MetroRail, One Year Later
Tuesday, Capital Metro marked the one-year anniversary of its troubled MetroRail service by trumpeting some good news: record ridership numbers. The numbers were already rising thanks to the addition of midday service in January (jumping from about 850 boardings per weekday to around 1,300), and this month were pumped up by the agency’s experiments with Friday-evening runs and Saturday service during South by Southwest. The first Friday of extended service, March 4, attracted 2,560 boardings, and average ridership during SXSW was 3,652 per day, with a high of 5,413 on the final Friday (MetroRail service ran eight of the 10 days). Potential customers had been clamoring for MetroRail to help them access the city’s nightlife scene, but Cap Metro had been holding off due to severely depleted financial resources and legal requirements to provide freight rail service on the same track. Clearly, demand for weekend service exists, though agency officials know they can’t consider SXSW numbers typical. Now Cap Metro must consider how and whether to meet that demand while still trying to recover from a decade of overspending, exacerbated by the recession. Still worth noting: That 1,600 average still falls short of what the agency expected with its original rush-hour-only service.
This article appears in March 25 • 2011.