Boosting Ridership by Replacing Buses With Rail

When rail goes in, ridership goes up. At least, that's what's happened in Los Angeles, where the county's transportation authority, Metro, has gone on a more than two-decade binge of light rail and subway development. A new analysis of transit ridership before and after the four lines opened shows that overall ridership has dramatically increased with rail in the picture.

Scott Page, a planner with Metro, has analyzed ridership stats and documents to see how transit use patterns changed along corridors formerly reliant solely on buses but now augmented with rail lines. By comparing average ridership before and after the rail options were in place, Page shows that adding rail service has grown ridership on these corridors anywhere from 95 percent to nearly 350 percent. His results and data have since been published on Metro's blog The Source. Below is a breakdown of those figures, using average weekday boardings counted during specific ridership survey periods to compare pre- and post-rail ridership: