Going over some (now slightly outdated) ridership data for our buses...these are average weekday boards during the school year (based on ridership from Feb/Mar and Sep 2017) Systemwide: 43,129 Busiest route (free): 5,179 Busiest route (w/fare): 3,767
Routes with below 200 daily boards amount to less than half of a percent of total system ridership--there were 8 routes in that category in fall 2017 Routes with 200~650 daily boards fall between 0.5 and 1.5 of total rideship each--there were 14 routes in that category
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What can you take away from this? There are several corridors in Western MA where bus transit--for all its limitations--is clearly viable. Free trips on certain routes skew this effect, but it shows up even on paid routes (4 of the 6 busiest routes charge fares)
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On the other hand, a lot of routes clearly aren't useful to many people--some might be redeemable with better frequency or restructuring, others won't. Sorting these routes out will free up resources that could be poured back into the effective routes for a net gain in riders.
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Solving the revenue problem will mean increasing the % of revenue that comes from fares rather than from state, federal, and local allocations--to do this, we need more riders *and* higher fares per rider. Neither is possible until the busiest routes are also the best to ride!
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