Rad Sallee, METRO’s man at 801 Texas Avenue, had this interesting bit of spin in Monday’s transportation column:
At the same City Council committee meeting, one speaker claimed loudly that Metro has “decimated” its bus system. You decide.
Local bus boardings for October through April were up 4.2 percent from a year earlier, rail boardings were up 6.3 percent and Park & Ride boardings up 13.1 percent.
Boardings are a rough gauge of ridership, because each transfer is counted as a boarding, so let’s look at other measures.
From April 2006 to January 2008, Metro says, it increased the number of bus trips 4.6 percent, bus miles traveled 2 percent and bus hours of operation 2.6 percent.
Metro also says it has increased weekday bus service in each of six consecutive route revisions since August 2006.
Before applauding too loudly, remember that bus boardings were 98 million in 1999 compared to bus and rail boardings of 101 million in 2007.
That’s a puny increase of 2 percent in eight years, several of which brought spiraling gasoline costs.
Still, the bus system is a long way from decimated.
Raequel Roberts had to smile after reading that. Perhaps she even supplied the statistics!
Pedantic debates over the verb “decimate” aside, however, the fact is that Harris County’s population has surged over a period of years, gasoline prices have surged more recently, and neither METRO system ridership nor METRO bus “service improvements” have come close to matching either. Quite the contrary!
And of course METRO’s man at 801 Texas Avenue neglected to mention that the 2003 referendum promised a 50% increase in bus service that has failed to materialize (and, in fact, that broken promise has even disappeared from METRO’s website). Apparently that wasn’t germane to the dissection of the verb “decimate.”
