How's ridership?

As all of you know, this agency just implemented one of the largest fare changes in our history as we closed a $12 million budget shortfall.(this was never proved and many people debated the truth of this) We did our best to estimate revenues and ridership with this fare change. While we have some very smart analysts here at TriMet that provided us with the figures – there is just no way to predict human behavior. So we moved forward with our best educated projections. I’m encouraged to report that our overall weekly ridership for September was only down slightly -- 1.6%.

• Weekly Bus ridership was up 2.9% and is similar growth to what we have seen on the bus side for about a year now.
• Weekly MAX ridership was down 7.9% and we attribute most of this ridership loss due to the Free Rail Zone going away. There is still some ridership loss on MAX compared to last year due to increased fare enforcement, but most of the MAX ridership decline is in the Free Rail Zone.(ya right and MAX has become VERY unreliable)
• A bright shining star
  
  
  is WES where ridership continues to grow – up in September by 10.4% over the previous year.  That’s 1,800 per day – a new record!(pathetic and LOOK AT THE OVERHEAD THOSE 1800 RIDERS GET!)

As far as the ridership losses – we will continue to monitor as this is just one month’s worth of ridership.
I should also note that the revenue we saw in September is lining up at or near our projections. I want to stress that is still very early with just one month of results in. There were a number of factors in play – people stocking up on tickets, exchanging in their old tickets and so forth. We’ll have a better idea of where our projections truly are after a full quarter’s worth of results.
(article by Neil Mcfarlane aka Mcfuher)