Today, Lucas Wall tackles the subject of Metro cutting downtown trolley service and some “low-performing” bus routes, and the result is (unintentionally) humorous. Just remember, these Metro officials are highly paid professionals who REALLY know what they are doing; and Wall is the Chronicle‘s resident transportation expert:
Death of the trolleys is not a surprise. The Metropolitan Transit Authority placed them on probation last fall because of poor ridership. It gave the trolleys, and other low-performing bus routes, six months to increase ridership or face the chopping block.
We’re glad it’s not a surprise to Wall. But maybe it’s a surprise to the people who used to depend on it — you know, back when it had thousands of daily riders, before the trolley service was “improved”:
Ridership has steadily dropped since reaching a peak of 10,384 average weekday boardings in August 2001. After getting down to half that number — 5,011 riders per day in May 2004 — Metro reconfigured six trolley routes into three and designed them to tie into the Main Street light rail line. That move resulted in an immediate drop of 2,000 riders per day, according to statistics from the authority.
Metro proposed killing trolley service last fall but agreed to instead reduce the hours of operation and implement a 50-cent fare to help recover some of the operating costs. Once the free service ended, ridership plummeted almost 90 percent. Last month, an average of only 302 people rode the trolleys each weekday.
“Their performance is worse than ever,” Wilson said. “The fare had such a negative impact on ridership, the revenue return was insignificant.”
THAT is an amazing quote. How much is he paid for expertise like that? You know, it’s almost like Metro didn’t want the trolleys to succeed:
Wilson said trolley service began in October 1998 to help relieve congestion caused by the Downtown/Midtown Transit Streets Project, Metro’s massive effort to rebuild 14 streets in the city center. That project is down to the final two segments, Smith and Travis downtown, and is expected to be completed by fall.
“The reason why the trolleys were there is going away in a matter of months,” Wilson said.
“You can look at it as we jumped the gun a couple months. But we just made a business decision on how to allocate our resources.”
Metro has to juggle a declining ridership problem, a hefty debt, and save some money to fund expansion of rail lines, all at the same time. No doubt that’s where Metro will allocate its resources, at the expense of “low-performing” bus routes, Park and Rides and the downtown trolleys.
(How long will the public stand for Metro’s questionable decision-making, and how long will local media continue to (mostly) cover for the unaccountable government entity?)
As for Laurence Simon’s forum question:
Are there still going to be trolleys from the rail stops to Minutemaid on game days, or will people have to walk all those blocks and back? What about Toyota Center, too?
Wall’s story doesn’t address this. But then again, Wall isn’t generally known for asking probing questions of Metro officials. His curiosity is definitely lacking!
RELATED: Metro cuts bus routes and downtown trolleys (blogHOUSTON)
