# Tide LRT Performance Continues to Improve



## Anderson (Oct 8, 2012)

Though the June, 2012 report seems to have an issue with C/Ped ridership figures alongside substantially different financials, I've got some rough numbers as to how The Tide did over the last few months:

1) Ridership. The official financial report for May (the last reliable month) indicated 146543 riders. The "monthly ridership" report (actually a daily report without monthly summaries) indicated approximately 174,000 riders for August. As a note, I suspect that at least some of this boost was induced by summer traffic issues in the area, but there was a spike in gas prices to contend with as well.

Also, doing a quick "Monday survey" over the last year, I get the following (vs. average weekday ridership where applicable):

Aug: 5305

Jul: 5323

Jun: 5687

May: 4064

Apr: 5640

Mar: 4791

Feb: 4136 (vs. 4679) -543

Jan: 3706 (vs. 4275) -569

Dec: 3800 (vs. 4473) -673

Nov: 4462 (vs. 4834) -372

Oct: 4608 (vs. 5036) -428

Sep: 4793 (vs. 4956) -162

(Last August is ignored because of the free week).

Moreover, the number of days with 6000+ ridership went from 3 in September 2012 to

2) Farebox. I'll go with both May and June here (since June's numbers are off). In May, farebox revenue is listed as $135,423, which would indicate $.92/rider (in line with what I've seen before), up from $.82/rider in January. June indicated $161,774 in revenue. If the ridership (indicated as 146,543) were accurate, this would indicate $1.10/rider, which I don't buy.

As a percentage of (rather erratic) operating expenses, The Tide is hovering somewhere in the 20-22% range but, to all appearances (at least, if increased ridership holds into the fall) increasing slowly (it was in the mid-to-upper teens for a good part of last fall).

3) Anecdotal numbers from the last few weeks indicate that ridership has, in fact, remained a bit higher (all of the numbers I've noticed this fall have been in the 6000+ range, and this would hold with what showed up at the end of August where a rather sharp ridership spike took hold (11 of the last 14 weekdays showed 6000+ ridership, and 4 of those broke 7000).

The big question is if I've just gotten lucky, or if there's been a jump in ridership that "stuck" over the summer.

Monthly report:

http://www.gohrt.com/public-records/Operations-Documents/Rail/Monthly-Ridership/Rail-Ridership-Current.pdf

Other data:

http://www.gohrt.com/hrt-public-records/


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## afigg (Oct 9, 2012)

Interesting. There are very wide swings in ridership numbers, most notably on Saturdays. For the May to August 2012 period, from looking at the numbers, it appears that Saturday on average is close to the weekday numbers. Lots of people taking the Tide for shopping and recreational trips?

One comment, I'm comparing the Hampton Roads daily report for May, June with the APTA (American Public Transportation) Second Quarter 2012 Report and I can't reconcile the lower numbers in the APTA report. The APTA reports uses "unlinked" transit trips, but since the Tide is a single line, there are no connecting light rail lines to connect to. Oh well.

In case you are not aware of the quarterly APTA reports, APTA has an archive of ridership stats for heavy, light, commuter rail, bus transit, ferries, demand service going back to 1996 on the archive page link. There are gaps in the reports when transit agencies did not send in reports, but the reports show the growth in transit ridership the past 15 years. The one that jumps out - to me anyway - is the huge comeback of the NYC subway system over the past 15 years, close to doubling in total number of estimated unlinked passenger trips. The numbers for the NYC subway in the heavy rail category shows its dominance in ridership over all the other heavy and light rail systems in the US combined.


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## AlanB (Oct 9, 2012)

afigg said:


> Interesting. There are very wide swings in ridership numbers, most notably on Saturdays. For the May to August 2012 period, from looking at the numbers, it appears that Saturday on average is close to the weekday numbers. Lots of people taking the Tide for shopping and recreational trips?


Yes, I've noticed that oddity myself more than once when I've looked at the numbers in the past.



afigg said:


> One comment, I'm comparing the Hampton Roads daily report for May, June with the APTA (American Public Transportation) Second Quarter 2012 Report and I can't reconcile the lower numbers in the APTA report. The APTA reports uses "unlinked" transit trips, but since the Tide is a single line, there are no connecting light rail lines to connect to. Oh well.


