SMART publicly released its daily ridership data for the first time with the numbers so far showing a decline in total riders during its second year, but also a steady increase in its weekday ridership.
On Friday, Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit General Manager Farhad Mansourian said the weekday ridership data shows the agency is meeting its goals to provide Marin and Sonoma commuters an alternative to driving on Highway 101, but said there is still work left to do.
“We’re two-and-a-half years old,” Mansourian said. “We have very limited data. Trying to draw conclusions on limited data — our look is this: are we overall increasing? The trend says yes. On weekends, the trend says no. You go back and say, ‘How do we make this better?’ You come up with ideas.’”
The SMART Board of Directors is set to meet at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday in Petaluma to discuss the data and provide direction on what data the agency should be disclosing to the public moving forward.
“From here forward, one of the questions we’re going to ask our board and other people is now that we have calibrated our numbers, going forward what would you like to see so we can post them on our website,” Mansourian said. “… There is no fight. There is no hiding the ball. There is no game here other than the naysayers and the sales tax people who are opponents are using this opportunity to find a way to beat us up.”
The data shows total ridership in SMART’s first year of operation — Aug. 25, 2017 through Aug. 24, 2018 — decreasing by 2.2 percent or about 15,600 riders from 721,790 riders to 706,188, according to an analysis by the Independent Journal. Average weekday ridership using aggregate data that includes service cancellation days shows daily riders increasing from less than 2,300 from the first year to more than 2,500 so far in the third year.
SMART spokeswoman Julia Gonzalez said removing weekday holiday data and service cancellation days caused by fires better demonstrates the core weekday commuter trends. With these days removed, she said the average weekday ridership increases even further from less than 2,300 in the first year of operations to about to 2,700 in the third year.
A Dec. 20 ridership report provided by the Corey, Canapary and Galanis research firm at the request of SMART shows daily weekday ridership being lower at 2,040 passengers for January through September 2019.
SMART officials cited train service closures caused by natural disasters and fires as well as heightened curiosity of the train when it first opened to 2017 to explain the difference in the ridership between the two years.
“SMART is only 2.5 years old,” Marin County supervisor and SMART board member Judy Arnold wrote in an email. During that time, we had 2 major wildfires, 2 large floods, mass evacuations and power shutoffs, which have created turmoil in people’s lives and commute patterns not to mention the loss of 6000 homes and the impact to the local economies of Sonoma and Marin Counties.”
At the same time, weekend ridership has been steadily declining through the years with average daily ridership dropping 30% between the first and second year from 1,282 to 886. The consultant’s report puts daily weekend ridership at about 800 for the first nine months of 2019.
Novato Councilman and SMART board member Eric Lucan said he sees a bright future for SMART based on the weekday ridership trends.
“If weekend ridership was growing but weekday core was decreasing then I might have a few more questions,” Lucan said Friday, “but I’m actually really pleased with the data that I’m seeing.”
Moving forward, Lucan said he has requested staff to calculate the greenhouse gas emission reductions resulting from people switching from cars to the train, which has been a repeated selling point for the SMART train.
With the recent opening of the Larkspur extension as well as a new schedule that that provides earlier weekend trips and increases daily week trips from 34 to 38, Lucan and Mansourian said the hope is more passengers will begin to use the train.
The Independent Journal and other media outlets have requested SMART provide more detailed ridership data, but only aggregate data has been released to the public.
SMART has been collecting manual count data of its ridership since it began operations in August 2017, Gonzalez and Mansourian said, but have waited to release the data until this month. Mansourian said they wanted to verify the accuracy of the counts as well as other passenger data sources such as Clipper and phone application fare riders through a consulting firm. SMART’s open ticketing system where passengers can use Clipper cards and smartphone tickets in addition to traditional fare purchases makes it more difficult to track and analyze as opposed to closed ticketing systems such as BART uses, SMART officials said.
The time also allowed the agency to provide further context on the ridership data, such as if a natural disaster occurred on one day, SMART staff said.
Mansourian and Gonzalez said ridership data was being presented to the public at board meetings through the form of aggregate data, which has since increased to more than 1.6 million since operations began.
Using these aggregates, Gonzalez said members of the public could roughly calculate daily and weekly ridership data based on changes. However, these aggregates lack specifics and did not provide detail about the number of passengers using the transit service on weekdays versus weekends.
“I am sensitive to transparency,” Mansourian said. “We are very transparent. We work very hard in verifying the data before we put them up. Now we feel confident, we have released the data, we are going to discuss them at a public meeting.”
SMART critics such as Novato resident, economist and Dominican University lecturer Mike Arnold argues the data shows that ridership has not increased in any meaningful way and is not making an impact on Highway 101 traffic congestion.
Further information should be provided to the public prior to voters deciding on whether to extend SMART’s quarter-cent sales tax for 30 years in the March 2020 primary election, Arnold said. The current sales tax, which is SMART’s largest revenue source, is not set to expire until 2029, but SMART plans to use the early extension to refinance its existing bond debt that was used to build out the now $600 million rail and trail system between Santa Rosa and Larkspur. The refinancing will work to prevent SMART from having to make significant service cuts in the coming years, staff state.
“The daily ridership tells us a lot, but it doesn’t tell us some important things the public deserves to know before the vote which is how many trains are they operating that have very few riders,” Arnold said. “And the public should know that’s what their taxes are going for is to operate a lot of trains, many of which are not carrying many riders.”
In response to the reduction of passengers from the first year to the second year, Lucan said SMART’s fare revenues have met their forecast targets. But he said SMART still needs to focus on working to attract more passengers to ride the trains.
“We need to continue to get the word out,” Lucan said.
SMART ridership
Aggregate ridership on SMART between 2017 and 2019. Counts begin on Aug. 25 of each year and end on Aug. 24 of the following year, with the exception of the last months of 2019, which only include data for Aug. 25 to Nov. 30, 2019.
Passengers totals
2017-2018: 721,790
2018-2019: 706,188
2019: 201,052
Average weekday ridership:
2017-2018: 2,255
2018-2019: 2,358
2019: 2,523
Note: Average calculations include days when all train service was canceled.
Average weekend ridership:
2017-2018: 1,282
2018-2019: 886
2019: 874
Source: Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit data
