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If
we turn to the past, say to the height of the streetcar era in
the 1920s, we see that transit played an enormous role in the
life of American cities. Not even the most ardent transit opponent
questions that historical fact. But even then, transit was not
used for all types of trips.
Before
the automobile age, the great competitor of transit was walking.
This goes back to the very beginnings of public transit:
When
most people lived within a few miles of their jobs, shopping,
and recreational sites during the horsecar days, a considerable
diversion from transit riding could be found in walking trips,
fluctuating, of course, according to weather and season.30
In
the 1920s, walking was the primary mode for a very important type
of trip: shopping. In most residential areas, almost every street
had a small store, usually part of someone’s house, that
sold basic items such as bread, milk and tobacco. Also in walking
distance, usually on a major commercial street, were meat markets,
bakeries, drug stores, hardware stores, shops that met people’s
everyday needs. Only major shopping trips, such as "going
downtown" to a department store for clothing or furniture,
were made by transit.
In
addition, a great number of what are "trips" today were
then needs met by home delivery. Instead of going to the grocery
store, people phoned in an order and the groceries were delivered
to their house, often by a boy on a bicycle. Most homes had the
services of a milkman, bread man, ice man and "egg lady."
Farmers came around in wagons or trucks in the summer, selling
vegetables and fruits door-to-door. There were tens of thousands
of "drummers" on the roads, selling brushes – remember
the Fuller Brush Man? – vacuum cleaners, and a wide variety
of other household goods house-to-house. And, of course, when
you got sick, the doctor came to you, you didn’t go to the
doctor.
The
point is that these types of trips, especially most shopping trips,
were never transit competitive, not even in transit’s
heyday. Yet today, they make up the single largest category of
trips. A 1983 study found that 35.6% of total trips nationally
were for shopping, medical or dental visits or other errands.
In comparison, only 22.8% of total trips were work related, including
commuting.31 A regional study (of California) done
in 1980 put home-based shopping trips alone at 26.1%, again the
largest source of home-based trips. 86.4% of those trips were
done by automobile. Interestingly, the past still showed its hand:
the next most common mode for home-based shopping trips was walking,
at 8.3%. This study gave transit 3.7% of shopping trips.32
Other studies generally agree: the 1983 report cited previously
gave transit a 1.1% share of "Family and personal business,"
down slightly from 1.6% in 1977 (in 1983, 87.9% of such trips
were by car).33
Two
Chicago studies make it clear that when the trip purpose is shopping,
not even rail transit makes a difference – which again is
historically consistent, because in the 1920s, our baseline, most
public transit was by rail, on streetcars. The first Chicago study,
done in 1970, notes the rising importance of shopping: "Among
the nonwork trip purposes, shopping trips exhibited the greatest
change in relative importance between 1956 and 1970. In 1970,
trips with purpose to shop constituted 12.6 percent of all trips,
while in 1956 they amounted to only 5.5 percent of the total….
Accordingly, more shopping trips are being made, and many of the
shopping trips that were formerly accomplished by walking (which
would not be included in the survey) are being made by auto."34
The latter point is doubly significant: the shift of shopping
trips from walking to automobile was still underway in the 1950s
and 1960s, and surveys tended not to count such trips when made
on foot, thereby ignoring a large and important share of trips
now made by car that were not taken from public transit.
Of
the shopping trips made in 1970 in Chicago, 96.1% were made by
car, in a city with extensive rail transit. In fact, only .3%
were made by commuter (suburban) rail and .8% by rapid transit.
Bus actually did better, at 2.6%.35 The second study,
with data from 1994, confirms the general picture. Looking specifically
at CTA’s Orange Line, it found that only 2.2% of trips were
for shopping.36
The
point is conclusive: shopping and many other types of personal
trips are not transit competitive trips today, because they
never were. Their nature as non-transit competitive trips
goes far, given their high share of total trips, to explain the
magic 1% (or 2% or 5%) of total trips made on transit. Further,
if transit is today a "failure" for not carrying more
trips of this nature, then it was just as much a failure at its
peak in the 1920s – when everyone agrees it was a success!
What,
then, are transit competitive trip purposes? The most important
is trips to and from work, commuting trips. This, too, has a long
history, reaching all the way back to transit’s glory days.
