MetroRail's "ridership" numbers: 12 million passengers a year!
About one year ago, the Chronicle's Rad Sallee wrote quite a story on Metro, exposing how Metro has really hurt the riders who need Metro's services the most. Included in that story was a look at how Metro counts ridership:
Because Metro has no practical way to count actual riders, it instead keeps track of boardings — usually expressed on an average weekday basis and counted by electronic devices on buses and trains. A single trip involving transfers, like Villanueva's journey to work, is counted as several boardings.
Today Sallee takes up the topic again, showing how Metro's bookkeeping doesn't provide a clear picture, certainly not as clear as Metro would like us to think:
The measure that Metro watches most closely — the key indicator of how well it is performing its mission — is often referred to as "ridership." But this turns out to be a slippery concept. As with the elephant and the blind men, you need to examine it several ways for a complete picture.
As its primary measure of ridership, Metro uses bus and rail boardings, which are presented by transit category in its monthly and quarterly reports.
Unlike ridership, boardings are easy to grasp. When you step on board a bus or train, that's one boarding. If your usual route is changed and you must transfer to reach a destination, that's two boardings.
And therein lies the problem with boardings as a measure of success: The journey takes longer and is more trouble than before, but it shows up in statistics as an increase in service.
Former Mayor Bob Lanier, who chaired Metro in 1988 and 1989, demanded ridership data in the form of "linked trips." To Lanier — and probably most people — a ride to the dentist should count as one trip, no matter how many transfers are involved.
"A full disclosure would require boardings to be coupled with either trips or passenger miles traveled, preferably both," Lanier has said. "Each has its own nuances, and there's really no practical reason for not presenting all three."
And what happens when the bigger picture is presented?
Metro does not now collect data on linked trips.
The results show essentially the same trends that Metro has reported based on boardings. But some of the changes are more dramatic when expressed in passenger miles.
From 2000 to 2005, overall ridership on Metro's fixed routes declined 7 percent, measured in boardings, and 9 percent in terms of passenger miles.
Local and express bus service, by far the largest transit component, declined 13 percent in boardings but 21 percent in passenger miles.
And when Metro uses its fuzzy math, you get press stories like this from the Ottawa Sun:
MetroRail officials say they could easily use 15 more cars because Houston has reached its capacity, transporting about 12 million passengers a year. They didn't expect to reach that level of ridership for another 20 years.
Really. Twelve million passengers a year. Certainly what Metro did with downtown bus service has boosted MetroRail's numbers, but still, wouldn't you like to see the backup on that "ridership" stat? What would the number be using Mayor Bob's preferred method of counting ridership -- linked trips?
Posted by Anne Linehan @ 07/17/06 06:02 AM | Print |
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