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News from King County Department of Transportation
Release date:  Jan. 23, 2008

Metro estimates biggest ridership gain in 10 years

King County Metro Transit bus ridership increased a record-setting 7 percent last year with an estimated 110 million passenger boardings in 2007. It surpasses the 103.2-million mark set in 2006. Metro vanpool and vanshare programs also saw record ridership last year.

These preliminary estimates will be finalized in March, but it is believed to be the largest annual ridership increase for Metro in the past 10 years. Breaking down the numbers shows that Metro had 365,000 boardings on an average weekday in 2007 – the equivalent of the entire population of the cities of Bellevue, Federal Way, Kent and Renton boarding a Metro bus on a single weekday.

“More people are turning to the bus for their daily travel, and they like the service enough to make it a permanent choice,” said King County Executive Ron Sims. “Our residents want options, and that’s what Metro is delivering.

"This shift in driving habits not only helps in the fight to reduce global warming, it increases the capacity of our roads and highways during the high-demand commute times," Sims said. "With more buses and improved service coming on-line from our voter-approved Transit Now initiative, it will be easier every year for even more people to include the bus as their travel choice."  

The 110 million boardings do not include trips taken by passengers traveling in vanpools and or ridership on Metro’s Access services for people with disabilities. The vanpool programs have seen strong growth, too. Vanpool ridership was about 2.3 million in 2007 – up 18 percent from the previous year. The newer Vanshare program totaled 300,000 rides in 2007, a 39 percent increase for the year. The Access program continues to provide about 1.2 million trips a year.

Metro managers say high gas prices and strong employment have historically contributed to ridership gains. Gas prices increased 10 percent in 2007, and employment in King County rose 2.5 percent.

“Those economic factors support the strong ridership growth we've seen over the past three years,” said Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond. “Since 2004, boardings are up almost 15 percent. We now have about 50,000 more boardings each weekday than we did in fall 2004.”

In addition to higher gas prices and job growth, Desmond believes Metro's efforts to restructure and improve service in the past few years have helped increase ridership. Also in 2007, new funding from the Transit Now sales-tax initiative became available for service expansion, and it is being rolled out over a 10-year period. So far, Transit Now has funded improvements on more than 15 high-ridership routes.

“Prior to the passage of Transit Now, Metro did not have the revenue to add enough service hours to keep up with demand,” said Desmond. “In recent years, our service changes have focused solely on restructuring service to better serve our markets and increase ridership and productivity.”

Desmond said while there was new service in 2007, it was just a beginning and accounted for less than two percent of all Metro service. He attributes most of the 7 percent ridership increase last year to Metro’s efforts to provide more productive service during a period of high demand. 

For example, a revised Route 150 and the new Route 180 in the Kent and Auburn areas have seen combined ridership growth of more than 13 percent since September 2006. About 900 of these daily rides occur on the new "Airport Connector" portion of the Route 180 between Kent, Sea-Tac, and Burien. Metro also introduced two-way express service during peak periods in South King County (new Seattle-to-Burien express trips in the morning and new Burien-to-Seattle express trips during the afternoon). These have generated new ridership by successfully serving the "reverse commute" market with express trips.

Desmond said it’s more than just the service on the road. Marketing programs helped reach out to new customers, and introduce them to the variety of services offered by Metro. The agency conducted unique commute planning sessions and community based incentive programs to help people change their travel habits and try transit.

The outreach also emphasized the positive environmental benefits of using Metro to reduce greenhouse gases, pollution, and congestion. And, putting service and schedule information at people’s fingertips made it easier to ride with Metro. Information requests grew almost 20 percent in 2007, with Internet sessions accounting for nearly 90 percent of all of Metro’s information requests.

But growth does not always occur where planned, nor does it always come without some hiccups.

“Existing bus routes have had to absorb most of this increase in riders, and we know many trips on many routes are crowded,” said Desmond. “When you have more people riding the bus, it can take longer to board passengers and travel times can increase. Reducing passenger loads and improving schedule reliability is a big goal for us in 2008, and our customers should be seeing changes for the better throughout the year.”

Updated:  January 23, 2008

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