The Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press reprint the same Metro Transit press release publish similar stories about Metro Transit.
Strib Metro Transit gets more customers
Pioneer Press : Gas prices are rising again, and so is ridership on Metro Transit
The Strib's version:
For the year's first three months, the total of 19.5 million rides represents a 2 percent increase over the same period last year, the transit operator said.Northstar Commuter Rail's rush-hour service between Minneapolis and Big Lake showed the highest year-over-year gain at 6 percent. Northstar customers chose the rail service more than 146,000 times in the first quarter of 2011.
For all of 2010, Northstar's 710,400 rides fell 21 percent below expectations. Transit officials attributed that to high unemployment and a resulting reduction in trips downtown.
"We're off to a very encouraging start in 2011," said Metro Transit General Manager Brian Lamb. "Rising gas prices have certainly played a role in encouraging new customers to give transit a try."
Comparing the first quarter of 2010 with the same period this year:
Express bus ridership was up 3.5 percent, urban local service rose 2.3 percent and suburban local service increased 1.5 percent.
Ridership on the Hiawatha light-rail line was down 1.8 percent from the first quarter of last year but trended upward in February and March.
Comment: Northstar may have shown the highest percentage gain, but in sheer magnitude, its gain is dwarfed by the loss in riders on Hiawatha. 146,000/90 is 1622 rides per day, or assuming all rides are round trip, 811 persons per day. If that is up 6 percent, that means it is up by a whopping 50 persons per day. On the other hand, Hiawatha was down from 2.2 to 2.1 million rides, or 100,000 rides, or 1111 rides per day (or 555 persons per day, assuming round trip). In other words the loss of riders on Hiawatha was 10 times the gain on Northstar. The fare is not ten times higher on Northstar, so net revenue from rail operations should have dropped.
It is good to see bus patronage up, though not surprising given the large increase in the price of fuel.
Please be a little more careful with your math -- The drop from 2.2 million to 2.1 million is mostly due to rounding. 1.8% would correspond to something closer to 39,000 rather than 100,000.
It's a bit disappointing to see the Hiawatha Line lose riders, but its losses were more than made up by the other bus routes -- perhaps a good thing, since the Hiawatha has been a huge driver of Metro Transit ridership gains over the time it's been open, and it's important for the core bus system to be a draw on its own. Considering the core urban routes only rose by 0.7% for all of last year, seeing them go up by 2.3% is good to see. That adds up to an increase of between 300,000 and 375,000 rides just in the first quarter.
The LRT is fairly vulnerable to having riders cannibalized by other services because the average rider lives more than 3 miles away from the line. It carries roughly the same number of riders as all of Metro Transit's express routes put together (not including the opt-outs, of course). As fast as the Hiawatha is, there are some express routes which are even faster. Now that the I-35W/MN-62 Crosstown project is done, I imagine the express services have improved in reliability a bit (and there may be some more routes operating as the 35W and MN-77 BRT operations slowly gear up). Of course, the completion of that project also whacked congestion on that stretch of road pretty thoroughly (for now, anyway), so I'm sure a lot of people are more comfortable driving on it.
@Mulad, The Pionner Press reports 100,000 difference. If as you say it is 40,000 difference, the general point remains, Hiawatha still lost more riders than Northstar gained. I do not have the raw data at hand to measure this myself (and to be honest, neither does Metro Transit, since the actual number of riders on Hiawatha (unlike buses) is not known).