Your city's daily rail ridership?
 

I was reading this article on Austin's commuter rail service which is averaging between 2,000 and 3,000 daily riders with higher numbers of 5,000 to 9,400 during festivals.

http://www.statesman.com/news/news/l...hen-hit/nWFB8/

54,000/ day last August, couldnt find anything newer.

http://cmt-stl.org/metro-ridership-in-august/

According to APTA's Q3 report, people make 706,700 trips on Bay Area railroads on an average weekday.

According to APTA's Q3 report, people make 1,357,800 trips on Chicagoland railroads on an average weekday.

Toronto (from Q3 2012 APTA report):

subway: 946,600
streetcar/light rail: 289,600
commuter rail: 174,300

total: 1,410,500

I get 1,286,300. Is there something besides the El and the CR?

Chicago's numbers in the last report look like a typo. They have nearly 1 million for the El, but in Q3 2011 they had only 729,000. Plus the El number for Q3 2012 is identical to the bus number. There was probably a transcription error.

sorry, i must have made a typo in my calculator. here's the (double checked) math from APTA Q3 2012 (double checked):

the el: 983,500
metra: 302,800
south shore: 12,600
total: 1,298,900



parhaps. i don't really know. i was just copying the data from the APTA Q3 report. if their data is wrong, then my math is wrong too.

For Dallas Fort Worth metroplex
DART light rail = 94,000
TRE = 9,000
DCTA = 1,400
Total = 104,400

According to the ATPA New Jersey finally reported correct numbers...kinda...the sources still vary by about 10,000 at most.

Heavy Rail

-PATH : 262,000
-PATCO : 36,500

All 3 systems Light Rail : 95,000

Regional Rail : 298,600

Los Angeles MTA

December 2012

Red / Purple Line Subway - 158,830
Blue Line LRT - 91,709
Expo Line LRT - 23,193
Green Line LRT - 46,029
Gold Line LRT - 42,295

Total Rail - 362,056 - Dec 2012 (for comparison sake, Dec 2011 was 294,082 and Dec 2010 was 270,199)

With the Expo Line Phase 2, Gold Line Foothill Extension, Crenshaw Line, Downtown Connector all under construction, i expect LA to break the 500,000 barrier by 2016

Source - http://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/

You forgot to add Metrolink's 40,000+ daily riders.

Melbourne trains: 222,000,000 annual trips (avg 608,219 per day)
Melbourne Trams: 191,600,000 annual trips (avg 524,931 per day)

from The Age:

http://images.theage.com.au/2012/09/...uses-300x0.jpg

For Boston (APTA Q3 2012):

Subway, all lines: 540,100
Light Rail, all lines: 255,100
Commuter Rail, all lines: 133,900
Boston Total Daily Rail Ridership: 929,100



...and now Tokyo (all Q4 2010 data, best I could find right now):

JR East, all lines (includes Shinkansen): 16,800,000
Subways, all lines: 8,6602,000
Private Commuter Trains, all lines: 10,378,600
Tokyo Total Daily Rail Ridership: pushing 35 million

The Tokyo numbers are a bit deceptive in that a trip on most of the private commuter lines turns into a trip on the subway at a certain point (ex. the commuter Tokyu Toyoko Line from Yokohama to Shibuya turns in to the Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line once you move from Shibuya through the central city, and then turns again in to the Tobu commuter line once you leave northern Tokyo and pass in to Saitama).

Combining these types of splits in to a single trip per rider, you end up with about 23 million daily rail trips in Tokyo.

DC

Metro: 1,027,600
MARC: 36,100
VRE: 18,800
Total: 1,082,500

It should be pointed out that the APTA numbers are for unlinked trips. That is someone taking 2 connecting Metro trains gets counted as 2 unlinked trips. In DC with entrance and exit checks of fare cards, figuring out which passengers took 2 trains is simple (assuming the most direct route). For systems that only check fare cards at the entrance with a fixed rate, the number of unlinked trips is much more of an educated estimate.

So be careful of mixing the APTA unlinked numbers to statements by the transit agency of so many passengers per day. The average daily ridership of the DC Metro is around 750K passengers per day, but I have not dug up the up to date figures for that.

^
True enough, but the great thing about APTA is they provide numbers for everyone, so we don't have to rely on data from individual agencies.

Yeah, but they source their data from the agencies. It's an information portal; APTA isn't collecting their own ridership data. I don't know if they do any normalization to make the figures more comparable, though.

DART discovered lower ridership miss counts when manually counting, and higher counts when using automatic counting devices - a difference of around 10%. So, there are variables that can affect the accuracy of any count.

Only Expo II and Foothill will be done by 2016 and they won't generate enough ridership to reach the 500,000 threshold. If you added the other two, you would still come up short of the milestone.

I say 425,000-450,000 by 2016. Maybe 500,000 by 2020.

