Saturday's trains were packed because of the Pecan Street Festival - which shows that
if you run a train to stations where people can WALK to activity centers, it will succeed; the festival is 2 blocks from the 'downtown' station. Unfortunately there aren't many people who work two blocks from any of the stations, unlike the 2000 light rail route; nor will there likely ever be (until/unless it's extended to 4th/Brazos, and even then it'll miss most of downtown and will NEVER be able to serve the Capitol or UT). It also doesn't hurt that you were dealing with paid parking available in more limited supply than on a normal workday (i.e. many office buildings with garages don't open to the public even for pay on the weekends). Most people who drove had to park further away than the train station, in other words, and had to pay 5 or 10 bucks for the privilege.
Electricron's video is difficult to reconcile with observations made by me and others (mostly others!) of low ridership - but I suspect an organized event, as I think I recognized Cid Galindo walking through the aisle before the train left downtown.
Today's Statesman indicates that
Capital Metro themselves admits ridership is averaging at or below 1000 boardings per day.
Quote:
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Capital Metro has had much lighter ridership for its Monday-to-Friday rush hour service during the line's six weeks of existence — about 1,000 a day since fares began, officials said.
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Note those six weeks of existence include the first (free) week where boardings were much higher than 1000/day - hence my comment that ridership during paid service must be averaging at or below 1000/day.
Also, from a comment made to my facebook page yesterday:
Quote:
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I was at a meeting last week where Doug Allen spoke. He freely admitted no one is riding the shuttle buses and said they are (finally) looking at extending the Red Line further into downtown to get closer to where more people can walk off the train to work.
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Those shuttle-buses are required to get to the Capitol or UT; and they disembark from that MLK station I stood at yesterday morning counting the two passengers who got off the southbound 8:25 train (one with bike, one without).
Bear in mind when an anonymous poster like electricron attacks my credibility, that I'm fully identifying myself and whatever axes I may or may not have to grind; and he's not (although another poster here has told me they think he's working directly or indirectly for a DMU manufacturer). Also bear in mind that
ridership is matching the prediction I (reluctantly) made to Roger Cauvin on twitter back in March.
Quote:
@rcauvin If there's any time between those two things, I think we're looking at 500-1000/day.
8:20 AM Mar 24th via TweetDeck in reply to rcauvin
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Note that
nobody else backed me up on this. Electricron would have predicted more riders, had anybody thought to nail him down. Most other people in this area assumed Capital Metro was right when they predicted standing-room-only and limited bikes to make room for passengers. Of course,
Capital Metro backed off that now that it's become clear that nobody rides the shuttles and bikes are a big part of the limited appeal of this line.
You should expect to see a lot more spin like this these days -
the whole reason for the Rock & Rail concert on Friday and the Saturday service was to distract people from the fact that relatively few people are riding this thing during the week. The monthly ridership numbers should be out any day now, by the way; Capital Metro coincidentally decided to switch very quickly to reporting via that method after the first fare-service weeks' numbers were so disappointing.
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