The number of trips taken on Los Angeles County’s bus and rail network last year fell to the lowest level in more than a decade despite a growing population and a booming economy.
Passengers on Metro buses and trains took 397.4 million trips in 2017, a decline of 15 percent over five years, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday. Metro’s bus system, which carries about three-quarters of the system’s passengers, has seen a drop of nearly 20 percent.
The ridership decline plaguing Metro and other Southern California transit agencies provides a grim assessment of public officials’ efforts to shift commuters from driving to public transit, according to the newspaper.
Experts and officials have no firm answers but attribute the decline to a combination of factors, including changes to immigration policy, competition from Uber and Lyft and more people buying cars, as well as problems with existing transit service.
Nearly two-thirds of former Metro riders told the agency in a survey in 2016 that they stopped riding because bus service was inefficient, inconvenient or difficult to reach, according to The Timeshose people now drive alone.
Metro officials, concerned by the decline, have commissioned a study on how to improve their service, which spans 170 lines and 15,000 stops, The Times reported
Experts have theorized that Metro has lost a relatively small number of riders who previously relied on the bus for all kinds of trips, including commuting and running errands. Their departure has had an outsized effect on overall ridership because they took multiple trips per day.
—City News Service