A study of transit in Boston in 1930 states:
During
this time (1917-1927), the annual number of revenue passengers
remained more or less fixed…but the change in character of
riding is significant. The number of Sunday and holiday passengers
declined about 20 percent. This is to be accounted for by two
things –the automobile and the increasing prevalence of summer
vacation…. Since 1917…there has been an accentuation
of the peak hour of the day. This is but another example that
the railway service is becoming more and more a business service.37
The
trend toward commuting as transit’s main function has strengthened
with time and is evident in any transit operation in the nation,
sufficiently so that one example is enough. The 1994 study of
ridership on Chicago’s Orange Line found that 60.6% of the
riders were riding to or from work. The next largest category,
school trips, was a distant 13.6%.38
In
fact, the question should be put the other way: is commuting the
only type of trip that we may classify as transit competitive?
Our answer is no, and again it comes from history. When electric
railways – streetcars, interurbans, and that favorite New
England hybrid, the country trolley – first came on the scene
in the 1890s, one trip purpose they competed for with gusto and
success was entertainment trips. Many an amusement park began
as an enterprise of the local trolley or interurban line, which
rang up fares by the thousand as it hauled people from the sweltering
city to its roller coasters, ponds and picnic groves. "Trippers"
brought their own picnics and simply got off the car at a country
stop, found a pleasant meadow to lunch in and, not infrequently,
walked part of the way back along the line for a constitutional.
Streetcars hauled vast throngs to ball games and other public
entertainments: the local baseball team was not the "Brooklyn
Trolley Dodgers" for nothing. In fact, just taking an open-air
car out into the country on a warm summer evening was entertainment,
and many people rode for the sheer joy of it. Some companies had
"party trolleys" with Victrolas, and early in the century,
an enterprising pair of newlyweds made their honeymoon journey
from Delaware to Maine entirely by trolley car. They even wrote
a book about it!
Is
it fair to argue that today’s transit should be able to compete
in the entertainment market? Most transit professionals would
probably argue not. But we disagree. The same standard that leads
us to argue against expecting transit to carry many shoppers –
history – argues for measuring its ability in the recreation
market. And there is evidence that it can again compete here,
from the fast-growing popularity of "heritage" trolley
lines, which people ride both for transportation and for fun,
to the throngs carried to and from the Atlanta Olympics on MARTA,
25.3 million people in 17 days.39 In Washington, D.C.,
70% of all trips to the new MCI sports center are on transit.
Thus
we have our definition of transit competitive trips: availability
of transit X quality of transit X trip purpose (commuting to work
or entertainment). Does transit work? The answer depends on how
many transit competitive trips it carries. To see what that answer
is, let’s turn to three case studies.
Case
Studies
Our
three case studies are Chicago’s Metra commuter rail system
and the Light Rail systems in San Diego and St. Louis. We chose
them because, first, each represents high quality transit. They
are not merely rail systems, but well run rail systems. Each should
be able to compete effectively for transit competitive trips.
Second,
these systems represent the future. Virtually all new rail transit
systems in America will be either commuter rail or Light Rail.
At costs sometimes exceeding $100 million per mile, Heavy Rail
"metros" have essentially priced themselves out of the
game. The most recent attempt to build a Heavy Rail system from
scratch, Los Angeles’s Red Line, quickly degenerated into
a technical, financial and political fiasco. While analysis in
terms of transit competitive trips can certainly be applied to
Heavy Rail systems, doing so would be little more than an academic
exercise, because no more are likely to be built.40
Finally,
we chose these three systems because they give us different perspectives
in time. Metra, which was established as a successor to private
railroad commuter service in 1983, is a relatively new commuter
rail system, but not so new that its performance is mostly speculation.
San Diego offers the oldest "new" Light Rail system,
that is, Light Rail in its "second coming" after the
decline and near-disappearance of the streetcar. And St. Louis
offers the "latest thing" in Light Rail, a system very
similar to what any city now considering Light Rail would get
(or at least should get). Its one line represents a classic "starter
line," and it was built for the eminently reasonable price
of $20 million per mile. St. Louis has also pioneered the use
of volunteer labor on a modern Light Rail line (as distinguished
from Heritage Trolleys), which we believe is a highly important
precedent.
