One Week of the Lynx Blue Line »
The numbers are in, so what can we learn? After a monstrous opening weekend, which saw some 100,000 riders over the two-day free preview, the first day of paying riders (last Monday) saw somewhere between 4500 and 5000 "passenger trips", well short of the estimated 9100 per day during the first year. To be fair, it's the first day, and you have to give people a chance to step up to the new patterns - but that's pretty far off the mark.
Notably, if the ridership is so low in the opening days, that means the numbers will need to be made up somewhere in order to meet the average. It's also worth noting that that is a "weekday average". I haven't been able to find a good number for weekend averages, but you would have to assume that it would be lower. Naturally, on a Panthers home game, it might be higher, but other than that, there really isn't a lot of reason to use the train - and other cities severely curtail transit on weekends, so it seems logical.
