Trainwreck: The Rapid Silver Line leads to falling ridership, rising deficits

Trainwreck: The Rapid Silver Line leads to falling ridership, rising deficits | ITP Watch:
It’s been nearly a year since the $40 million Rapid Silver Line Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) line opened for business, so we thought it would be a good time to check up on how things are going.

The Fantasy: Promotional video from The Rapid showing the Silver Line causing economic development

In short, it’s a disaster:

• Since the Silver Line entered service, The Rapid has been losing ridership
• The Rapid is now losing millions operating the Silver Line
• No new economic development has been caused by the Silver Line

We review each of these items in this article.

Since the Silver Line entered service, ridership has declined

Wait, what? You thought ridership was increasing? One wouldn’t know it by reading The Rapid’s public proclamations. In fact, during the first few weeks of the Silver Line’s operation in August of 2014, The Rapid released statistics purportedly showing that ridership was increasing on both Bus Route 1, which largely overlaps the Silver Line’s route, and on the Silver Line itself. When one looks at the full picture, however, we see that riders mostly shifted from DASH service, the GRCC shuttle, and Route 1 to use the Silver Line. 

For instance, in September of 2014 the Silver Line had just under 60,000 riders. In the same month, the ridership on Route 1 dropped by 22,000 riders from September of 2013. The GRCC shuttle similarly dropped by 31,000 riders, and DASH South and West ridership dropped by over 5,000.

This is exactly what we expected and pointed out our position in a Crain’s Detroit article in May of last year. Since the Silver Line route added nothing new to The Rapid’s services, we didn’t expect much of anything to happen. And that’s exactly what happened. Nothing.

Even evidence that ridership is simply shifting from other routes to the Silver Line doesn’t tell the whole story. When The Rapid applied for funding from the federal government to cover the $40 million cost of constructing new permanent bus stops and purchasing buses, the system represented that the Silver Line would carry 7,200 average weekday riders and would attract 1,300 new daily riders to the system — all in its first year of operation. The trouble is that The Rapid’s overall ridership has declined, particularly in the last several months.

To the right is a graph showing the year over year ridership change at The Rapid. In just the first five months of this year, The Rapid’s overall ridership has declined by over 3%, with the most recent four months showing an average decline of 6% year over year. (All data are from the National Transit Database.)

In the most recent month where the data are available, the Silver Line’s ridership was approximately 3,000 per day, far from the 7,200 promised — and since The Rapid’s ridership is down overall, the number of new riders is in negative territory.

All this adds up to the fact that the Silver Line hasn’t added any new ridership to the system, meaning that $40 million was spent for nothing at all..."