Quote:
Originally Posted by nixcity
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Using 2030 as an estimate is perfectly reasonable. What matters is ridership after a few years of build up. It's the long term ridership that matters, not that in the first year.
As for that link, it's a massive snow-job by an anti-rail advocate. I called Julio out on it, but he doesn't allow for comments on his blog so it wasn't public. Though I can do so now.
He uses as one of his ridership numbers the current bus ridership on the route.
For this year.
1. Not ridership after another 15 years of Austin growth and density.
2. Not even another 7 years of Austin growth and density, for the day one.
He's basically asking people to believe that a vastly improved rail experience, and vastly improved frequency, will lead to NO additional riders.
The other
HUGE issue with that post is his assertion that there's an opportunity cost to what would have been spent on the rail. That somewhere in the existing bus system, there's a huge number of potential riders.
That can be captured at the rate (cost) of some of the best performing routes in the system.
He simply fails to understand the concept of
diminishing returns, and that simply running additional buses certainly won't produce riders at the same rate as the existing system.
Where is this magical new route, that would perform that great? There's lots of lesser performing routes in the system already. We've hit the point of diminishing returns.
Look at the overall numbers.
He's claiming up to 45,000 additional daily riders. CapMetro only has ~100k daily bus riders. And it costs them >100M /year to capture that ridership.
He's basically claiming that with 15% more money, he can capture 50% more riders. Way better than the existing rate, rather than at a rate of diminishing returns.
It's simply not possible.