First, unlinked means that they count everyone who steps through the door, without regard to whether that person only rode light rail or whether they transferred from any other transit mode, be it another light rail train, a bus, a heavy rail train, or a ferry.

Additionally, you should know that APTA gets its numbers direct from the National Transit Database reports. It could be that the NTD is using revised numbers.


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## Anderson (Oct 9, 2012)

Most of those odd spikes are event-based. For example, I can _probably_ link the string of very busy days in June to OpSail. The massive day last November would come from post-Thanksgiving shopping. One thing to remember is that the line directly serves MacArthur Mall, strongly boosting weekend travel above and beyond what you might expect.

As to linking trips, the Tide links to a fair number of local bus lines, and there is a _lot_ of bus ridership in and around Norfolk. It's quite possible that you've even got folks taking The Tide into downtown and then taking a bus up to ODU, for example (or vice-versa). The thing I don't know about the APTA/NTD system is how it allocates a linked trip.


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## AlanB (Oct 9, 2012)

Anderson said:


> The thing I don't know about the APTA/NTD system is how it allocates a linked trip.


They don't. There is no way to do that, most systems don't have any way to track transfers for all riders. Especially with light rail which often doesn't have any way to know how you actually paid for that ride. Most LRT systems use POP (Proof Of Payment) where an inspector challenges you to prove that you did pay. A few, like Boston require you to pay as you board, or Seattle for example requires that you tap your ORCA card prior to boarding. You can't do a transfer in Seattle anymore without ORCA, so it becomes possible to track transfers.

But most systems have no way to track if a rider did transfer either to or from some other form of public transit with POP.

Therefore the NTD only tracks unlinked riders, meaning that any system's total daily ridership should never be advertised as the number of people who ride public transit. Not only do most people take a round trip, another thing that cannot be accounted for, but again there is no way to know how many "rides counted" were the same person being counted on a bus and then a LRT train. The total number of actual people riding hovers some place between 1/2 to perhaps 1/3rd of the total number of unlinked rides being reported.


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## Anderson (Oct 20, 2012)

Ok, I got my hands on the daily data for September 2012 vs. September 2011:

1) Ridership was 169,044 in 09/12 vs. 144,181 in 09/11. The increase is around 17%.

2) However, ridership in the first few days of September 2011 was exceedingly high due to the startup of the line (railfans, novelty, etc.), which made Labor Day Weekend ridership 20,380 vs. 13,730 this year on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday combined. This also distorted weekend ridership for the month quite dramatically (especially Sunday). Labor Day Friday was also slightly inflated as a result as well, as did that Thursday.

3) Daily ridership averages by day of the week were (Day: 2012 vs. 2011):

Monday: 5920 vs. 4793 (+23.5%)

Tuesday: 6975 vs. 4455 (+56.6%)

Wednesday: 6662 vs. 4710 (+41.4%)

Thursday: 6730 vs. 5023 (+34%)

Friday: 6712 vs. 5752 (+16.7%)

Saturday: 5149 vs. 5452 (-5.6%)

Sunday: 2262 vs. 3168 (-28.6%)

Note that Monday ridership in September is, for obvious reasons, a bit lower than other weekdays due to Labor Day removing commuter traffic. Still, average weekday ridership is up to 6600 vs. 4946 last year, a jump of almost exactly one third.

Of particular note is that in Sept. 2012 ridership exceeded 7000 on four days, exceeded 6000 on all normal weekdays save one, and exceeded 6500 on 12 of 20 weekdays (as well as Labor Day Saturday). By comparison, in September 2011, it exceeded 7000 on one weekday (Labor Day Friday) and one weekend day (Labor Day Saturday), 6500 on only those two days, and 6000 on only those two plus the preceding Thursday.

Edit: Also, I noticed something else: Ferry ridership has jumped 20% year over year as well.


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## Anderson (Nov 5, 2012)

Daily numbers for October just came out today. Notwithstanding four days impacted by Hurricane Sandy (which more or less annihilated ridership on two days and drove it down by about 45% on the other two) and Columbus Day, there were only two weekdays with ridership less than 6000 (5949 the Friday before Sandy, 10/26, and 5854 on 10/09). On regular weekdays, ridership was fairly stable between 6400-7000 T-F, and a bit lower on Mondays. Interestingly, Saturday ridership is almost on par with Monday ridership, and only Sunday ridership is lower. I can't help but wonder if Sunday ridership is mainly lower because of the lighter service schedule vis-a-vis Saturday (rather than the normal opposite situation).

