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Transit Ridership Statistics & Tracking

44 North said:
I appreciate the visualization by way of different sizes circles for varying ridership. But something seems up with it. I see larger circles with ridership lower than other circles. Also didn't realize Barrie's daily avg was that low. Still wonder if it was a worthy recipient of electrification+RER compared with spreading that money to other unfunded GO projects.
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The numbers only count boardings at stations, and no longer include child riders. You can pretty much take that number and double it and it would pretty accurately represent the real ridership numbers. It doesn't really work like this for all lines, especially the Kitchener Line, where students make up a significant portion of riders (<1%, but it's still significant enough when comparing it to other lines). Since students tend to use GO to get home for the weekends and vice versa, their rides shouldn't be doubled. There's also the fact that there are fewer children that generally ride the Kitchener Line, and the fact that many commuters on this line get off at places other than union (Guelph, Brampton, Bramalea, Weston (for the airport), Bloor (for the subway)).

If we're not going to include children at all but assume that all users make a roundtrip, then you're better multiplying the "daily ridership" of the line by 1.75 to get a more accurate representation of the line's ridership.
Justification:
If we sum up all the daily riderships of every line except the UPX, we have a total of 106,500 boardings across the entire system excluding Union Station and the UPX stations. Since Union's ridership is about 75400 passengers per day, we can say that 3/4 of the riders make a roundtrip to union station, and therefore, 3/4 of the actual rides on the respective lines are not counted for the outbound trip. Adding 3/4 to 1 gives you 1.75.

This isn't truly accurate either though, as it doesn't accurately represent the lakeshore lines and undersells the Milton line as well.
raptor said:
It just occurred to me that the latest ridership numbers include the Raptors parade. It's thus impossible to objectively pass judgement on them.
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Over the course of 3 months, even an extra 3 days worth of ridership (which it most certainly was not) will only equate to about a 3% increase over the ridership from last year. Go transit ridership grew by about 5% so the ridership of the network is still most certainly growing.
 
drum118 said:
Electrification of lines will benefit the line over time. Because of the cost to makeup and breakdown a train to meet ridership for x time and place, GO must use long trains that are mostly 12 cars long today.

If and when real EMU trains arrive, you can run trains in various size to meet the ridership demand. To meet increase ridership on higher section of the line, you can either run one type of service for it and another for the other section using different train size. Joining 2 EMU requires a lot less time and even short when breaking it apart.

As an example, you could run say a 3 car train connected to a 5 and 6 car train, with the the 3 car being cut off at X point to carry on to Barrie. The other 2 car train would return to Union and then back to X point where it would pickup that 3 car train if the connection time line up with it or another one. Another way is to have smaller trains that will meet ridership between Union and X point and run every 1 to 4th train to/from Barrie with a train layover at X point to fill the gap of that train to Barrie as well giving the crew a break.

Have seen train split apart in Europe where one short train go to Z while the other goes to P and join up on the return trip.

Quality of service will drive the demand for service. Even though hourly service is not great, it better than nothing, but there is a need to get it under 60 minutes to get people to use it. There is nothing stopping to having more service in the 15 minute window, but it has to be another type of service like mid to long station express. It goes back to my comments in 2007 when asked about adding more station on X line as well between existing ones.

As for circle showing less riders than they supposed to be, someone not on the ball to trying to skew things wrongly..
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Definitely agree on all counts. Electrification is the way to go. That being said do wonder if specifically for Stouff and Barrie we could achieve close to similar results using DMUs and a bit lower off peak frequency, and use the savings to build more lines/expansions. People driving so far to reach stations that are so full, maybe the alternative could be to offer more services closer to them. With new lines, not more GO buses.

rbt said:
The circle size represents the change in ridership.
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Oh boy maybe my Q-tip went too and I broke my brain. Not sure missed that lol. It's even written right in the legend.
 
WislaHD said:
I really wish Metrolinx found a different format for displaying numbers.
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Agreed.

I've also come to dislike how the bubbles cover falling ridership. Hamilton region looks really strong on the map, but actual numbers for the region (Hamilton, West Harbour, Aldershot, Burlington) is down about 100 daily riders.
 
Some of you will be interested to know this :

www.journaldemontreal.com

Des millions de clients calculés en trop dans les bus et le métro

La nouvelle méthode de calcul, plus précise, montre des disparités importantes.
www.journaldemontreal.com www.journaldemontreal.com

Historical ridership calculations in Canada had cooked numbers, they changed the formula in Québec but there are fears of losing money if other provinces don't do the same.
 
For the Stouffville Line, it's interesting that if you don't count Danforth (most of those trips are LSE and its ridership not broken down by line), the stops north of Unionville (and future 15-minute service) are now 51% of ridership and growing.
 
What's the weekend Stouffville ridership been like? Let's hear some anecdotal observations.
 
Neutrino said:
What's the weekend Stouffville ridership been like? Let's hear some anecdotal observations.
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I took it this past Saturday around lunch time - northbound was quiet, maybe 50 passengers on at Union. On the southbound trip, there were probably 30 or so of us getting on at Markham Station, with another couple of dozen at each of Unionville and Milliken stations, and smaller numbers getting on at Centennial and Agincourt. About 10 others got off at Kennedy with me.

Dan
 
^Thanks for that. Was it a 12 car coach?
 
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