Ridership on LA's Expo Line is steadily increasing -- and it doesn't seem to be impacting bus use

[marmar]

One Year Later, Who Is Riding the Expo Line?

Axel Hellman | May 1, 2013 | 5:55 p.m. PDT
Staff Reporter


[font size="1"]Expo Line passengers /photo credit: stevebott (flickr)[/font]


When the Expo Line, Los Angeles Metro’s newest light rail line, opened in April 2012, initial ridership numbers were low, starting at around 11,000 per average weekday, a fact which many media sources reported on. One libertarian think tank even used these low numbers to argue that light rail systems in general should not be built.

But now, one year later, the picture is very different. Ridership on weekdays has been increasing at a steady clip of about 1,000 per month, reaching an estimated 26,000 per day during the week. Given that Metro projected about 27,000 riders per day by the year 2020, that number is very good. The number of people riding the Expo Line may pass that benchmark in the coming months.


[font size="1"]A graph of Expo Line ridership per month. (LA Metro)[/font]

A Metro spokesperson, Jesse Simon, disputed the line’s naysayers, cautioning that ridership will rise with time, “A favorite tactic of rail critics used to be to take statistics from a year or two after the opening date of a rail [line] to show that out-year estimates of rail patronage were grossly exaggerated. But changing to rail involves a longer process of changing habits. Our experience with rail patronage, and I believe experience elsewhere, is that rail growth is incremental.“

Simon said that in the long term, ridership has been slowly increasing on Metro’s other rail lines, “Rail patronage has increased steadily almost every year since the first line opened in 1990; and not only because more lines came online – within each Line the growth has been steady and it has not reached a stable endpoint.” ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.neontommy.com/news/2013/04/one-year-later-who-riding-expo-line