METRO+DART Ridership Update: summer slump and Beryl erase spring gains
This week we have another great analytical guest post from Oscar Slotboom. Dallas DART's extensive and expensive light rail strategy is looking more and more like a total failure as suburban cities try to reduce their tax subsidy to DART.
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When I last reported on Metro ridership in April, ridership had reached a post-Covid high in February, down only 14.7% from the 12-month pre-Covid average. An upward bump in April pushed ridership to another post-Covid high at only 13.5% below the pre-Covid level. Summer months are usually low ridership months, and Hurricane Beryl caused Metro service outages during the week of July 9-12. July ridership was 22.3% below the pre-Covid average. However, in spite of the substantial service outages due to Beryl, July ridership was only slightly lower than June. So we can probably expect a strong rebound, especially since September and October are normally the highest ridership months.
In Dallas, June ridership (page 55) was 23% below the pre-Covid baseline. As the plot shows, ridership has been flat in the last 9 months, appearing to end the four-year trend of slow recovery. It's interesting to note that the image shown below mentions that on-demand services are included in the ridership data, but a version of this plot presented one month earlier (page 4) without any mention of on-demand services showed ridership down 28%.
Multiple member cities of DART, including Plano, are attempting to reduce their tax subsidies to DART.
Nationally, public transit ridership is down 25% compared to pre-Covid levels and appears to be holding steady with little or no upward trend. Of course, there are wide variations in performance by city and Houston is above average.
Plot credit: the Antiplanner
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