Before
we look at the first of our cases, we need to add a word about
method of analysis. Our goal is to determine how effectively these
three high quality systems compete for transit competitive trips,
i.e., what percentage of such trips they carry. In a world of
ideal statistics, that would be relatively easy. First, we would
determine the size of the population served by these three rail
systems, based on the "catchment area:" the number of
people who can walk to a train station or trolley stop, plus the
number who can drive and find parking, plus the number of bus
seats serving the train stops (minus some number reflecting reluctance
to take a bus, even to a train). Then, other statistics would
tell us how many commuter or entertainment trips that population
generates. We would count the riders on the trains or Light Rail
cars, compare that number with the total, and have the percentage
of transit competitive trips carried by transit.
Unfortunately,
in the real world, it’s not that simple. Not surprisingly,
since we are introducing a new measuring standard in "transit
competitive trips," we find the statistics have not been
compiled that way. No one has attempted to count transit competitive
trips. We hope someone will do so. Many a useful and publishable
paper is to be found in doing so. But so far, as best as we can
determine, it hasn’t been done.
That
leaves us rummaging about in the data as we find it. It is not
a satisfactory situation, but it is not a hopeless one either.
There are indicators, enough that it is possible to put together
a useful picture. Let’s take a look at our three cases and
see what we find.
Metra
Metra
is the nation’s second largest commuter rail system, with
twelve lines, 546 route miles, 1.6 billion passenger miles in
1996 and 240 stations serving more that 100 communities.41
By commuter rail standards, Metra easily meets the availability
test for transit competitive trips (Heavy Rail, Light Rail and
bus systems generally have better availability than commuter rail,
because they are more concentrated in the city’s dense core
area). As already noted, Metra also meets the quality test: its
97% on-time performance is the best in the country.42
So
how does it do? In short, vastly better than the 1% or 2% or 5%
figures usually cited. Chicago’s Central Business District
(CBD) remains the economic heart of the region. "More jobs
are concentrated in downtown Chicago than anywhere in the region,
and more than half a million people commute to those jobs every
day.… More than 1.1 million trips are made each day to Chicago’s
central area…. Between 50 and 60 percent of trips made
to the CBD are on transit (emphasis added)."43
Further, "Commuter rail has become the most prevalent form
of transit for CBD work trips, followed by bus and rapid transit."44
Specifically, Metra carried 21% of CBD commuting trips in 1990.45
A
look at transit trends in Chicago makes the success of Metra and
the high quality service it represents even more clear. Between
1980 and 1990, "transit’s CBD market share for work
trips dropped from 67% to 55%."46 The principal
drop was in bus riders; rapid transit fell slightly; and
Metra
ridership grew by about 15% between 1985 and 1995.… Generally,
all Metra zones have been experiencing steady growth since 1985.…
Ridership in zones A and B (combined) increased by about 800,000
annual riders between 1990 and 1994. These are the zones closest
to the CBD. This 14 percent increase may be due to switching of
CTA (Heavy Rail) passengers to Metra to benefit from better fares
and a better passenger environment.47
In
other words, people were showing preference for one rail system
over another, in part on the basis of quality. And Metra’s
success continues to build: the most recent ridership statistics
show Metra ridership up from 73.4 million in 1996 to 75.2 million
in 1997.48
The
importance of transit to Chicago is further illustrated by considering
what would happen if the 50 to 60% of trips to the CBD made on
transit shifted to automobiles.
The
Chicago area has the fifth worst traffic congestion in the United
States, and congestion is increasing annually. Traffic reduces
worker productivity and increases likelihood of accidents. A typical
driver in Chicago spends 34 hours per year sitting in traffic.
Delays caused by congestion are costly for businesses, particularly
those dependent on frequent and timely deliveries and "just
in time" inventory. The annual cost of Chicago area congestion
has been estimated at $2.8 billion.
The
Chicago region could not afford to build its way out of traffic
congestion. There is not sufficient funding in Illinois to maintain
the existing highway system. Building of new roads is becoming
extremely difficult in the face of cost, environmental restrictions,
and public opposition. In much of the Chicago area, roadway capacity
could not be expanded without demolishing homes and businesses.49
One
statistic brings transit’s role home to anyone who knows
the city of Chicago. "The Dan Ryan/Kennedy Expressways carry
200,000 vehicles per day, while parallel CTA/Metra (rail) lines
carry 182,000 riders."50 If all 182,000 rail riders
drove instead, those Expressways would simply stop, gridlocked.
