And Now the Reason Foundation Is Completely Wrong About Expo

I wonder what it is about the Expo Line that makes conservative muckrakers lose their collective minds?

Earlier this week, Fox and Hounds published an op/ed by Los Angeles Business Journal Editor Charles Crumpley’s attack on the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by telling an imaginary story about job loss because of a CEQA lawsuit against Phase II of the Expo Line. There was no job loss as a result of the lawsuit.

But that’s not the biggest whopper that’s been told about Expo. Last year, the Reason Foundation, an oil industry funded think tank that pretends to espouse Libertarian principles, declared the Expo Line a failure after sending two people to ride Phase I of the light rail line on its opening week and complaining that it wasn’t meeting its ridership projections for 2020. The line averaged 11,000 weekday boardings. Expo’s 2020 projections was 27,000.

After just about anyone that has ever examined a transit project laughed at Reason’s surreally lame attempt to examine ridership; the Foundation fired back a couple of weeks later with a whiny post that Expo still wasn’t meeting its 2020 ridership projections in its second month.

If major politicians and news outlets didn’t treat the Reason Foundation’s findings as though they were fact, we could all just laugh at them and walk away. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Fortunately, it’s really easy to show the Reason Foundation is completely and utterly inept when it comes to examining transit projects.

Yesterday, Metro announced that the Expo Line averaged 27,280 boardings every weekday, meeting its 2020 ridership projections a mere seven years ahead of schedule.

This is hardly news for anyone that’s ever read a Reason transit analysis. As Streetsblog.net’s Angie Schmitt noted last year, Reason Foundation reports on rail are predictable, they all say the same thing. “Ridership will be lower than expected; costs will be higher.”

Now it’s completely understandable that maybe Reason made a mistake and didn’t realize the 2020 ridership projections were in fact for 2020; but after they were informed that many many times after their first attempt they stuck to their guns. Now the line has made those estimates seven years early.

Reason owes either an apology or an explanation. Anyone want to take a bet on whether or not one is coming?