Lies, damn lies, and misleading data: bus service (DC Circulator)

When I went to college there was a book "famous" in economics called Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, about the manipulation of data.

In reporting on transit ridership, I am bothered when they don't report ridership by bus line or day of the week, but "by the year."  

There was a reddit entry about this on the Alexandria bus system, touting 5 million riders last year, a system high, without discussion of daily data.  It turns out they have about 10,000 riders during a typical weekday, on 12 bus lines. Probably most of the ridership is on the King Street line, which connects the King Street Metrorail station to Old Town.

This comes up with the DC Circulator.  For years they haven't been reporting data by bus line--there are six.  Obviously it's because most of the lines have minimal ridership.   This is from a blog entry, "Semi-reprint: Methodology for determining transit expansion" from 2014:

DC Circulator ridership per day
High and low service months (2013 data)

Route	Ridership Peak	Month	Ridership Low	Month
Georgetown-Union Station	6,600	June	5,500	February
Woodley Park-McPherson	5,060	February	4,000	November
Union Station-Navy Yard	1,700	July	900	November
Rosslyn-Dupont Circle	2,750	July	2,550	October
Potomac Ave.-Skyland	1,650	September	1,150	November

I had no idea that the ridership of these various bus lines was so pathetic. I knew they were bad mostly, but I had no idea how low the ridership is--other than the fact that I look at every Circulator bus that I pass and judge the amount of ridership on that particular bus, and most cases, except Downtown-Georgetown and sometimes on 14th Street, the number of riders appears to be minimal.

2. Circulator expansion is a form of what I call political bus service, provided to assuage business or neighborhood groups, but not really justifiable on a cost basis, because it gets minimal ridership.

Circulator bus at a stop on 14th Street NW.  

The reason this matters is that besides "branding" the most significant element of Circulator service is frequency, ideally every 10 minutes.  

But to justify that level of service cost-wise, you need high ridership, [ideally] 9,000 to 12,000.

DC's highest used buslines provided by Metrobus provide service as frequent as every 6-8 minutes during peak times, and have from 15,000 to 20,000 daily riders.

Even though DDOT makes information about the services available, they are not subject to the same budgetary pressures as the transit services offered by Metro, because the Metro budget process is much more public because their fare and route system is subject to federal regulations about how changes can be implemented, while locally-provided services don't have the same requirements.

So they evade real scrutiny.

3. This is why for many years I have advocated for the creation of an objective set of service metrics and standards for locally-provided transit service, so that decisions about what to offer or to not offer can be made in an objective, non-political, cost effective manner.

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I threw up my hands about the Circulator years ago, calling it "political bus service"--created to assuage particular neighborhood groups, not because it's needed ("Throwing up my hands and the "Anacostia" "Circulator"," 2010).

The fact is that public services ought to be offered where they are used, although breadth--offering services where they wouldn't otherwise be available--is an important criterion too.  The thing is, most Circulator bus lines duplicate in some ways Metrobus service.

Anyway, Greater Greater Washington has an article on the Circulator ("The DC Circulator's electrification dilemma"), saying that the city shouldn't cut back services in order to pay for electric buses, that reducing bus service is a different way of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.  It turns out, introducing electric buses and cutting three lines might actually be the way to get rid of the minimally used services.

The Circulator bus service has six lines.  With 5.7 million riders in a year pre covid, that's an average of 2,735 riders per line per day.  That's pathetic for a city that pre-covid, had multiple Metrobus lines with ridership between 12,000 and 28,000 each day during the week.

But now total ridership is almost 1/3 of that level, so it's fewer than 1,000 daily riders per line.

Note: all transit systems are screwed ridership-wise these days, given the impact of work from home on ridership.  Most systems have less than 50% of pre-covid ridership, although there are a couple of exceptions.

So I understand the dilemmas of transit planning in that environment.  On the other hand, it's all the more reason to discontinue services that are not only minimally used, but duplicated by other services.

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Here in Salt Lake City, a local sustainable mobility group advocated for a dedicated bus lane on a street with only four lanes, for a bus line with fewer than 2,400 riders per day.  That's crazy.

I am reminded about a section in one of the books I read about the Vietnam War, that the US kept reporting battle victories duly written about in the New York Times, but a journalist mapped each battle, and noticed that each one was that much closer to Saigon, indicating that actually the US/ARVN were losing territory.