Metro Ridership Down to Lowest Level Since 2004

Nicole Raz
WMAL.com

WASHINGTON (WMAL) — Metro ridership is down to levels not seen since 2004. According to a MWAA’s second quarter update, 9.5 million fewer rides on rail and buses compared to a year ago.

“It’s not at all surprising,” says Vice Chair of the WMATA Riders’ Union Graham Jenkins. “On the other hand, the drastic-ness of this decline is definitely disturbing.”

If Metro doesn’t change course, the system is stuck in a Catch-22, he says.

“The weekend track work, which drives away riders on the weekends, is meant to make the system more reliable for those who ride during the week. But people aren’t riding during the week because the system is unreliable.”

He says metro needs to immediately change course, starting with the way they do track work.

“The piecemeal approach is clearly not solving the problem, and it really points to the need for some kind of drastic measures, like a partial-line shutdown for some number of weeks in order to conduct repairs.”

Metro declined to comment.

As the report states, the decline has a direct relationship with the level of service:

As noted in the first quarter, ridership data indicate that from the customer’s point of view, predictability of rail service has declined in recent months. It is difficult to determine how long it takes for riders to react, or by how much, but rail reliability began to decrease for customers around the time of the Silver Line launch, turning down particularly since May 2015. In the last twelve months, all of the following have been increasing for morning commuters, based on tap-in to tap-out times for representative commutes:

Median travel times
The unpredictability of travel times, or the “normal range” (measured by the
standard deviation); and
The frequency of severe delays (measured by the 95th percentile travel time)

Taken together, this means that riders have been forced to budget more travel time to avoid being late. This trend likely is one contributing factor to the current decline in rail ridership.