Late Night Service Discussion

bostontrainguy wrote:

jamesinclair wrote:

bostontrainguy wrote:Seriously? Most of the ridership was affluent white college students out for a night of fun.

And you have the detailed data that proves this on hand?

Just ride it.

And this is a bad thing because???

We have a city where more and more people who can are avoiding the T like a plague. If the T cares about ridership/relevancy in the eyes of the next generation of potential T-commuters, you would think they'd be trying a little harder to make Uber/Lyft/Bridj a less-appealing option.

Otherwise they risk even further irrelevance as they continue to hemorrhage ridership to other non-MBTA modes and create a tax base that's even LESS incentivised to give them the additional funding that they so desperately need today.

Bramdeisroberts wrote:

bostontrainguy wrote:

jamesinclair wrote:

bostontrainguy wrote:Seriously? Most of the ridership was affluent white college students out for a night of fun.

And you have the detailed data that proves this on hand?

Just ride it.

And this is a bad thing because???

We have a city where more and more people who can are avoiding the T like a plague. If the T cares about ridership/relevancy in the eyes of the next generation of potential T-commuters, you would think they'd be trying a little harder to make Uber/Lyft/Bridj a less-appealing option.

Otherwise they risk even further irrelevance as they continue to hemorrhage ridership to other non-MBTA modes and create a tax base that's even LESS incentivised to give them the additional funding that they so desperately need today.

If that question was addressed to me, I never said it was a bad thing. If the college students provided a good base of patronage and kept the thing going it would be a good thing.

Boston is about 75% black/hispanic, most of the suburbs are substantially white. Since the "T" probably didn't keep statistics, they are getting jammed up by special interests. Obviously, cutting back late nite service is a minor cutback, and is not intended to impact protected classes, but since they can't prove the impact...

Bramdeisroberts wrote:And this is a bad thing because???

We have a city where more and more people who can are avoiding the T like a plague. If the T cares about ridership/relevancy in the eyes of the next generation of potential T-commuters, you would think they'd be trying a little harder to make Uber/Lyft/Bridj a less-appealing option.

Otherwise they risk even further irrelevance as they continue to hemorrhage ridership to other non-MBTA modes and create a tax base that's even LESS incentivised to give them the additional funding that they so desperately need today.

Because it debunks the claim that cutting the service negatively impacts minorities and low-income riders.

Ridership has broken records and continues to increase, the Authority isn't worried about becoming irrelevant and it certainly isn't already. Uber, Lyft, and Bridj aren't even on their radar screen, nor have taxicabs ever been.

BandA wrote:Boston is about 75% black/hispanic

For 2014:

White non-Hispanic: 45.6%
Black non-Hispanic: 22.3%
Hispanic (of any race): 18.6% (breaks down as about 7.4% White Hispanic, 2.2% Black Hispanic, 0.2% Native American Hispanic, 0.1% Asian Hispanic, 6.2% Other Hispanic, 2.6% Multiple race Hispanic)
Asian non-Hispanic: 9.7%
Multiple races, non-Hispanic: 2.2%
Other race non-Hispanic: 1.4%
American Indian/Alaskan Native non-Hispanic: 0.2%

So, Boston is 38.7% black/hispanic

bostontrainguy wrote:

jamesinclair wrote:

bostontrainguy wrote:Seriously? Most of the ridership was affluent white college students out for a night of fun.

And you have the detailed data that proves this on hand?

Just ride it.

Sounds like you've never been on the blue line.

Look, the feds are asking for stats. "Just ride it" is not a stat, especially because race, ethnicity, income and language proficiency cannot be measured by "just riding it" and looking at people.

Bramdeisroberts wrote: We have a city where more and more people who can are avoiding the T like a plague. If the T cares about ridership/relevancy in the eyes of the next generation of potential T-commuters, you would think they'd be trying a little harder to make Uber/Lyft/Bridj a less-appealing option.

Citation needed.

2000 rapid-transit/bus ridership: c. 315k (eyeballing from a graph on page 18)
2014 rapid-transit/bus ridership: c. 360k (likewise eyeballing)

2000 population of Boston, Cambridge, Quincy, Braintree, Brookline, Newton, Somerville. Medford, Malden, and Revere: 1,190,107
2014 population: 1,294,576

daily rapid-transit/bus rides per capita, 2000: 0.265
daily rapid-transit/bus rides per capita, 2014: 0.278

There doesn't appear to be any movement on net of people avoiding transit like the plague. Of course, the ridership increase could be being driven by people outside of those cities/towns (which I picked as the cities/towns with rapid transit stations), but since those are generally growing more slowly than the rapid transit area and are generally rather transit-unfriendly, I doubt it.

It also would not surprise me at all if the median income of the MBTA rail rider (both commuter and rapid transit) is higher than the median resident of the Commonwealth, but the former statistic doesn't exist as far as I can tell.

Riders have reacted very positively to real-time information on the bus and subway lines. Reliable information has been shown (not just in Boston) to make riders more tolerant of inconsistent service.

The only substantial decreases in the last decade or so have been on the commuter rail, and that's a mode where the average rider is above median income AND the main competition is good old private carrier buses and private cars, not Uber/Lyft/Bridj. The commuter rail losses are directly attributable to severe long-term equipment and track issues causing increased travel times and frequent delays, to cuts to weekend service meaning that it doesn't act as a loss leader to attract repeat riders, and to the double-whammy of fare hikes and parking hikes making it not cost-competitive in many cases.

