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Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
8,128 posts, read 7,547,924 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Losfrisco
Its difficult to understand how San Diego could hold this lead over LA Metro light rail for so long. LA light rail is much larger, serves a vastly larger population area, and has underground capabilities notably absent from SD light rail.
San Diego can't make progress with buses though, while LA metro area buses (including Santa Monica, OCTA, and Long Beach) beat Chicago not only in total but per capital ridership. Quite an illustration of the stealth primacy of LA's bus fleet over everywhere outside of metro NYC, while many still entertain the notion that "everyone" is driving a car up there.
A bit of a surprise indeed. Although LA should soon jump ahead, likely sooner than later. It looks like at least in one month of Q4 (Oct.), that LA did surpass SD, and then it flipped right back to SD in Nov/December. This pecking order could change for good this year 2024 possibly.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
8,128 posts, read 7,547,924 times
Reputation: 5785
Quote:
Originally Posted by kbtoy7891
Heavy rail:
Montreal Metro: 303,969,500
Toronto Subway: 302,527,000
Thanks. I was wondering if the 2023 numbers were updated for these two. It would be nice to know their levels of percentage growth YOY at least over the last two years.
Montreal Metro: 303,969,500
Toronto Subway: 302,527,000
If we're looking at the last page of the APTA report as the reference to try to keep things consistent, the TTC Heavy Rail figure is 298,619,000. In the OP's format:
Heavy Rail:
Societe de transport de Montreal 303,969,500 +23.81%
Toronto Transit Commission 298,619,000 +29.26%
Vancouver's Skytrain system which is essentially rapid transit system with lower capacity trainsets than most of the HR lines comes under the heading of AG - Automated Guideway and is effectively competitive with Heavy Rail as defined elsewhere. Its ridership is:
Greater Vancouver Transp Auth 141,339,300 +21.25%
In the US + Canada context that's generally referred to as Northern America, these take the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th spots.
Light rail has Canada taking the 1st, 2nd, and 8th spot if doing a US+Canada top ten.
Montreal has something funny where EXO, the commuter rail agency, and the new REM project that converted some commuter rail over to automated guideway are not listed here, but play a large part in the transit landscape for Montreal which arguably has the best per capita transit system within Northern America and also has the most on the docket for substantial improvements. For light rail, there is a chance that this year sees Canadian cities take four spots on the list as Edmonton and Ottawa numbers are expected to substantially improve.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 03-20-2024 at 09:52 PM..
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
8,128 posts, read 7,547,924 times
Reputation: 5785
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
If we're looking at the last page of the APTA report as the reference to try to keep things consistent, the TTC Heavy Rail figure is 298,619,000. In the OP's format:
Heavy Rail:
Societe de transport de Montreal 303,969,500 +23.81%
Toronto Transit Commission 298,619,000 +29.26%
Vancouver's Skytrain system which is essentially rapid transit system with lower capacity trainsets than most of the HR lines comes under the heading of AG - Automated Guideway and is effectively competitive with Heavy Rail as defined elsewhere. Its ridership is:
Greater Vancouver Transp Auth 141,339,300 +21.25%
In the US + Canada context that's generally referred to as Northern America, these take the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th spots.
Light rail has Canada taking the 1st, 2nd, and 8th spot if doing a US+Canada top ten.
Montreal has something funny where EXO, the commuter rail agency, and the new REM project that converted some commuter rail over to automated guideway are not listed here, but play a large part in the transit landscape for Montreal which arguably has the best per capita transit system within Northern America and also has the most on the docket for substantial improvements. For light rail, there is a chance that this year sees Canadian cities take four spots on the list as Edmonton and Ottawa numbers are expected to substantially improve.
Ahh, I seem to always forget the Canadian numbers are at the very bottom.
Interesting too that comparing Vancouver and DC for #4 spot that in Q4 at least, DC narrowly edged it out by total, and caught up to VC on avg weekday that quarter also.
WMATA Q4 total- 37,140,900
Avg weekday- 474,000
Greater Vancouver Transp Auth- 36,251,000
Avg weekday- 446,400
There was a serious incremental increase quarter by quarter for WMATA last year that we all here knew about, but is now reflected on paper. IF the DC Metro continues at this same rate it's currently going at so far this year, I'd expect it to jump Vancouver on the annual stats for 2024.
Ahh, I seem to always forget the Canadian numbers are at the very bottom.
Interesting too that comparing Vancouver and DC for #4 spot that in Q4 at least, DC narrowly edged it out by total, and caught up to VC on avg weekday that quarter also.
