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[quote user="MidlandMike"] [quote user="Sam1"] In FY12 DART operated 85 miles of light rail and served 61 stations.  The average weekday passenger trips was 48,136 persons - assumes that most of the passengers were round trippers - or an average of 566 persons per system mileage. When the system opened in 1996 it operated 11 miles of light rail - I rode the first public train on opening day, and carried an average of 2,692 persons per day or 244 persons per system mileeage. By 2005, when the system was roughly half built out, it operated 45 miles of light rail and carried an average of 33,615 persons per day or 747 persons per system mileage.   From its beginning through 2012 DART's light rail system mileage has grown by 672 per cent.  From the opening day until 2005 system mileage grew by approximately 309 per cent. The growth in persons per mileage, however, has not been so dramatic.  From opening day until 2012 the growth in person miles was 132 per cent, which is less than the percentage increase in system mileage.  From opening day until 2005, the growth in person miles was 206 per cent. Irrespective of the build out of the system, the average number of persons carried per system mileage by the light rail system actually declined from 2005 (747) to 2012 (566).  As noted in several articles in the Dallas Morning News, as well as other sources, DART's light rail ridership has not increased significantly over the last couple of years.  How to grow the ridership is a DART challenge. <div style="clear:both;"></div> [/quote] I'm not sure what your statistic of "person miles" tells us.  If the milage of a system doubles, and even though the number of passengers doubles, your "person miles" growth would be zero.  If a line doubles in length, and people are traveling longer distances to a central city, then the the more standard statistic of passenger-miles would increase, giving a truer indication of the growing utility of the system.  Does DART report passenger-miles data? [/quote] No!  I used person miles to show the number of miles traveled by a person, which is approximately half the number of passenger miles, because most people who ride DART are round trippers.  Thus, if DART reports the average weekly passengers using the light rail system as 90,000, for the most part it means that 45,000 people rode the train that day.  Most people, although not all of them, get on the train in the  morning, ride to work, and then return home in the evening. That is one person making two passenger trips. Just looking as passenger trips overstates the number of people who use the system. The same issue, by-the-way, applies to all  common carriers, i.e. airlines, buses, Amtrak, etc. Amtrak reports number of passenger trips and calculates passenger miles.  In fact, however, number of passengers (passenger trips) does not translate into number of customers (persons). Last year I took 14 passenger trips on Amtrak, mostly from my home near Austin to Dallas and/or San Antonio. I was one customer who took 14 passenger trips.  The key point, with respect to DART's light rail system, is that the percentage increase in system mileage has been greater than the percent increase in person (passenger, customer) miles, suggesting that the system is not as efficient as appears on the surface.  If you ride the system, as I have, you can see why. Beyond Richardson and Garland, for example, the ridership drops off significantly, suggesting that those extensions are under utilized.  Whether they will be better utilized in the future is another issue. Too often people throw out a statistic without putting any meat on it or putting it into context.  Just  highlighting ridership increases without placing it in context tells me, at least, very little in the way of helpful information.   As noted in an earlier post, DART has spent more than $5 billion on the light rail system.  Each ride requires a subsidy of approximately $3.82.  And less than 3 per cent of the service city populations use it.  Was it worth it?  Or if we could do it over again, would opting for light rail have been the best option?  I don't know.  Besides, it is water under the bridge, so the arguments are moot.
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