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.
The only problems reported were the integration of 20 new or modified bus routes designed to feed people to the train line. 20 new or modified routes. I just don't get it. Presumably, each of those routes is running multiple times a day. Looking at a schedule for just one of these routes, it runs some 60 times a day.
Have you seen buses in Charlotte? Many of them run close to empty, and running 60 times a day seems a bit ridiculous. I'm all for mass transit, but just maybe we're overdoing it a bit? Twenty new or modified routes times 60 times each day is 1200 runs. That's just 4 people per run, based on the averages that were seen on the first day, assuming each person that rides the train takes the bus, and that's not going to happen. Yes, I realize that the opposite won't either, but come on.
When you consider that the ride includes a free transfer to the bus, all this extra maneuvering doesn't actually gain any revenue, then it's seems a bit, I don't know, wasteful. What do you think?
As to the riders, let's see, 5000 passenger trips per day equates to $6,500 per day in revenue - at best (not considering potential discounts for seniors, students or multi-ride passes, or factoring in potential loss). Extend that over a year (365 days, even though this is just a weekday figure) and you're talking just $2,372,500. And we paid nearly $500 million to build this thing, not to mention any operating costs? Hey, that's a 210-year payback schedule, making all these assumptions. That's quite a deal.
Oh, and don't forget that the Ticket Vending Machines don't always work, so you can't buy your passes all the time, either. And make sure you take cash with you, because even if they do work, the credit card processors haven't been installed yet. Nice job on this one, Charlotte.