WMATA Q4 total- 37,140,900
Avg weekday- 474,000
Greater Vancouver Transp Auth- 36,251,000
Avg weekday- 446,400
There was a serious incremental increase quarter by quarter for WMATA last year that we all here knew about, but is now reflected on paper. IF the DC Metro continues at this same rate it's currently going at so far this year, I'd expect it to jump Vancouver on the annual stats for 2024.
I think there's a very good chance that Washington Metro will pass Vancouver's Skytrain this year and an even better chance in 2025. I think 2026 is a crapshoot as Vancouver's Skytrain supposedly opens up the Broadway extension in 2026 and will get a full year in 2027 and thus has a chance of passing Washington Metro again as it opens up six stations with one of them being an interchange with the Canada Line.
Toronto has a lot of ongoing construction with its subway system and those will fall under a combination of Light Rail and Heavy Rail. GO Transit becoming more of a RER system that will likely still fall under commuter rail in the APTA stats but will still give a boost to TTC via more transfers. Montreal's REM line, which isn't included in the stats this year, hits very central parts and thus has a chance when combined with the Montreal Metro system keep Montreal above Toronto. I think the near future large additions in various parts of Canada will keep them pretty high up there though local political changes have thrown a wrench in a lot of planned lines like the Quebec Tramway.
I wonder how DC area's Purple Line light rail will change things as a solid feeder line to a lot of Washington Metro lines. That project unfortunately has also been plagued by a lot of setbacks. I think the cities with major top ten changing projects in the near future are DC, LA, SF Bay Area, Seattle, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa. LA has several major projects under construction which will likely push it above San Diego on light rail and jump past Atlanta and Philadelphia in Heavy Rail alongside some commuter rail improvements that could act as strong feeder systems. Caltrain in the Bay Area is arguably turning into Heavy Rail, but it's unclear if it'll be marked as such once Caltrain modernization / electrification finishes. I wish Wikipedia had a widget for US passenger rail like Canada's here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templa...r_rail_systems
I also think of all systems in US and Canada, Philadelphia has the lowest technical barrier to massively improve via turning its multi-tracked and electrified Regional Rail system on fully publicly-owned rail and stations that through-runs Center City and can effectively form a large West Philadelphia, Center City, and North Philadelphia loop and with a lot of unused rail right-of-way that is not yet electrified into a full S-Bahn system, but no fully supported and funded plans have been set. Chicago also has that to a lesser extent and Metra leadership of recent has shown a lot of promise. Unfortunately, CTA leadership has been unimpressive of late and the lack of solid coordination does not bode well for the near future.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 03-20-2024 at 11:24 PM..
Obviously being local the huge glaring observation to me is WMATA not only entrenched itself, but looks to have separated even more as #2 in HR. The DC Metro averaged over 100k more weekday riders than CTA in 2023, and ended the year with almost 20 million more total riders. Even more impressive for DC there are more post pandemic ridership records breaking this year, and it looks as if based on 4th qtr only stats DC in all forms of rail eked out both Chicago CTA + Metra, and the MBTA's combined rail options as well:
4th qtr 2023:
WMATA- 37,140,900 DC Streetcar- 197,700
MARC- 924,700
VRE- 364,300
Seattle's light rail numbers will bump up a little in Q2 with the late-April opening of a starter portion of East Link from Bellevue to Redmond.
The existing N-S line will open a northern extension to Lynnwood late this year.
Sometime in 2025 the East line will connect to Seattle (they have to fix some errors), where it will share a large portion of the existing line and increase frequency there.
In late 2026 the existing N-S line will open its southern extension (taking longer due to bad soils in one spot).
So basically four jumps will occur in the next couple years. After that it'll be about six years until the next one, the West Seattle line that's yet to start.
The ridership experience on WMATA is much better than the CTA too imo. With reliability issues and the dirtiness of CTA trains vs Metro, it makes sense why WMATA has taken over.
I always rode the CTA without issue when I lived in Chicago, but, after talking to friends who never moved away, almost all of them complain about the ride quality post-Covid from reliability to increased crime. A number of them have purchased cars or Uber when they can. These people all live in dense neighborhoods too, so the L was the whole point. CTA ridership is apparently still hovering around 60% of its pre-Covid levels too.
Yeah, WMATA is Americas undisputed #2 transit system at this point. Crazy cause for decades CTA was #2. Like most things Chicago, it's on the decline.
Crazy that San Diego's lightrail has more ridership than Atlanta's MARTA
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