About six weeks ago, I promised that I would publish a spreadsheet on Metro ridership and boardings. I also made this promise on a BlogHouston subject thread. Well gentle readers, I have completed the task of transcribing Metro's boardings information from the 200+ pages of hard copy which they sent to me and onto a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.
Some notes and caveats:
1) You will be asked whether you want to enable the macros or not. Do enable the macros. I only wrote one or two when I first started entering in the data, but found later I didn't need them.
2) I did not actually enter in all of the data which Metro sent me. I didn't enter in data for boardings on Saturdays and Sundays, nor did I enter in data for boardings on holidays. My reason for doing so was that I already had some 20,000 pieces of data from printouts to enter over a period of 10 years and that was taxing enough. Also, I figured that most people would not be terribly interested in weekend data. I will do some commentary in the future on weekend and holiday data, but it is IHMO a minor issue.
3) You will notice that not all of the spreadsheets look quite the same. The 1997 Metro spreadsheet shows patronage and utilization of Metro's Park and Rides, which they apparently quit collecting or noting. The 2004 and later editions of the spreadsheets have Light Rail boardings, but only after 2005 did Metro start keeping track of boardings by station.
One really good item which Metro started doing in 2001 was keeping track of boardings from all sources on an annual basis. This allows for apples to apples comparisons from a year to year basis as to how well the agency is performing.
4) The well known and well trodden arguments over public transit boardings verses trips verses passenger miles will not be covered here. I should say that I did not ask Metro for their passenger mile estimates, only their boardings on all routes (including canceled ones). Instead, if anyone out there wants to rehash those issues, then I refer them to Houston Chronicle transportation beat writer Rad Sallee's well written post on the subject, dated July 17, 2006.
I will say this about linked trips and boardings, especially in the light of the fact that various bus routes have either been truncated and rerouted towards the Light Rail line. Metro itself estimates that 62 percent of its boardings come from work commutes. David Hutzelman, who has a graduate degree in statistics, has estimated from American Community Survey data that the percentage of Metro passengers who transfer while in route to their destination has gone up from 36% to 41% after the building of the Light Rail line.
5) The data I asked for when I made my first TXPIA request was for passenger boarding data through July 2006. Ergo the FY2006 data is complete only through July of last year and is not complete. When I return to Houston I intend to ask Metro for the rest of their data for last year and through this year.
6) Metro's "fiscal year" starts in October of the previous year and runs through September of the current year. Ergo I have followed their convention when creating the spreadsheet.
7) Metro has followed a labor intensive method of collecting passenger survey data for some time now. It involves having people sent on board buses and counting them by head since the agency does not have automatic or electronic means of collecting this data. This should change in the not too far distant future as Metro is looking to implement cameras and other instrumentation to do the job.
8) I am started the long and laborious process of collecting route information from years gone by on all bus routes and schedules. I would really like to compare from a year to year basis the frequency of bus route stops along all bus routes and try to correlate them with bus route patronage. This is of particular interest to this writer as the #18 Kirby route used to run every 15 - 25 minutes during day hours, but was cut back to service once every 30+ minutes after the Light Rail line was built. This has resulted in a loss of patronage level of 1,400+ riders in the late 1990's to 950-1,000 by FY 2005.
No doubt the question that is most important to most people is, what can be inferred from the data?
What clearly stands out is that Metro was on a roll - relatively speaking - when they stuck to a bus only program, bearing in mind that Metro is responsible for only about 4-5 percent of all work commute trips and about 2 percent of all passenger trips in the 1,285 mile service area. Weekday boardings went up from 267,000 in FY 1996 and reached a peak of 334,000 boardings per day in FY 2001 just as the Light Rail line was starting construction. From there, weekday boardings dropped to 312,000 boardings by FY 2005 (the construction period for the Light Rail line was from 2001 - 2004). In terms of annual boardings, Metro's performance dropped about 7 percent from a peak of 101,903,000 boardings in FY 2001 to a low of 94,959,000 in FY 2005. This all happened during a period of time where the population of Houston and of Harris County increased by about 15 percent.
Starting in September 2005 and through FY 2006, there is a noticeable increase in boardings from all service categories, including Light Rail boardings, fixed route passenger buses, Express buses and Park and Rides. This is what I call "the Katrina effect", referring to the matter that this bump in the data occurred at the time when Houston was innundated with an estimated 100,000 - 150,000 evacuees fleeing the flooding of the city of New Orleans. The overall effect of the Hurricane on Metro's patronage seems to have held for a period of about 15 months. In data not yet obtained from Metro, but seen from other sources, Metro's boardings seem to start dropping back to pre - Katrina levels sometime around the period of January 2007.
Other items of interest include what happened to patronage along specific bus routes when Light Rail was built?
1) The #2 Bellaire bus route, which has perennially been the bus route with the largest patronage, fell from an FY 2000 peak of 14,376 riders to a FY 2005 low of 10,238 before recovering in FY 2006 to a level of 11,000+ riders. The Bellaire route was one of those which used to run directly into downtown Houston as far as Congress Street, but was truncated to terminate at the Light Rail line at the TMC transit station.
2) The #14 Hiram Clarke bus route also used to run into downtown Houston as far as Commerce Street. The route, like the Bellaire route, now terminates at the the TMC transit station. This resulted in a drop in boardings along the route from a peak of 7,826 boardings in FY 1999 to a level of 3,155 boardings in FY 2005.
3) The 4 routes along which Metro wants to build out the bus rapid transit / light rail lines have a combined total of about 26,000 passengers. In particular, the #50 Harrisburg route peaked out in patronage in 5,499 boardings in FY 1999, but had fallen to 4,435 boardings by FY 2005.
More later as I have things I have to attend to. This should be more fuel for the transit debate, but the charge that we have spent many hundreds of millions of dollars on Light Rail only to have seen overall transit service suffer is clearly borne out by the data. As a final note, I intend to keep this spreadsheet updated for the future.
Wizard
Posted by The Mighty Wizard at April 16, 2007 05:00 AM