Well, the news is official: T ridership is down, from over 650,000 boardings/day in 2000 to shy of 600,000 boardings/day in 2005 (Subway) or 1.2M to 1.12M (total). Since we have only the numbers to work backward to the cause, we can only speculate likely culprits but many of them seem to point to the effects of a recession on rider patterns. In any case, the MBTA sees a problem and GM Dan Grabauskas is addressing ways to improve service and rider experience in order to lure customers back: “We can’t rely on it being so awfully congested on the highways that people will take the T,” he says. “What we have to rely on is making it a positive experience. We will boost ridership when we focus on reliability, cleanliness, accessibility.”
Charley at Blue Mass has some great suggestions for just that, and his commenters make some good points, too.
But what sturck me about the Globe’s article is that it shows the MBTA acknowledges something that was pretty predictable: fare hikes and decreased quality of service (flip sides of the recessionary plan for the Authority) have led to decreased ridership, which in turn has minimized the usefulness of the fare hikes to begin with. The loss of .8 million boardings a day may be offset by the increased fares, but when the fares were designed to plug a hole in the budget, you see the magnitude of the problem.
For this reason, I’d guess that some smart suggestions along the lines Charley presents will be implemented - I have some faith in Grabauskas - but not all of them. What we’ll see are a dual focus on a) accesibility issues (including broken elevators and escalators) that are a political and legal liability for the T and b) cheap-to-implement measures to improve rider experience (station cleanliness, driver politeness, communication). What we won’t see is improved service, if by that we understand more trains and buses, or better civil engineering. At least not in the near future.
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