TFC
Active Member
The mega circle is actually for Dixie GO, not Cooksville. It took me a while to catch that.
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Transit Ridership Statistics & Tracking
- Thread starter Midtown Urbanist
- Start date
steveintoronto
Superstar
Glad it wasn't just me! The metrics used/stated are far from linear. It's frustrating, as we've been presented with some intriguing figures to study, but we need a 'legend' to do it with.
Hopefully Munro will post a deep analysis on his blog.
crs1026
Superstar
The growth at so many 416 GO stations makes me wonder whether the transfer/fare policy made a difference....or perhaps it’s evidence that (poor) TTC service quality is driving some who can afford it to pay the higher fare instead of bus or subway.
I know that on occasion I have grabbed the GO to Bloor and/or Kipling, rather than face the subway at peak periods. Sometimes the five bucks is worth it.
- Paul
I know that on occasion I have grabbed the GO to Bloor and/or Kipling, rather than face the subway at peak periods. Sometimes the five bucks is worth it.
- Paul
steveintoronto
Superstar
Considering the difference in cost is less than a cup of coffee, it's worth it even outside of peak, albeit Kipling is eliminated at this time for all-day service. I live equidistant from Bloor Station and Dundas West. Unless I have need to get off somewhere in the upper core, to get downtown, it's UPX for me, and a return trip within three hours levels the fare difference too.
Allandale25
Senior Member
reaperexpress
Senior Member
Indeed, it's nice that they're giving us some statistics, but the lack of supporting documentation means that it raises just as many questions as it provides answers.
First of all, the total ridership displayed is not annual, it's "Fiscal YTD April-November 2018", so it would need to be scaled up to be comparable to annual statistics everyone else publishes. And that's assuming there isn't pattern in ridership over the course of the year. For example, if the April-November period tends to be a relatively busy time, scaling up to the rest of the year would overestimate the total annual ridership.
- The fiscal year starts April 1, but does the data include the month of November or not? (i.e. is it until Nov. 1 or Nov 30?)
- Is the daily ridership a weekday ridership or just the total ridership divided by the total number of days? Dividing the total ridership by daily ridership doesn't yield a consistent ratio so it must be weekday ridership, in which case the ridership for St. Catharines and Niagara Falls stations is only based on less than 1 train trip per week (toward Niagara Falls on Friday evenings during summer months or holiday long-weekends), which can't help their average dailies.
- Does the station ridership include train-buses? The previous numbers I was using (from 2014) included train-buses, but I'm not sure these do.
Then there's the odd data - as you mentioned the Union Station ridership is bizarre. Previous statistics have stated that some huge percentage of trips arrive or depart Union (>90% if I remember correctly), which would mean the Union Station ridership should be 30+M given the total train ridership they provided. Am I supposed to believe that Union's ridership (18.4M) is comparable to Clarkson's (12M)?
Unfortunately the blog doesn't seem to have an option to post a comment where I could ask these questions.
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nfitz
Superstar
These new GO Service ridership numbers was already being discussed in the GO Service thread.
Midtown Urbanist
Superstar
Clarkson's is almost definitively a typo. It should be 1.2M.
There are other typos in the document. It certainly appears that this graphic was not proof-read.
Neutrino
Senior Member
I almost wish they wouldn't release data at all than tease us with such crap.
reaperexpress
Senior Member
Oh my god, they just took the total Year-To-Date ridership and divided by the number of days that train service operated*. So for every-day stations they divided by 244 and weekday-only stations by 175. Which makes the daily ridership totally invalid to compare between stations, because some stations are weekday figures while others are average daily (including weekends). I feel like screaming.
*Except St. Catharines where they assumed there was service 5 days/week but service was actually only Friday-Sunday (3 days).
*Except St. Catharines where they assumed there was service 5 days/week but service was actually only Friday-Sunday (3 days).
Leo_Chan
Senior Member
I know this idea is quite far fetched, but I'll suggest it here anyways. If Presto ridership data gets good enough and they can extract the statistics efficiently, would it be possible to have daily updates of Presto ridership on all routes of all the transit agencies? This would kind of be like stocks where you have a percentage or point increase/decrease every day. This would then be published to the Presto website with a adequate user interface for people to check the details of transit ridership. There's probably some privacy issues that may arise if they was to be implemented, but it's still a cool idea right?
reaperexpress
Senior Member
From what I can tell, the only valid data is the year-to-date ridership (typos notwithstanding). So without further ado, here is the ranking of stations by ridership:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CcoA1sQv-g-znZNA_dlaJ1_HbZcOEtbo_f4T1c261Oc/edit?usp=sharing
Screenshot of top 20:
Given the revelation that they are using 244 days of data, I also scaled the data to 365 days for the 'annual' column in case anyone wants to do a rough comparison to some annual statistics.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CcoA1sQv-g-znZNA_dlaJ1_HbZcOEtbo_f4T1c261Oc/edit?usp=sharing
Screenshot of top 20:
Given the revelation that they are using 244 days of data, I also scaled the data to 365 days for the 'annual' column in case anyone wants to do a rough comparison to some annual statistics.
reaperexpress
Senior Member
It's not far fetched at all. For a while Metrolinx was publishing ridership data for UP Express down to the level of individual days (with daily updates I believe), but I can't seem to find it anymore. There's no privacy issue if all you're doing is publishing totals. The privacy issues start to arise when you provide origin-destination pairs that can be broken down to an individual user, like when Hamilton Bike Share published their GPS traces and you could see individual bikes going to and from individual houses.
crs1026
Superstar
In general, I agree that ML ought to be putting more frequent and granular data out in the public domain.
One problem is that Presto data is not the complete daily count - there are paper fares that have to be added in.
My transit contacts tell me that they do a lot of back room work before they view data as valid for discussion and analysis.....eg seasonal variations have to be tracked, and raw data is validated by manual counts and comparison to other transactional data sources. This idea that Presto is a mature and user-ready fountain of mineable data, just begging to be tapped, is an overexaggeration that is mostly offered by IT vendors and internal empire builders.
I’m not disputing that mining Presto is a good tool, but good data takes preparation. It’s a question of how much time and effort and money we want transit operators spending on producing this data for our pleasure. Personally, quarterly counts are about as granular as I care about.
- Paul
reaperexpress
Senior Member
Well they gave us the April-November 2018 data with the percentage change from April-November 2017, so technically we have two years of data now, since we can reverse-engineer the 2017 chart. But you're definitely right that it would be much more intuitive to read if they used the size of the dot to represent ridership and the colour to represent growth.
Actually the data is from a period of 244 days, which provides a daily ridership of 3504 including weekends.
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