Can Metrolink Get More People to Ride the Train?

In car-crazy Southern California, it's doubtful:

Five years ago, at a time of robust economic growth, the board of the Orange County Transportation Authority approved a plan to expand Metrolink commuter rail service.

At the time, officials predicted that by 2010, average weekday ridership on the three Metrolink lines that serve Orange County would grow from about 14,000 to more than 30,000.

Then came the recession. Ridership levels are back near where they were five years ago, after rising in the intervening years. In October 2010, average weekday ridership on the three lines was 14,818, down 3 percent from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, OCTA has delayed plans to add new trains. The agency initially envisioned adding 16 round trips between Fullerton and Laguna Niguel by 2009, but didn’t. It’s now looking at adding at most six round trips in 2011, with more to come later.

The expansion, which was approved by voters as part of the renewed Measure M sales tax ballot initiative in 2006, ultimately envisions adding 34 new trains in the county, to bring the daily total to 76. The overall cost, which includes buying new locomotives and passenger cars as well as making improvements to stations, expanding parking lots, and making street crossings safer, is more than $400 million.

Will Kempton, OCTA’s CEO, believes that once trains are running more frequently, more people will ride them.

The idea is that, with trains running every half hour or so, “people won’t have to worry so much about a schedule,” Kempton said. “They can simply go to the station and know that there will be a train.”

That, he says, should result in a “stable and expanding ridership base.”

Still, it’s unclear who the new riders will be.

“Voters always vote for rail,” said David Brownstone, an economics professor at UC Irvine who studies transportation.

Brownstone noted that California voters in 2008 approved a $10 billion bond measure for a high-speed rail system that could one day compete with Metrolink and Amtrak on the Anaheim-to-Los Angeles route.

“They think it’s going to cut congestion,” Brownstone said. “Time and time again, people vote for these things and I think they think someone else is going to take (the train). It doesn’t happen.”

I've noticed that Metrolink has raised their tickets costs rather significantly in the last couple of years. It used to be pretty cheap to ride the train, especially on the weekends, but rising rates have kept me and many others off the train. If they want to stimulate more ridership they should do the same thing that stimulates economies - cut rates. They'll get more riders and more demand for the new trips they want to schedule.

With gas costs steadily rising they have a window of opportunity to lock in new riders, but like most government bureaucracies, it's hard to convince them that cutting rates will in the long run increase revenue.  It costs about as much to run an empty train as a full one, so loading it up, even at lower fares, would be a net positive.

But even with reduced rates mass transit in Southern California will always have one big problem - it's not much use to you if it doesn't go where you're going, doesn't run on a schedule that fits your needs, or if getting there will involve a lot of connections and hassles.  Cars are just a lot easier for most people.