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
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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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Also, BART tried increasing train frequency at the N. Concord BART station to boost ridership. It didn’t work. So these aren’t iron laws.
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Do you have any links or documents which go over this? Very interested to see what happened.
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No, sorry.
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Population density OUTSIDE of walking range is useless for rail ridership. But within 1/2 mile is very useful
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Frequency is also obvious if you compare PATCO or SEPTA Rt. 100 to adjacent SEPTA regional rail commuter lines.
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That's because no matter where the line is going, the majority of people won't work there, so adding more close by people wouldn't tend to increase ridership much.
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