Good afternoon, hope you're enjoying lunch, gentle reminder that *no factor has a greater impact on transit ridership than frequency* Let's look at two investigations of ridership generation, both conducted by Fehr & Peers, looking at BART/Caltrain & Sacramento LRT, respectively
- Population + Employment within 0.5 miles of station - Population within "station catchment area" - Frequency of feeder buses - Number of parking spaces - Frequency of trains Suppose any one of these factors for a particular station saw a 100% increase, eg double the parking...
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...how much would ridership change, given the importance of that factor for ridership today? The results: - Double population w/in catchment area = 2% ridership boost - Double parking spaces = 4% boost - Double pop+emp w/in 0.5mi = 23% boost - Double feeder bus freq = 29% boost
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and finally, far and away the biggest impact: - Double train frequency = 48% boost in ridership! Now, there's something else very important here: notice that local population density is the LEAST significant factor! Even adding parking does more...
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...however, while population density is not a major contributor, you will notice that EMPLOYMENT density has a substantial effect...or at least, it does when it's increased alongside population density. I suspect that its effect works in isolation too...
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...ie, that if you increase employment density without changing residential density, you will see a significant change in ridership. This isn't just about people going to work, by the way--rather, I suspect it has to do with *customers* more than employees.
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Think about it: if you added up all the people who enter and leave, say, a shopping mall in the course of 24 hours, what % of those people are employees, and what % are customers? Which group has greater variety in trip timing? Which has more flexibility in trip demand? Etc...
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But enough conjecture about why employment has a bigger impact than population...let's look at Sacramento results. This time, F&P were only able to create a formula accounting for 75% of ridership variation, based on: - pop w/in 0.5mi - emp w/in 0.25mi - parking - feeder buses
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- Double parking = 11% boost in ridership - Double employment w/in 0.25mi = 21% boost - Double population w/in 0.5mi = 30% boost - Double feeder bus frequency = 47% boost I wonder what the employment impact would be for 0.5 mile radius? Regardless, freq once again tops the chart
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Worth mentioning here is that these studies investigated *peak period* frequencies only. Would be interesting to see research which looks at average daily frequency (total trips/span of service), but I suppose that's for another day.
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You can read the summaries here--I deliberately skipped the SLC study because there is no clarification of what is meant by "transit accessibility," which makes it hard to draw a lesson from: http://www.fehrandpeers.com/docs/0805DirectRidershipForecastingWeb.pdf …
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Remember: increasing frequency increases the total POSSIBLE trips that can be made--in a busy system, it follows the principle of induced demand, and encourages many trips that otherwise wouldn't be made! This is freedom for the riders
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