Rail Gets a Ridership Bump

Changes to Capital Metro's MetroRail Red Line schedule are paying dividends in increased ridership, although the Leander-to-Downtown commuter rail still lags well behind the agency's original ridership projections. Cap Metro last week also announced some limited experiments with Friday and Saturday service.

Timetable adjustments that took effect Jan. 18 included more rush-hour trips running all the way between Downtown and Lakeline Station (previously, many trips only ran between Downtown and Crestview or Howard) and the addition of hourly midday trips. Ridership on the previous schedule had been stuck around 850 trips per day. During the first nine days of the new schedule, that figure jumped up about 40%, to 1,191, with a high of 1,390 on Wednesday, Jan. 26. But even that doesn't come close to the 1,700 to 2,000 trips per day that Cap Met planners forecast back in 2009.

Those numbers were presented to the Cap Metro board of directors' rail committee last week. Staffers warned committee members to temper any excitement over the rise with caution. Todd Hemingson, the vice president of strategic planning and development, said he would have to "drill down for more detail" into the numbers, getting an idea of what stations and times of day accounted for the boost, and marketing manager Cynthia Lucas said some of the numbers could have been joyriders curious about the new midday trips.

Staff also told the committee it had settled on dates for limited weekend service. Every Friday in March, the train will run into the evening, with Saturday service during South by Southwest (March 12 and 19) and for the May 7 Pecan Street Festival. Don't plan on the train being your ride home if you're planning to close down the bars or if you live in Leander, though: Final schedules for these dates have yet to be finalized, but Hemingson said that service will terminate at Lakeline, which will allow it to run every 30 minutes, with the last run probably leaving Downtown around 11:30pm.