[All] LRT - info on number of boarders

[Carmen Nave]

The Wikipedia entry makes for a fairly raw data set without a lot of
context. The fact of the matter is is that Waterloo is looking to attract
choice riders to the LRT; this data does not allow us to compare cities with
various transit goals and commitments vis-a-vis their ridership. In other
words, a list of populations and ridership numbers does not allow us to
ensure that we are making apples-to-apples comparisons.

 All of the cities listed are American, and America has in my experience a
rather significantly different attitude to transit than Canadians have.
Car-culture is different in the two countries, and I am not prepared to
dismiss that as an irrelevant factor. People's personal expectations about
what it means to drive or use transit will affect whether they choose to do
so. For example, the author asks why we would expect a greater ridership
than Seattle. Off the top of my head, having taken transit in Seattle, the
city is laid out very differently and it would not be easy to make a
significant number of origin-destination connections with a single line of
rail as it is in Waterloo. They also didn't allow unfolded strollers on the
bus; and while one might argue that parents with strollers are not going to
make up the bulk of choice ridership, at the same time a transit system that
is easy to use at different points in people's lives is going to retain and
grow ridership better than one that isn't. If a student with a bike or
mother with a stoller discovers that the GRT is fast, easy, and
accommodating, it seems likely that that person will seriously consider
continuing to use it when their needs change from occasional ridership to
regular commuting.

Even more important than the potentially significant effects of cultural
attitudes towards what it means to take transit is that there are also
significant infrastructural factors. Waterloo Region has coordinated the LRT
with a larger improved transit plan, and they have coordinated that transit
plan with other elements of infrastructure and development planning to
create a context in which the LRT links points of origin and destination for
a lot of potential users. Population is not by any means the only factor
from which the region has drawn its estimate, and comparisons between cities
that have not made similar transit and development commitments are not worth
considering.

The region's estimates were peer reviewed, which means that professionals
have looked at these numbers with more than just a Wikipedia entry to use as
comparison. This doesn't make them unquestionable, of course, but at the
very least suggests that they aren't so outrageous that a cursory population
comparison should completely discredit them. The author of the attached file
suggests that there is no need even for a BRT, when the iXpress is already
exceeding capacity several times a day. This suggests to me that the
research conclusions in this pdf are not particularly accurate.

Carmen Nave

2011/4/12 Sharon Woodley <waterzooee at yahoo.com>

> Hope you can look at this short pdf on the proposed number of boarders for
> the LRT and what may be the real numbers as per other cities in North
> America.
> Sharon Woodley
>
> --- On *Mon, 4/11/11, jean narveson <midnightediting at gmail.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: jean narveson <midnightediting at gmail.com>
> Subject: oops: one correction
> To: "moi" <midnightediting at gmail.com>
> Received: Monday, April 11, 2011, 8:19 AM
>
> Dave noticed an important change that had to be made in his last sentence.
> It should read:
>
> *With less than half the boarders, the region's subsidy will be about
> $21.7M instead of the $3.8M forecast (see 'Connecting to the Future'  Summer
> 2009).*
>
> Revised copy attached.
>
>
>
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