Here’s a cool chart shared on Twitter by a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, showing expected v. actual ridership numbers for different light rail lines around the country.
I am one of the people that always assumes transit planners low-ball the ridership predictions, so that they can announce (often right away) that the new transit line is exceeding expectations. But while that always happens in the Twin cities, apparently that’s not always the case around the rest of the country (e.g. Denver, San Jose). It’s nice to see that MSP light rail is at top of the heap, just behind Seattle, when it comes to national rail transit performance.
Good work!
Denver’s R Line has been a complete disaster, doesn’t surprise me. When the Green Line is extended, there’s a good chance that MSP outright passes Denver in ridership despite having nearly half the track miles.
This. I travel to Denver frequently (writing as I’m on the blue line to MSP to go there today) and I do not understand why so many people from MSP hold up Denver as a peer that we should aspire to mimic. The R line isn’t their only disaster, it’s just the most visible. My coworkers based there all hate taking transit (but many do it anyway) because it’s just so inefficient. A couple even share the quip that RTD stands for “Reason to Drive”. And have you seen their local fare? 😰😰😰
A lot of people look at Denver with envy because they passed a massive transit levy, then actually executed it by building a lot of lines quickly. But of course, in order to do that, they compromised at every step of the way on the quality of those lines, especially in station location.
Denver has stops that are on the wrong side of major highways from job centers, stops that are inaccessible from neighborhoods directly next door because they let the neighborhood build a wall, stops that serve nothing at all, etc. etc. etc.
What’s funny is that their commuter rail is far better.
Meanwhile San Fran is so far ahead of Seattle (and MSP) that it’s barely clinging to the chart
Their light rail was build in the early 1900’s and (unlike Philadelphia) their number doesn’t include a couple really low frequency/low density lines)
Question – when are these projections made vs the date of service? It’s not unusual for large projects to update their estimates as they progress so when were the predicted X axis values calculated – the initial proposal, at the time of construction….. and were there in fact any meaningful changes along the way?
I took a look at the original tweet. The predicted values are actually just calculated from a few variables such as job density. It’s not the pre-revenue ridership expectation.
The conclusion, though, I think it largely unchanged: MSP performs like it “should” or above where is “should” based on the math and cities like Denver perform poorly.
Should have clarified—it’s not the pre-revenue service ridership projection.