Sun Metro has not been publishing their quarterly fixed route numbers so I made a public information request.
Their response was quick, the service was good.
They provided me with their year end report for FY2019 as I requested:
They claim having more than a million riders for the month of August 2019 and more than 12 million for all of FY 2019.
Unfortunately their records show another 6% decrease in ridership between 2018 and 2019.
Also please take a look at their cost per trip. In August 2019 they show it as $5.00 per passenger trip. The most a passenger can pay is $1.50.
Their records show that passengers paid $11.59% of the cost of operating the service in August 2019.
We deserve better
Brutus
elpasospeak 
Maybe the problem here is that Sun Metro lies or the politicians in El Taxo lie? A MILLION people riding? A grand fantasy to try to stay in business and keep getting that “bite” on the taxpayers. It would seem the only people riding the buses, are the maids, baby sitters, students from Juarez. They pick them up in the morning and take them back in the afternoon, early evening. Mostly up North East, never see more that 2-3 people on any bus. And after about 7 pm, nobody on the buses, except the Driver, with all the lights on, including those BIG extended buses. EMPTY. Most times during the day, nobody waiting at bus stops. Unless Sun Metro, the City is charging passengers $200-300 per trip, their “Cash flow” numbers would seem to be a gross fabrication. Just another “Albatross” the CITY has hung around the necks of taxpayers.
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One reason nobody much on those 7 pm buses is that there is no service after that…no point in riding downtown when you can’t get a ride back…if you have a night class, too bad…you can’t get there by Sun Metro…
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Another interesting fact is the percentage of people picked up from bus shelters. That number is dismal. Either we’ve built shelters at the wrong stops or folks who ride the bus don’t really care about shelters. We built a bus terminal off Mesa that never has more than 3 people and usually those are standing outside smoking. The majority of riders near there go to stop next to Walmart instead of the terminal Beto said our community just had to have. The biggest problem is that folks with the ideas of what mass transit should look like don’t actually use mass transit on a daily basis and as a result don’t have a clue about behaviors of folks who do ride the bus. They just look at other cities with different demographics and job center cluster characteristics and assume the same model fits here. And taxpayers end up with more wasted money. Hey, Tommy G., since Sun Metro seems to have such a problem hitting their metrics, why don’t you get a few green belts DMAICing a corrective action plan. After all, Six Sigma can fix anything. And you’ll never win a Baldrige with your current metric misses.
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Everyone riding a bus wishes they had a car.
This is an indisputable fact. No one who values their time enjoys waiting for a bus or is better served by public transportation than they would private transportation.
For example, taking a bus to get groceries can take an average of about three hours in transportation time, unless you need to make transfers to different routes to get where you are going, like to the Outlet Shops from the far East side. That can become an easily half-day ordeal.
In a car that drops to twenty minutes or less, or forty from far East side to far West side.
Nobody wants to ride a bus.
Every politician thinks you should ride a bus.
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Robert Francis O’Rourke, Steve Ortega, Susie Byrd and Cortney Niland all made every effort to ensure that Sun Metro became what it is now. O’Rourke was the mastermind of the trolley.
NONE of them rode the bus to and from anywhere.
At least O’Rourke rode a bicycle regularly. They are all hypocrites in legislating public transportation that they themselves had no intention of using.
Try taking your pet to the veterinarian or pet park on a bus. Try carrying a ladder or several tool bags on a bus.
Public transportation is not even remotely a be-all-end-all solution for daily transportation.
It is, in reality, a niche solution for certain activities of people who don’t have the luxury of placing value on their personal time and effort.
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Beto did not mastermind the trolley. You can thank Peter Svarzbein.
https://salud-america.org/artist-saves-historic-streetcar-in-border-city/
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O’Rourke suggested the Trolleys in 2006-2007, years before Svarzbein was elected.
When he was trying to get the Segundo Barrio imminent domained to give to his father-in-law’s downtown real estate venture It was originally going to cost $1 million per mile to install. The trolleys were part of the downtown plan they were pushing, and what they ended up doing significantly increased O’Rourke’s father-in-law’s group downtown investment values.
So much for “man of the people”.
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https://downtownelpaso.com/beto-orourke-speaks-on-importance-of-downtown-revitalization/
Article from 2013, Svarzbein didn’t take office until 2015
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I saw Beto waiting at the bus stop once in front of his mother’s store. He did ride the bus at least once 🙂
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he was probably buying some pot, bust stops are popular places for drug deals and o’rourke is an admitted dopehead
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Feel better about yourself now?
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Soon they will be taking a page from Kansas City and some other cities and making bus rides free leaving taxpayers to pick up 100% of the cost of operation. Free rides will not even boost ridership much. The deeper problem in an inefficient system. What would be a 20 minute car ride can take three to five times longer by Sun Metro. We also live in a car and truck culture and people want their wheels and their independence.
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Don’t worry. AOC will fix that soon and cars will be no more or will be powered by unicorn farts.
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The exclusion of Segundo from the city’s planning process is a sad chapter in the DTEP saga. It seems real that Sanders wanted Segundo and its residents disappeared. But what do you do when they condemn the house you’ve lived in for 30 years and give you a check for $20K? Now you’re a homeless person with $20K because you can’t replace your dwelling for that amount.
I actually saw this happen when EPISD used emminent domain to take a retired woman’s home in Segundo. I was running the HFC then and, fortunately for her, her one time employer Jerry Rubin intervened to help.
The entire DTEP planning process was run in secret and the public involved only when it was near complete. The city chipped in a six figure amount for the planners, too, but had no control over it. That was done by the then PDNG now Borderplex of which our current mayor was a major player. I complained about the secrecy to the then HFC board but it wasn’t the HFC’s mission space.
Pay to play, the El Paso way! The Shaplites, all white yuppies, were the drivers of this. Racism is real and their virtue signaling belies the racist reality of the plan for DTEP and Segundo gentrification.
Then there was the Glass-Beach Study that basically concluded El Paso is perceived to be old, dirty Mexicans and the city needs some white washing of its image. It’s where we got the, “It’s All Good” tagline. I think we paid $250K for that one.
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Excuse me Jerry, but you apply labels a little too loosely to stir the pot. Escobar and Ortega are not white. Ann Morgan Lily and John Cook were not yuppies. It’s odd that you blame the Shaplites as you like to call them rather than Foster, Hunt, Margo, and the other business people who were the real drivers of the downtown redevelopment plan. Don’t leave out Joyce Wilson and her fuzzy math CFO. Don’t forget the prominent Latinos who have been proud members and contributors to PDNG and Borderplex Alliance and investors in Sanders’ downtown REIT to cash in and join the club. You can blame the young Shaplites all you want, but it was John Cook who cast the deciding vote on the ballpark after a closed door meeting in which he was told to get in line. That’s the same John Cook who also wanted to be a lobbyist for a downtown developer right after he left office, something he knew was against the rules.
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Spot on assessment. The “private investors” were driving the downtown revitalization through joyce wilson to city council. No one in city council at that time was an innocent, they were all aware of what they were doing. joyce brought her crew from arizona and they basically took over the major city departments.
the city attorney stopped cook from lobbying in a meeting when he should have been fined for doing it. he did know the rules and was intentionally in violation.
a bank guard doesn’t stop a robber then let him leave. when politicians break the law they are never held to account.
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