I also got my hands on a quarterly report for HRT, and there seems to be an accounting nightmare there. In June (one month), costs were listed as $760,181 ($25,339/day) and farebox revenue as $161,774 ($5392/day, for a CR of 21.3%). For July-September (three months), Light Rail costs were $2,235,961 ($24,303/day) while passenger revenue was listed as $271,418 ($2363/day, for a CR around 10%). Since this isn't down to unstable costs, I cannot help but feel that _something_ is off in terms of the farebox. Ridership in June wasn't _that_ much stronger than normal, etc. So something doesn't add up here.


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## afigg (Nov 6, 2012)

Anderson said:


> Daily numbers for October just came out today. Notwithstanding four days impacted by Hurricane Sandy (which more or less annihilated ridership on two days and drove it down by about 45% on the other two) and Columbus Day, there were only two weekdays with ridership less than 6000 (5949 the Friday before Sandy, 10/26, and 5854 on 10/09). On regular weekdays, ridership was fairly stable between 6400-7000 T-F, and a bit lower on Mondays. Interestingly, Saturday ridership is almost on par with Monday ridership, and only Sunday ridership is lower. I can't help but wonder if Sunday ridership is mainly lower because of the lighter service schedule vis-a-vis Saturday (rather than the normal opposite situation).


Would there be a reason to expect Sunday ridership to be close to the Saturday numbers? That the Saturday ridership is close to the weekday levels says that the Tide LRT - which is a starter stub route really - is being used to travel along the route for shopping, going to eat, etc and not so much to commute to work.

The DC Metrorail system, for example, has a Saturday average ridership of close to half of the weekday levels because the DC Metro serves both as a commuter system on weekdays and to get around the DC region for all other types of purposes. The Sunday average ridership is about 70% of the Saturday average ridership. As a side note, the DC Metro Saturday and Sunday ridership numbers are increasing faster than the weekday ridership levels, indicating that because of TOD around the stations, the DC region is shifting in how it uses the Metro system. As an additional side note, the PlanitMetro web site put out a megadump of DC Metro ridership data for May 2012 with station-to-station ridership numbers by weekday, Saturday, Sunday for stat geeks to data mine to their heart;s content. 

Getting back to the Tide Saturday and Sunday ridership levels, unless the Tide gets a lot of tourist traffic, as a local transit system, I would expect Sunday to have lower average ridership than Saturdays and weekdays, even if it ran the same number of hours and service frequency.

On the low cost recovery percentages, that leaves the Tide and proposed expansions open to attack and efforts to stop expansion as a boon-doggle, socialist urban plot, yada, yada. If the numbers are correct, they should be looking at improving the CR to at least respectable levels for a single line LRT.


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## AlanB (Nov 6, 2012)

Anderson said:


> Since this isn't down to unstable costs, I cannot help but feel that _something_ is off in terms of the farebox. Ridership in June wasn't _that_ much stronger than normal, etc. So something doesn't add up here.


This is one reason why I prefer to wait for and use the numbers from the National Transit Database, because they tend to sort through the anomalies and figure out what happened and then fix things. Unfortunately we won't see LRT numbers until the 2012 report comes out. The 2011 report was only released about a week ago; so we've got a long wait to see what really did happen.

And unfortunately that will make it harder to silence any critics.


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## Anderson (Nov 6, 2012)

Well, the problem isn't whether the numbers are correct or not...it's that you've more or less got two sets of data that are irreconcilable (no, they don't overlap, but I can't help but see the Jul-Sep data as not making sense if the June data is accurate and vice-versa). PPR does not "just" drop by 50% unless you're being godawful stupid with your accounting and not properly running accounts for annual passes.

As to the potentially low CR, you've got two problems slowing things down:

1) HRT has been cutting too good of a deal on annual passes for organizations (and has acknowledged as much), meaning that you get a lot of "free" ridership from NSU in particular; and

2) There's always the relatively low fare to look at as well.

I'm hopeful that the Jul-Sep data is simply in error...it's well off of what we've seen until now (CR was rising into the mid-to-upper teens), but...well, we'll see.


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