SMART recorded its highest December and January ridership counts yet, saying the increases could be from recent schedule changes, promotions and new stations in Larkspur and downtown Novato.

“Our intuition, but hopefully reality, is that the Larkspur station will be a game-changer for the system,” Damon Connolly, a SMART board member and Marin County supervisor, said after hearing the report at the board’s Wednesday meeting. Connolly called for increased tracking of the number of riders getting on and off at Larkspur in the future.

These latest numbers come at a time when SMART is seeking to gain Marin and Sonoma voters’ support for its 30-year sales tax extension ballot measure, Measure I, in the March 3 primary. Ridership has been a point of criticism leveled against SMART by the tax opponents who say taxpayers are paying a high subsidy of $100 per passenger for each round trip.

SMART began releasing daily ridership data at the start of the year, despite earlier requests by the public to do so and plan to release updated data monthly. Wednesday’s meeting was the first of such reports.

The newly released data show 58,199 passengers were counted in December and 71,974 riders in January, the highest counts for those months since SMART began passenger service in 2017. The other December counts were 56,425 passengers in 2017 and 51,670 passengers in 2018. Trains in January 2018 carried a total of 56,527 passengers and carried 57,136 riders that month in 2019.

Average weekday ridership in January was also the highest for that month at 2,847 riders, a 24% increase from January 2019, which had 2,289 riders. In January 2018, the district recorded about 2,100 average weekday riders, according to SMART’s ridership data.

Last month, board members predicted that the opening of the Larkspur and downtown Novato stations on Dec. 14 would draw more riders.

“For those cranky people out there, I think that’s good to hear and obviously is going to be shared,” SMART board member Patty Garbarino said of the January numbers. “And for that, I’m sure they’ll move on to another cranky topic.”

January included several changes that could have affected the ridership numbers, SMART’s programming and grants manager Joanne Parker said, though there is no definitive evidence as of now to tie the increase to any one of them.

The changes included it being the first full month of passenger service to the Larkspur station, which is located near a major transit hub at the Larkspur ferry terminal. The downtown Novato station also opened to full daily service that month. In addition, SMART increased its total daily weekday trips from 34 to 38 trips and reduced wait times to a maximum of 32 minutes between trains where before waits could be as long as 90 minutes. Earlier weekend and holiday train trips were also added.

SMART also implemented two new fare promotions, a weekender pass through February and the sail-and-rail pass for the first six months of 2020. January was also the first month where SMART’s bike lockers could take Clipper cards as a form of payment.

“Any one of those would have a major change in your system potentially,” Parker said. “We’re going to have a really hard time figuring out what’s going on in the system and tying it back to any one of these seven things.”

About 12,600 unique riders paid to ride on SMART in December and 13,711 people in January, Parker said. The January paid fare rider count is the third highest monthly count so far, behind September 2017 and July 2018, she said.

In addition, four of the five top days of paid fare riders using the train were in January, with Jan. 30 having the highest number ever at 2,822. Parker said this last data point is promising as it shows the ridership bump is likely not people using the weekender pass promotion, which allows riders transferring from a Golden Gate Ferry to SMART or vice versa to only pay one of the two fares.

“A higher number of riders are paying than ever before,” Parker said.

Parker also presented new ridership data that board members requested last month. including how full trains were during different times of the day. The data were collected through counts by train crews who manually counted how many riders were on the trains by the time they got to the final station in either direction — Larkspur for southbound and the Sonoma County airport for northbound, according to Farhad Mansourian, SMART’s general manager.

Overall, the data for Jan. 9 showed that the morning weekday southbound commute trains between 6:06 a.m. to 7:42 a.m. and the northbound evening commutes between 2:21 p.m. and 5:01 p.m. were at at least 75% capacity of the two-car, 158-seat trains. Similar trends were found during a similar count on Jan. 29, but Parker noted there was also a train at higher capacity for the northbound commute at 6:38 a.m.

Only anecdotal evidence was available for where people were entering and exiting the trains, Parker said. Manual counts for this type of data is not feasible at this time, Mansourian said, as SMART has an open ticketing system that does not track what stations passengers enter or exit on. Parker said SMART’s mobile app ticketing system and Clipper user data could potentially provide insight into where riders are getting on and off.

San Rafael Mayor Gary Phillips, a board member, asked whether three-car trains in the morning affected the capacity percentages. Mansourian said when SMART began its new service schedule in January, the increased number of trips required the agency to switch to running only two-car trains rather than the three-car trains based on their fleet size. Part of the reason is some train cars need to be held in reserve should something occur, Mansourian said.

While one month of data is not enough to draw any conclusions, continued data collection could help inform future decisions such marketing for weekend trips, informing potential service cuts if fiscal reductions are required or adding more capacity where possible, Mansourian said.

“For now, for 2020, we need to establish a trend and a pattern before we can start really using some of these figures for our advantage and not rushing to, ‘Yes, this is is good’ or ‘No, this is not good,'” Mansourian said. “One month will not be able to tell us.”