isn't enough to make people take the train. But at $3.50 or more ...

New Orleans restoring a line, and Charlotte opening certainly helped. I wonder what Lynx year over year numbers will look like next year

Justin said...

Buffalo's system is actually pretty good. It actually gets fair riderhip, considering the downtown core is pretty much dead.

Alon Levy said...

The numbers are a bit weird. New York's subway doesn't get 8 million riders a day - it gets 5-6, according to the MTA.

I think they just bundled together bus, light rail, and heavy rail ridership together when operated by the same agency. The numbers for New York make sense as the numbers for all of New York City Transit, including both the subway and most of the bus system.

Unknown said...

Washington's Metro doesn't get over a million riders a day. But add bus and rail together, and you get the number presented.

Thats a problem with such simple tables though; not enough space for good explanations.

crzwdjk said...

It's not adding bus and rail together, it's just counting things differently. WMATA and NYCT give their official figures in terms of entries (linked trips, regardless of number of transfers) while the APTA counts unlinked trips (boardings), which counts the number of times someone got on a transit vehicle regardless of whether they were making a transfer.

Alon said...

Arcady, that doesn't explain why the figures for light and heavy rail in LA are exactly the same.

crzwdjk said...

alon, wtf are you talking about? Look at the numbers again, they're not the identical, although they are pretty close. Which is an interesting piece of data in itself: that a single heavy rail line has as much ridership as three light rail lines put together.