Comment 119546

By kevlahan (registered) | Posted June 23, 2016 at 16:34:58 in reply to Comment 119539

The last full data on HSR ridership dates from 2007 and was used as the basis for the 2010 Operational Review of the HSR by IBI.

https://www.raisethehammer.org/static/im...

Exhibit 3-16 shows that the annual ridership on the Main/King lines in 2007 was about 9.35 million. Note that this includes the current 10-bline that only runs on weekdays for 12 hours per day and the 51-University which only runs September to April.

Averaged over 365 days (which under-estimates ridership on weekdays during the university year), the ridership was therefore about 26,000 per day. Averaged over 52*5 weekdays this gives 36,000 per day, which is probably a better estimate of weekday ridership during the university year.

In any case, this data is nine years old and the former transit director has said ridership had grown about 20% on the Main/King lines between 2010 and 2015, experiencing much faster growth than the rest of the system.

Assuming equivalent annual growth of 3.7% for the nine years between 2007 and 2016 suggests that annual Main/King ridership in 2016 is around 36,000 today.

Assuming continuing growth until the line opens in 2024 (or at least latent demand since the system is more or less at peak capacity) suggests ridership of 48,000!

If you look at the actual numbers (and remember the data is really from 2007) it is really hard to see why some people claim there is not enough ridership to justify LRT!

A big problem with understanding HSR ridership is lack of reliable data since proper ridership surveys are done only extremely rarely. I'm not actually sure how they estimate ridership for their annual reports.

Comment edited by kevlahan on 2016-06-23 16:36:13

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