At the very very least, we know they're presenting it the same way for all the agencies. If you go to your transit agency webpage and it says "ridership = xxxx" you have no idea whether that's linked or unlinked. Boston might say one, while Philadelphia says the other. At least with APTA we know what we're dealing with for every single number. Every transit agency is treated equally, so comparisons between them are as valid as possible.

So APTA is both the easiest place to get numbers and the only place where we know they're apples-to-apples across agencies. I can't think of any reason why we'd use anything else for this thread.

San Diego Trolley (LR) - 95,700 daily boardings

Source: APTA

Doesn't San Diego also see Coaster commuter trains? Why didn't you include their 6,600 riders a day?
Amtrak California's Surfliner trains should be considered inter-city, and the Sprinter trains don't actually go to San Diego. But Coaster trains do.

I didn't include Coaster data bc I found a few conflicting numbers. That's all.

The Sprinter runs from Escondido to Oceanside along 22 miles with 15 stations and carries 10,000 daily, while in SD County, it doesn't serve the city of San Diego.

Deleted.....

^ ....so that adds up to about 5 gazillion for metro NYC?

Now if we're going to add streetcars to the number, then we'll need to add the 5 people who use the Kenosha streetcar each day to metro Chicago's daily ridership

Philly gets about 105,000 daily trips on its Streetcar system and Portland gets about 11,000 if I recall correctly. New England Cities have decent transit ridership , so those numbers seem high to you but aren't high to me. NJ too , the Density creates high usage on the Transit system , mostly buses for now , but Rail is starting to explode.

For Portland:
Max Lightrail 129600
Streetcar 11400**
Commuter Rail 1800

Total 142800
**Latest data is from June 2012, New line opened in Sept 2012.

If I understand Nexus' list correctly, you'd also need to add the South Bend streetcar (10,000 daily riders), the Metra extension to Rockford (20,000 daily), and the new Racine subway (40,000). What's that, you say? None of those are actually proposed and I'm just making up the ridership? Correct.

I'm all for transit fantasies, but let's keep them separate from questions about reality.

actually, ridership on kenosha's streetcar is closer to 175 people per day. ;)

but the kenosha city council has voted to provide funds to expand the system beyond its current 2 mile downtown loop, so if they get a real line or two connecting the downtown to the neighborhoods, it might actually be useful as real transportation.

in any event, even if there were thousands of people riding it everyday, including kenosha's streetcar number into a chicagoland rail ridership total would be pretty silly in my opinion.

don't forget about the new Arlington Heights funicular railway!

and shouldn't the ridership from the 13 roller coasters at six flags great america also be included? a railroad is a railroad, however crazy and loopy it may be.

For Vancouver:

SkyTrain: 404,600
West Coast Express (commuter rail): 9,500

Total: 414,100

There all proposed , or under Construction so its not fantasy per say......Its more future outlook , there's nothing wrong with my numbers either. My DC-Maryland-NOVA-Delaware ideas are pure fantasy and really crazy , but the NYC regional lines that you see about are from NJT/MNRR or state , same with the numbers. So I basically just copied the list , some of it is from the Various Rail groups which work with the state or agency and have gotten lines built.

Daily London (city proper):

Riverbus (boat) 18,000

Airlink Rail 50,000

Tramlink 80,000

Overground: 240,000

Light Rail: 300,000

Heavy Rail: 500,000

Commuter Rail 1.75 million

Underground: 3.66 million

Buses: 6.3 million

I managed to google one of your projects before you deleted the list. Here's what I found for the West Trenton light rail, which I selected at random:
So OK. You're listing official fantasies, but still not active projects, much less actual service on the ground. And you said yourself that you made your own assumptions about the ridership.

It obviously wasn't what this thread is about, and you deleted it. Matter closed as far as I'm concerned.

We've explained to Nexis4Jersey many times that pie-in-the-sky transit dreams that he heard from his "sources" that lack any official online documentation don't count as actual "proposals". But he doesn't get it.

I've been trying to get ridership statistics for London-area commuter rail. Where did you find them? And do they include all commuter rail ridership in the metro area, or just boardings in Greater London proper?

For Atlanta:

227,300 on MARTA

From APTA Q3 2012.

Here's Denver's from APTA's
CO 63.6 Denver Regional Trp District 1,510.4 1,737.5 1,732.2 1,540.4 1,659.6 2,025.8 4,980.1 5,225.8 15,612.8 15,554.8 -4.70% 0.37%

Just a side note Denver's RTD will open the West Corridor light rail line April 26 and in 2016 41 miles of commuter rail will go online.

Kind of hard to compare Philly and Portland there. I think portland streetcar is only about 9 miles with the numbers of the 11,000 on average ridership while Philly has close to 80-90 miles of trolley track. So Portland is actually quite high for the small length of their street car system. Not to mention Philly is a lot bigger than Portland.

Source?