Metra’s
phenomenal success, as the largest and still-rising mode in a
transit service that carries 50-60% of all CBD trips, suggests
a question: just who is riding those trains? The answer helps
dispel some of the false images of transit we criticized in our
earlier study. Metra’s riders are overwhelmingly white (86%),
well educated (66.7% college graduates), professional/technical
(47.9%) or managerial/business owner (27%), and very, very well
off. In 1995, 24.9% of Metra’s riders had household incomes
of $100,000 or more. Only 5.6% had incomes under $25,000. And
-- perhaps the definitive indicator of Metra’s ability to
compete for transit competitive trips -- 85.6% of Metra’s
riders had an automobile available for the trip, if they wanted
to drive.51
Consistent
with our definition of transit competitive trips, in 1996 92.7%
of Metra’s riders were on work or business related trips.
What about entertainment/ recreational travel? On the surface,
the numbers are not encouraging. In 1996, only 2.7% of Metra trips
fell into this category, down from 4.4% in 1991 and up just slightly
from 2% in 1985.
However,
20% of one-way ticket users were on a social or recreational trip,
and 43% of all Metra riders indicated they had used Metra for
recreation at least once in the previous six months.52
Metra itself sees a major future for this market. Its Marketing
Plan for 1997 states, "The recreational market serves as
the main focus of our secondary market."53 "Recreational
travel promotions include discount coupons and weekend Family
Fares extended to include weekdays during the summer. Popular
suburban attractions include the Ravinia Festival, Arlington International
Racecourse, and riverboat casinos."54 It will
be interesting to follow Metra’s progress in gaining recreational
riders.
Metra
is a testimonial to what high quality transit can do in terms
of competing for transit competitive trips. To its credit, it
is not resting on its laurels. In 1991, Metra adopted a program
called "Future Agenda for Suburban Transportation,"
or FAST. FAST will add service to 50 more municipalities and 100
stations, plus 280 route miles, expanding transit availability
– the sine qua non of competitive success. It will
also add up to 36,000 new parking spaces, beyond the 18,000 added
since 1988. Parking is a major component of transit availability.
And FAST will add a whole new dimension of quality service: speed.
In addition to its 97% on time service, Metra will attempt to
cover 50 miles in 45 minutes. In rush periods, that will make
Metra faster than driving. Metra understands that for its upscale
clientele, time is money.55
Speaking
of money, how much does Metra cost? Metra recovered 58% of its
operating expenses from the farebox in 1997 – the highest
percentage in the country for a commuter rail service – plus
5% of passenger revenues for capital financing. And it did so
with fares that were less than 5% above 1983 rates.56
In
sum, from every perspective, Metra does it right – and it
works!
San
Diego
While
the San Diego Trolley and Chicago’s Metra commuter rail system
both run on rails, the similarity largely ends there. The two
cities are very different. San Diego’s CBD is much less important
to the region than Chicago’s. While Chicago’s commuting
market includes a large proportion of wealthy executives and managers,
San Diego’s is tilted toward immigrant laborers. San Diego
is also very much part of California’s well-known "car
culture." To a visitor from an eastern city like Chicago,
San Diego appears to be an endless string of suburbs, connected
by roads.
The
two rail systems are as different as the two cities. Metra is
a long-distance, high speed commuter rail line. San Diego’s
Trolley is just that: a streetcar system, though one with a great
deal of private right-of-way. Stops are frequent, runs are comparatively
short and speeds are much lower: while Metra can talk of "50
miles in 45 minutes," the average speed of the San Diego
Trolley is 21.9 miles per hour. San Diego recently began service
on its own commuter rail system, the Coaster, but this study will
focus on the Trolley.
The
San Diego Trolley has much to tell other cities which are considering
Light Rail. The San Diego Trolley is the first Light Rail system
built in the United States since World War II. Its initial line,
running from downtown south to the Mexican border opposite Tijuana,
opened on July 26, 1981. The system has steadily expanded since,
but its history now reaches back almost 20 years. That is enough
time to look at initial promises with some perspective and see
whether they have been borne out.
But
first, we need to see how the Trolley meets our basic criteria:
availability and quality of service. Availability presents a mixed
picture. In downtown San Diego, it is excellent. Not only is the
Trolley in easy walking distance of the main business district,
it also directly serves the downtown entertainment and convention
centers, the waterfront and the Santa Fe railroad station, which
is the end of the line for the Coaster commuter train (in fact,
the Trolley has two direct interchange stations with the Coaster).
The only important downtown destination not served is the airport,
a line to which is planned.
