Thursday night, I prepped the below table for a Friday interview that hopefully will go public Sunday at 12:01 AM. But I figured it was time to put together a ridership table for the controversial Sounder North train run. I got the Average Mean Daily Ridership by dividing the quarterly total boardings/ridership by 65 or 13 weeks X 5 days. I then divided that number by two to get an – arguably inflated – estimate of the users using the run round trip under “AMDR/2 for Round-Trip Estimate“. Finally due to Sounder North’s ridership depending on among other things slides and the economy to record growth by the same quarter in the previous year. Hopefully this helps the conversation.
So here you go. It appears to me from the above we’re talking about a transit service that only serves 500-600 regular commuters or so.
If you want the Excel table, please e-mail me at growlernoise-at-gmail-dot-com and put in the subject line, “SOUNDER NORTH EXCEL SPREADSHEET PLEASE”.
Also would like to embed the spreadsheet, but having no luck.
Programming Note: I also yesterday had less than optimum ridership experience using Sounder North – again partially due to a need to see the Mukilteo Station’s behind schedule progress for North by Northwest – and will write about that next week after I verify some things that affirm my views on Sounder North. Also will hopefully, finally get an Island Transit update out the door.
Comment for notifications and yes, I took that photo yesterday the 8th on the 6:45AM Sounder North run pulling out of Everett Station to go to Mukilteo.
I rode the 7:15 am 2-car run yesterday and it was only 40% full on the second deck until Edmonds, where it filled up.
I also suggest uploading that spreadsheet to a cloud hosting site (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) for public download.
Sorry I missed you. If I had known you’d be riding the 7:15 AM, I’d have linked up with ya. I took the 6:45 for journalistic research purposes – stay tuned.