The Office of Rail Regulation produces a variety of statistics and reports; one report (http://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/display...2-e4981745d08b) provides a 2011-12 figure of 993.8mn for train operating companies operating in and around London (but excluding long distance and other regional operators).

Without a further breakdown, it would be hard to ascertain a weekday number, but probably in the region of 3mn+. The interesting story behind the figures is the increase in ridership despite the mixed economic outlook and year-on-year above inflation fare rises.

Following on from muppet's post, total ridership for 2011-12 as per Transport for London's 2012 Annual Report (http://www.tfl.gov.uk/assets/downloa...ort-2012.pdf):
Buses: 2,344mn
Underground: 1,171mn
Overground: 102mn
DLR: 86mn
Tramlink: 28.5mn

Paris
Annual rail ridership in 2011

• Metro: 1,524 million
• SNCF RER and suburban train: 698 million
• RATP RER: 469 million
• Tram: 114 million

http://www.stif.info/IMG/pdf/RA_2011_BD-2.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subway-..._Lines_(SEPTA)

120,000 now :D

APTA's most recent ridership report says 95,000 on the average weekday for all SEPTA light rail (which would include the Norristown high speed line in addition to the streetcars).

I clicked through to Nexis' wiki link. I see where it says 120,450 (supposedly not including the Norristown line), however when I click on the citation and go to the actual SEPTA source document for that, the number 120,450 does not appear anywhere in the document. It's 76 pages long and mostly text, so I admit I haven't read all of it, but running a search for that number does not produce any results.

Still the highest in the US , its a shame the system isn't shown off more as opposed to Portland which gets all the credit for Modern streetcars or streetcars in general which Philly has almost 10x the ridership and size.

According to APTA, Philadelphia is 6th in total light rail ridership.

1. Boston: 232,000
2. LA: 200,000
3. SF: 175,000
4. Portland: 130,000
5. San Diego: 96,000
6. Philly: 95,000

Including the NJ RiverLine would be enough to push Philadelphia up to 5th, but definitely not first.

Maybe you could invent some metric that Philadelphia is first for. It could conceivably be first for ridership on streetcars operating in mixed-traffic with cars (although SF is going to be a serious contender as well). But you'd have to subtract all ridership on the Market subway portion, plus the Norristown Line, and probably some other segments, so the number would be much much lower. And of course, Toronto would then blow anything in the US out of the water. It would be a pretty silly distinction.

By the way, the reason Portland gets attention for its streetcar is because it's new. Other cities that hope to build new streetcars can learn much much more from a new one than from any vintage pre-1950 streetcar network.

I consider Philly and Toronto to be in a separate category from Light Rail....and I thought they were in a separate category. Toronto's Streetcar system is similar to Philly's , so hence why I compared the two systems. I don't really view both systems as primarily Light Rail , there's only 1 or 2 lines that really fall under Light Rail. Its true that both systems do purpose LRT routes but for now most of both systems is Streetcars. I think you can learn more from the past in terms of system design and usage patterns then from the present. Portland is a two faced tale of one being a nice Modern system and the other having numerous problems depending on who you ask. So I honestly don't like the fact that it is poster child for all New Streetcar systems in the US....but then again Philly is not a perfect system either but its a system that works and can be learned from. Same with Toronto , both systems work and service a variety of densities and system design varies as well. Thats just my opinion though....

The Philadelphia trolley system is listed in the 4th quarter 2011 APTA report as averaging 110.1 thousand weekday passengers in 2011. SEPTA ridership is down in 2012 for both the subway and trolley/light rail categories. The 120,450 figure is likely an older number.

The Boston Green Line has been the busiest light rail system in the US for many years, AFAIK.

Philadelphia's trolleys run in a dedicated subway through downtown. A subway. To suggest that on-street light rail in other cities doesn't count because it has its own lane apart from cars, but then ignore Philadelphia's subway, is absurd.

If you want to count only streetcars that run in mixed traffic, you have to subtract *all* ridership in Philadelphia that begins or ends in the subway, as well as all that begins or ends anywhere off-street (including the Norristown line). It would be interesting to see those numbers, but you haven't presented them. You've claimed Philadelphia's full light rail ridership and then exaggerated it even further.

This is why we never trust your numbers.

Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco have subway-surface systems: fast and frequent in the center, on-street and slower outside. Frankfurt and Cologne are the same. Tel Aviv is building its subway line on the same principle, but without the branching of the other cities; instead, there are turnback and yard access facilities at both portals of the central subway segment, to allow higher frequency in the subway than can be accommodated on-street.

Los Angeles, Portland, Calgary, etc. have the opposite concept: their light rail lines run in fast dedicated ROWs with long interstations outside the center but slow down in the center.

Toronto has a legacy streetcar system that's slow everywhere. It has high ridership because even a legacy streetcar has better ride quality than the most modern bus.