The
Trolley’s availability outside the downtown is mixed. The
Orange (east) Line serves many suburbs, the Blue (south) Line
fewer. The most recent line extension intersects the critical
I-15 corridor, but that corridor is merely intersected, not served
directly along its length. Nor does I-5 have a parallel Trolley
line except for a 3.5 mile segment from downtown San Diego to
Old Town. On the whole, the Trolley serves residents south and
east of the city better than those to the north, where the more
affluent suburbs generally lie; this is evident in the demographics
of the ridership.
In
terms of quality, the Trolley rates high overall. The equipment
is simple but reliable and comfortable. Track quality is excellent.
Stations are basic but adequate, and the "honor fare"
system is easy to use. However, two factors detract from quality
service. There is a perception of danger from crime. The actual
crime statistics are not bad, but the mix of races and social
classes on board some lines causes apprehension. This is a growing
problem on transit nationally, reflecting decreasing order in
the society as a whole; we will come back to this problem in the
conclusion to our study.57
The
other detractor is the time between trolleys, which generally
run on a fifteen minute interval; the Blue Line has a 7.5 minute
interval during rush hours between Old Town and the Mexican border.
In the palmy days of the streetcar, many a system advertised,
"Always a car in sight." New Orleans’s St. Charles
Avenue line, the last survivor from those happy times, still follows
that attractive practice. When a rider has to wait up to a quarter
of an hour before the wire sings and a car appears, he starts
thinking of getting around some other way. Originally, much of
the San Diego system was single track, which limited frequency.
Now that it is all double track, frequency should increase.
There
is a third way in which the San Diego Trolley does not quite measure
up to Metra, though it is in no way San Diego’s fault. The
available statistics do not allow us to measure its success in
attracting transit competitive trips quite so well. But we can
find some useful indicators, and as with Metra, they point to
success far beyond one percent.
A
first indicator is predictive success. If we look at the original
ridership predictions, then compare them with actual ridership,
what do we find? Many transit critics have said that original
predictions have virtually always been high, as a tactic to "sell"
Light Rail. Then, the real numbers come in much lower.
According
to a 1982 study, by 1995 the original Blue (south) Line of the
San Diego Trolley should have been carrying from 28,000 to 30,000
daily riders.58 In fact, by 1991 – four years
early – it was carrying approximately 32,000 riders per day.
Ridership was up to 34,000 per day by mid-1995 and to 51,135 per
day in May 1998 (including 5,080 on the Old Town segment and 5,350
per day on the Mission Valley line). In 1991, ridership for the
second line to open, the Orange (east) Line, also "exceeded
expectations; ridership on that line was 24,560 per day in May
1998."59
A
1992 study offers a number of other indicators as to the Trolley’s
success in capturing transit competitive trips. "The Trolley
has taken single-occupant vehicles off the road, while increasing
transit ridership in its corridors."60 In 1985,
29.6% of Trolley passengers previously drove alone; by 1990, that
figure was up to 36.9%.61 "41 percent of trolley
passengers (36.1% in 1995) ride by choice, compared to only 26%
(24.9% in 1995) for all transit users…. the data seem to
indicate that the boost in choice riders for the region depends
heavily on LRT (light rail) service."62 The study
"indicates that a higher proportion of trolley riders earn
$30,000 or more than riders of the system as a whole. Taken together,
these data seems to indicate that the trolley attracts middle-
and upper-middle-income workers, even though they could drive
to work."63
The
1992 study also has something to say about how the Trolley works
in cost terms. Over its first ten years, as ridership grew continuously,
the real cost per passenger dropped from $.91 to $.56, the cost
per train mile fell from $6.82 to $5.60 and the cost per car mile
went down from $3.47 to $2.23 (all figures in 1982 dollars).64
And there is icing on that cake: "The closest the trolley
came to breaking even overall was in FY 89 when the recovery ratio
reached 95.31 percent…. In FY 89, 90 and 91, the South Line
actually ran a profit."65 In contrast, in FY 89
the San Diego bus system recovered 42.9% of its costs from the
farebox.
