Just How is the Lynx Blue Line Doing? »
Over the weekend, the Charlotte Observer reported that since opening to paying customers on November 26 - nearly a month ago - the Lynx Blue line had taken some 12000 passenger trips. I'm thinking that's a misprint, but I haven't been able to find a retraction or a correction. Perhaps they meant to print that they are doing 12000 trips per day. But 12000 total would be, well, pretty bad, to say the least. They were supposed to do over 9000 per weekday, and 12000 total would just suck.
They did announce that there will be a couple more ticket vending machines added at the I-485 station, and even a pre-fabricated ticket booth for someone to dispense tickets. I can't imagine that they would need to do that if the ridership was so poor, unless they are following some strange publicity track of trying to convince people that ridership is so good that they need more when there really isn't anyone riding.
Whenever we've been near the train, there seems to be people on board - but to be so far below expectations doesn't seem right. At the same time, I don't know that it's good enough to say that it's that far above expectations either. That might be a little ambitious. But I haven't seen anything other than a rough guess of riders.
Outgoing transit czar Ron Tober has spent the last month or so of his job riding the train and counting heads, which isn't really the best way to figure out how many are riding. Surely they will have some way to tell us just how many people are on the train?
As to the makeup of the crowd, when we went to the Checkers game last week, there was a good crowd on the train - and I am fairly certain that they weren't going to the game. So ridership is decent, even after-hours.
But I can also say that there were plenty of people on the platform who couldn't figure out the ticket vending machines. One group of men had trouble buying their tickets because the bill-accepting slot is placed so far down on the front of the machine that it looks like it doesn't take bills at all (in fact, it does). These guys were scrounging in their pockets for coins, when all they had to do was slip the bills in towards the bottom of the machine. So it just makes you wonder why they didn't put that in at the top, or make a big arrow pointing out where you put the bills in?
