Reader Inquiry: Ridership on AC Transit’s Transbay O Route

Posted by Eric ⋅ 23 February 2008 ⋅ 3 Comments

Reader Inquiry: Ridership on AC Transit’s Transbay O Route. I noticed that someone has hit this site a few times, searching for ridership information on AC Transit’s O route, which is the transbay route that largely runs on the Alameda portion of the 51/851 route. This is a question that before now has remained unanswered on this site, but I figured that I might as well answer it, since someone appears to be interested: in 2007, daily ridership on the O was estimated to be 1,343. The top-two performing AC Transit routes were the 1/1R (at 21,554 daily passengers) and the 51 (at 18,747 passengers). 72/72R/72M clocked in at 15,019 daily passengers. Interested in the 2007 ridership estimates for other AC Transit lines? Check out the last few pages of this PDF.

Discussion

3 thoughts on “Reader Inquiry: Ridership on AC Transit’s Transbay O Route”

Looking at the AC Transit website, patronage is put at either 217,000 or 227,000 daily boardings. When I add up the numbers in the General Manager report you reference, I get a bit less than 180,000 per day, allowing for the Transbay peak services not reported in the agenda item. They also state about 60,000 rides per day by school children, but total tripper boardings were only 6,200 per day according to the GM report; obviously most of these are on regular routes.

Do you know what gives with these differing numbers? If the GM report numbers are correct, AC Transit patronage has plummetted dramatically from its peak in the 1970’s ånd 1980’s.

Posted by Michael D. Setty | 24 February 2008, 4:40 pm
Michael: data crunching. AC Transit’s per-route figures are based on automatic passenger counts, which include some educated “massaging” since many buses aren’t equipped to count. The 227K figure is quoted from the FTA (see the 2006 NTD profile for AC Transit) and projects total daily ridership on the basis of some unlinked trip data samples. As I understand it, it seems to boil down to different methods of making up for the fact that not every single unlinked trip is being counted.

Posted by Eric | 24 February 2008, 9:05 pm
and NOONE uses the farebox counts even though in theory each boarding passenger is tallied by fare collected. As well AC does not physically count the BART generated discount coupons–they go straight into the trash– yet they reimburse BART on some numeric basis. The mantra is Translink will cure this although readers are down more often than fareboxes in my experience.

Posted by david vartanoff | 25 February 2008, 12:54 pm