The chart below shows SacRT riderships trends from January 2000 through October 2016, based on data provided by SacRT. People discussing SacRT ridership often refer to the economic downturn, the resulting service cuts and fare increases, and the resulting loss of ridership. The chart gives a visual representation.

Be cautious in drawing conclusions from the chart. Though the saying is, “hindsight is 20/20,” in the case of transit, it may not be that good. There are multiple variables at work on ridership, only two of which are service levels and fares. There are other transit variable, and many out side the control of transit agencies such as freeway and roadway construction (Fix 50, among others), economic vibrancy, employment rates and types of employment, and patterns of jobs and residences, all of which have changed a great deal over this span.

The chart seems to me to indicate that a downturn in ridership was already under way before the service cuts and fare increases took place, so these may have exacerbated rather than caused the loss of ridership. The September 2005 fare increase did not seem to affect ridership, and the January 2008 service cut was followed by increased ridership. A long term trend of interest is that bus and light rail are nearly equal parts of ridership now, whereas at the beginning of this period bus was nearly twice light rail. A part of this may be the extension of light rail to Folsom, which is packed with riders during commute hours. Though it is a little soon to say, it does not look like the CRC extension had a similar effect.

It might be useful to plot employment/unemployment trends on the same chart, but this information is not readily available and will take some time to locate and get into the same format as ridership.

• SacRT