The EGE wrote: The only substantial decreases in the last decade or so have been on the commuter rail, and that's a mode where the average rider is above median income AND the main competition is good old private carrier buses and private cars, not Uber/Lyft/Bridj. The commuter rail losses are directly attributable to severe long-term equipment and track issues causing increased travel times and frequent delays, to cuts to weekend service meaning that it doesn't act as a loss leader to attract repeat riders, and to the double-whammy of fare hikes and parking hikes making it not cost-competitive in many cases.

Even then, there is some question as to whether commuter rail ridership is actually down.

Both the Train Audit figures and the headcount measures are reported in the MBTA’s “Ridership and Service Statistics” report (the so-called “Blue Book”). And yet they differ from each other and are moving farther apart. Since 2009, the conductor headcounts have shown a 13 percent drop in daily riders, while the Train Audits show ridership growing by 9 percent. There is no explanation offered in the Blue Book or anywhere else why these two stats, collected by the same conductors, are diverging in this way. But many current and past officials, as well as various written documents, cast aspersions on the accuracy of both statistics. Even so, they remain a regular feature in official MBTA documents, research reports, and media coverage of ridership levels.

Both of these methods are contradicted by fare revenue, which held steady between the fare hikes of 2007 and 2012. This suggests, indirectly, that ridership may have remained steady as well. From 2012 to 2013, fare revenue jumped up 23 percent, almost exactly equal to the size of the average commuter rail fare hike in the same period. MassDOT has considered changing the way it reports ridership numbers to use fare-based data instead of conductor counts, but has not made the switch. But interest in such a switch underscores the strong doubts about the accuracy of conductor headcounts.

Further confusing matters, MBCR, the former commuter rail operator, hired consultants to conduct “peak passenger counts” at core stations. And the MPO’s 2012 report included its own audited count, which it then compared to all these other methods. The results differed wildly, ranging from 104,000 to 150,000 weekday trips. That’s a difference of 43 percent from the low end of the range to the high end. The chart below [omitted --LR] shows some of the figures they examined, and compares them to those cited in the MBTA’s Blue Book.

Confused? You’re not alone. Even the MBTA itself cannot seem to keep the numbers straight from document to document. A recent, widely circulated report from the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation cited the T’s capital investment program to make the claim that commuter rail had lost 4.4 million riders, or 11 percent of its ridership, in a single year, from 2012 to 2013. MTF used this figure to argue that commuter rail service is losing riders even as its costs increase – in short, that commuter rail was a bad deal for the state.

But the capital investment documents that show 2012 and 2013 ridership refer to the “2012 edition of the MBTA Ridership and Service Statistics”, a document that does not exist. The two most recent editions of the so-called Blue Book were published in 2010 and 2014, according to Pesaturo and the T’s online document library. The 2014 edition includes data for the time period in question, but it shows a much smaller decline of 800,000 riders. In other words, the capital investment numbers, and, by extension, MTF’s numbers, are relying on inaccurate information sourced to a report that does not exist. Regardless, all these numbers are coming from conductor headcounts, a source on which both the MBTA’s spokesman and the MPO report characterize as mere estimates.

Given the huge variation between the various methods of measuring riders, it’s not clear whether any of the currently available figures can be used to estimate either current ridership or trends over time. Pesaturo reports that the T and Keolis are discussing new ways of counting passenger boardings and exits at every station. “The effort to capture each door of each train at each station will require significant personnel but the information collected will be the most accurate and most detailed ever recorded,” he wrote.

It admittedly doesn't fill one with confidence in MBTA/MassDOT management if they have no clue of what the ridership is.

To say nothing of some other issues in the data. I suspect that there are several counts that were completely made up - the June 2007 counts in the Bluebook for the Newburyport/Rockport Line are very suspicious.

leviramsey wrote:

BandA wrote:Boston is about 75% black/hispanic

For 2014:

White non-Hispanic: 45.6%
Black non-Hispanic: 22.3%
Hispanic (of any race): 18.6% (breaks down as about 7.4% White Hispanic, 2.2% Black Hispanic, 0.2% Native American Hispanic, 0.1% Asian Hispanic, 6.2% Other Hispanic, 2.6% Multiple race Hispanic)
Asian non-Hispanic: 9.7%
Multiple races, non-Hispanic: 2.2%
Other race non-Hispanic: 1.4%
American Indian/Alaskan Native non-Hispanic: 0.2%

So, Boston is 38.7% black/hispanic

OOPS. I guess I was reading about the Boston public school population (approximately) rather than the general population. My bad.

T will bend to Feds:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massac ... story.html

typesix wrote:T will bend to Feds:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massac ... story.html

Looks like the stereotypes about drunk college kids being the only riders were wrong.

Huh, who could imagine that "just ride it" is not even close to accurate!

According to 2015 data collected by the T, 54 percent of late-night bus riders are minorities, and 64 percent are low-income. On the subway, about 47 percent are minorities and 59 percent are low-income.

I'd imagine there are a ton of food service employees going home to places like East Boston, Malden, Quincy, etc.

If anything, that makes a good case for expanded CR service to even more of the immigrant suburbs like Lynn, Framingham, Waltham, Brockton, Lowell, and Lawrence/Haverhill.

jamesinclair wrote:Looks like the stereotypes about drunk college kids being the only riders were wrong.

Huh, who could imagine that "just ride it" is not even close to accurate!

The article says nothing more about the ridership demographics, only that the T is going to complete the analysis that they skipped before.

Charlie cards and 7 day passes don't contain income and ethnicity data on them, so "just riding it" and observing the ridership is exactly what you've got to do to see who's there.