Orange Line Popularity Surging

According to the Daily News, the Orange Line is reaching capacity due to it’s surging popularity as of late. The article states that ridership in May was 22,000 per day, surpassing the expected 5,000 to 7,000 per day initially forecasted by MTA, and exceeding the ridership of the nearly three year old Gold Line light rail. Rising gas prices are cited as a major reason for the stunning increase in ridership. Read the entire article here.

Having ridden the Orange Line for the first time last weekend (I took it from North Hollywood to Warner Center and back), I am a bit curious as to how the MTA gets its ridership numbers for the “bus that acts like a train”.

The article states, “Like most transit agencies, the MTA counts every time a passenger boards the line, regardless of whether it is for a one-way or round trip.” From my experience that is something of a bald faced lie in regards to the Orange Line. The Orange Line uses Rapid style articulated buses, but unlike rapid buses, tickets are bought at the station, much like a train. The problem is, like the trains, the Orange Line then succumbs to the honor system, where passengers load on with the assumption that they have already purchased a ticket. Furthermore, passengers can board on the rear half of the articulated bus where it is impossible for a driver to make any sort of count (which I’m pretty sure they aren’t doing anyways). It seems to me that passengers just board and leave without any sort of official tally being taken, so I’m quite skeptical of the ridership numbers. It seems a bit like propaganda without any insight into where exactly they get those numbers from.

One could claim that they get the numbers from ticket sales at the stations, but that seems unlikely as well because when I rode last weekend, I had purchased a Day Pass from the Red Line station at Hollywood/Western, so obviously that ticket purchase could not have been counted as a Orange Line ride. I’m sure many people board the Orange Line with Day Passes or Monthly Metro Passes, which would tell me that if they were counting ticket sales and reached the near capacity number of 22,000 by that tally, there would be many other riders (probably beyond “capacity”) who had tickets from venues that could not be counted as Orange Line sales. Until MTA offers us up a clear and concise method for measuring Orange Line ridership, I would take the ridership numbers presented with a grain of salt. The MetroMole has more on this on his May 13th, 2006 post.

However, assuming the numbers MTA has given are in fact true, it brings up another issue: the capacity of a bus way. From the Daily News article:

“The concern I have is that we are now rapidly approaching the engineered capacity of the line. We didn’t expect to be near this ridership,” said Kymberleigh Richards, a transit activist who chairs the MTA’s San Fernando Valley governance council. “We are going to have to look at increasing capacity. There is a limit to how much capacity a bus-based system can have.”

This to me brings up the basic problem of building a bus way vs. a light rail. Sure, up front the bus way is cheaper, but if ridership booms (which I assume is the goal), it quickly becomes ineffecient. The problem with a bus way is that it’s not future proof, it ignores the potential and problems of success and thus dooms itself from the start. This seems to be a recurring theme with a lot of transit initiatives in LA. Money ends up getting spent on something that will soon need to be replaced, think of those crappy ticket machines the rail system had. Spending a bit more upfront on something that will last will most surely head a greater cost savings in the future. MTA needs to start future proofing all of it’s initiatives if it wishes to make a public transit system that will work now and 100 years from now.