I wanted to check up on how the Brio service was doing so I went to the Sun Metro web site looking for the director’s quarterly report to the board (the board members are the city council members). The last presentation was at the board meeting of April 14, 2015. Item 12 on the agenda was:
Presentation and discussion on the Fixed Route Performance Indicators for FY15 2ND QTR for period ending on February 28, 2015.
Unlike their prior quarterly report presentations there was no posting of the report for the public to view.
I decided to look at the national transit database web site. Sun Metro is required to submit their information to this database. Unfortunately their 2014 annual reports have not been published yet so I looked at 2013 compared to 2012.
The web site publishes a comprehensive manual that explains what each of their terms means. One term that required some research was “unlinked trips”. According to the manual every time a person steps on a bus the unlinked trips number increases by one. If someone must transfer from one bus to another in order to get to their destination, that would count as two unlinked trips.
How are we doing?
For 2012 sun metro reported that passengers road the busses for 86,715,454 miles. In 2013 their number was 65,226,810 or roughly a 25% drop.
Unlinked trips in 2012 were reported at 16,655,904 bus boardings compared to 12,710,270 in 2013. That is about a 24% drop.
In 2012 their operating expense per passenger mile was reported at $.55 and in 2013 it was $.70 or about a 28% increase in cost per mile.
In 2012 their operating expense per unlinked trip was $2.82 and in 2013 it was $3.52.
You don’t need to be a chief performance officer to understand these numbers.
Maybe someone familiar with the situation can explain to us why they had such a dramatic decrease in their ridership numbers.
We deserve better
Brutus
Posted by Brutus 
elpasospeak 
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