Bucking the national trend, Washington has managed to increase transit ridership by 90 percent in the first quarter of 2019 compared with the same quarter of 2018. It accomplished this by the simple expedient of offering the rides for free. Did I mention that this is Washington, Indiana?
Still, 90 percent sounds huge — but don’t get excited. For Washington, Indiana, increasing ridership by 90 percent meant going from 37 riders per day to 70. The city of Washington had about 12,000 residents in 2017 and Washington transit carried 10,353 rides — less than one per resident. Increasing ridership by 90 percent won’t even bring it up to two.
By offering free rides, “The city may be losing 75 cents per ride [which was the previous transit fare], but people will spend even more than that at area businesses,” claimed transit consultant Chuck Martindale. “It is something that is beneficial to the entire community.” Martindale offered no evidence that people getting free rides were spending more at area businesses before they got free rides, and he neglected to mention that, before offering free rides, Washington was losing nearly $10 per ride anyway.
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Given numbers like that, the city of Washington should contemplate the Targhee Regional Public Transit Authority’s response to low ridership in Idaho Falls, Idaho: even though it has been carrying far more riders than Washington transit, it completely shut down yesterday. Targhee carried almost 200,000 riders in 2012 but only 76,000 in 2017. It did charge fares, but collected an average of just 38 cents per bus trip against $18.62 in operating costs per trip in 2017.
In its shut-down notice, Targhee didn’t blame declining ridership but instead said it could “no longer incur cost without local match and other revenues including federal share.” I suspect this refers to the fact that federal funds are partly based on ridership, so declining ridership means less subsidy. In any case, it is nice to know that, unless some politician reverses the decision by throwing more money at the agency, some sanity prevails in at least one part of the United States.
They could give people 10,353 $10 Uber coupons every year and still come out ahead as they won’t have pensions , maintenance, replacement of buses etc to worry about.
Uber people will make more money and getting a ride directly to where you want to go should really help businesses, rather than dropping people off where a transit administrator decreed they must go.
I don’t understand the intuition here. Is he suggesting that by not having to pay a nominal fare of 75 cents per trip the riders will have an additional 75 cents to spend elsewhere? If so, where does he believe the extra 75 cents (to cover the revenue loss) will come from in the first place?