What
has happened since 1991? A recent report by the San Diego Metropolitan
Transit Development Board shows an interesting picture. It compares
the vital statistics of transit in San Diego – bus and trolley
– in 1976, 1986 and 1996. The contrast between 1986 and 1996
is the most instructive, as Light Rail was in operation in both
years. Between 1986 and 1996, service miles grew from 13,687,286
to 21,216,572 (23,990,000 in 1998). That growth included almost
a doubling of the Light Rail system. This substantial addition
of high quality rail transit worked its usual magic: ridership
grew from 35,192,140 to 62,168,114 (72,744,800 in 1998) - substantially
more, as a percentage, than the growth in service miles. The growth
in total system ridership shows that rail riders are not merely
people who previously took the bus; in fact, in 1990, just under
25% of Trolley riders formerly took the bus.66 Finally,
with all this growth, costs fell. Between 1986 and 1996, the farebox
recovery ratio for the whole system – Light Rail and bus
– rose from 44.15% to 52.5% (51.9% in 1998), and the subsidy
per passenger declined from $.76 to $.69 ($.71 in 1998).67
How
does the San Diego Trolley perform in competing for the two classes
of trips that transit should be able to compete effectively for,
trips to work and recreational trips? 44.8% of riders are using
the Trolley to go to and from work. This compares to 40.6% of
riders of the system as a whole, indicating the Trolley competes
for commuters slightly better than the bus system.68
We must say we would expect this difference to be higher.
The
explanation is not inadequate parking. 47.9% of Trolley patrons
walk to the Trolley stop, which is consistent with our concept
of availability. 13.9% drive to the Trolley, compared with only
2.6% who drive to take a San Diego Transit bus.69 This
is consistent with rail transit’s superior ability to draw
riders from choice.
But
in fact, not many people drive to the Trolley. With an average
weekday ridership of 75,692 (in May 1998), the San Diego Trolley
offers only 5800 parking spaces. And, on average, only 25% of
these spaces are filled.
A
possible explanation is reflected in another key measurement of
the San Diego’s Trolley’s ability to compete: the percentage
of patrons who are riders from choice. In 1995, only 36.1% of
the Trolley’s riders had a car available.70 That
is less than half the figure for Chicago’s Metra. We suggest
the reason is the demographics of the area served. As noted previously,
the San Diego Trolley offers little service to the wealthier suburbs,
which generally lie north of the city. Those suburbs are more
likely to generate park-and-ride business, as Metra's experience
demonstrates.
If
we look at our final indicator and ask how San Diego’s Light
Rail system does in competing for recreational trips, we find
a surprise: it does remarkably well. In 1995, almost 18% of all
trips on the Trolley were for recreation or entertainment.71
A more recent measurement comes from Super Bowl Week in 1998,
when nearly one million people used transit to get to and from
Super Bowl events.
During
the week leading up to the Super Bowl, San Diego Trolley estimates
well over 400,000 riders used the trolley to go to Super Fest,
the Players’ Party behind the convention center, and the
NFL Experience in Mission Valley…. Platforms at key stations
were filled with waiting riders, some eight to nine deep. San
Diego Trolley put extra trains into service, with frequencies
approaching every three minutes, and demand was so high, San Diego
Trolley provided non-stop service round-the-clock both Friday
and Saturday nights into Sunday morning…. On Super Bowl Sunday…Estimates
are that San Diego Trolley carried more than 30,000 fans (twice
what had been predicted) to the stadium by the 3:18 kickoff….
As the game went into its final 28 seconds, with spectators still
in their seats, San Diego Trolley had 21 train sets standing by
in pocket tracks and nearby locations. Within 30 minutes after
the gamed ended, the system had sent 14 trains out of Qualcomm
Stadium, packed with departing fans.72
Shades
of 1910! This picture virtually duplicates the scene at any ball
game, amusement park or church revival meeting at the height of
the streetcar era. The fact that it can be duplicated in 1998
is clear evidence that rail transit can compete for entertainment
trips. It is doing so not only in San Diego, but in Cleveland,
in Atlanta – where MARTA’s rail system was the transportation
backbone of the Olympics – and wherever else rail serves
major recreational and entertainment locations.
In
sum, while the data is less solid for the San Diego Trolley than
for Metra, it is clear that in San Diego Light Rail is competing
for transit competitive trips more effectively than are buses.
More than a third of the Trolley’s riders have a car available
but choose to take the Trolley instead. As Trolley service is
expanded in the northern suburbs, that figure should rise. And
the Trolley’s recent gains in ridership – in 1997, it
carried 19.5 million people, the highest number in its history
– show that it is competing ever more effectively within
those portions of the metropolitan area that it serves today.
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