A few weeks back ST released their corrected February 2013 ridership report (an Excel error threw off Sounder numbers in the earlier version) and once again the system had healthy year-on-year gains for most services.

February’s Central Link Weekday/Saturday/Sunday boardings were 25,370/18,015/12,934, increases of 14.4%, 21.0%, and 12.2% respectively over February 2012. Sounder’s weekday boardings were up 8.7% (21% North, 9% South)*, but Tacoma Link continued it’s downward trend, – 2.3% weekdays (although part of this is due to running Sunday service on President’s Day). ST Express Ridership increased 7.5% (part of this is counting tunnel trips). Overall weekday system ridership was up a very healthy 9.0%.

The report for March would normally be released around this time, but due to the cancellation of this month’s Operations Committee meeting the numbers will be rolled into the 1st Quarterly Report due out at the end of the month. Bruce Gray was kind enough to provide us with their March Link ridership estimates which show continuing strong growth: 26,485 Weekday, 20,771 Saturday, and 14,603 Sunday riders. Weekday ridership in March was up 13% from last year. Ten out of the last 12 months have had higher than 10% year over year growth.



My charts below the fold.

*Yes, I realize the numbers don’t seem to make sense, but Bruce Gray explained:

Keep in mind that we arrive at average weekday ridership based on days we actually ran. If we have a bunch of mudslides, that can impact the weekday average because we’ll have a smaller window of days to arrive at that average. So if you have the combination of many lost days to slides and strong ridership on the days there are not slides – you can end up with a boosted weekday average. And the south line made up 88.5% of the Sounder total for February. To further complicate things, 2012 was a leap year so there were more weekdays last year than this year.

In other words, when a mudslide cancels service, it lowers the overall weekday ridership average but doesn’t lower the average of either line. Therefore, North and South line averages don’t add up to the overall Sounder average.