[PRCo] Fwd: Pittsburgh 1948 - Part 12: Interurban lines

[Bill]

--- In LRPPro at yahoogroups.com, "Leroy W. Demery, Jr."
<chris_demery at ...> wrote:

Lyndon et al.,

Continuing with Pittsburgh streetcar line traffic data from 1948:

Part 12: Interurban Lines

Charleroi
35.2 miles

Donora
6.3 miles

Washington
29.0 miles

37 - Castle Shannon
6.7 miles

Interurban lines
62.9 miles system length (unduplicated).

The reported "revenue passengers" are actually "zone passengers," and
so this count is 
much larger than the number of people who rode the cars.

When we discussed this previously, Ed estimated:

--3.3 million passengers for the "interurban" division.
--300,000 passengers for the Donora branch.
--An average travel distance of 5.5 zones, = 11 miles, for the entire
interurban division.
--An average travel distance of 2 zones, = 4 miles, for the Donora branch.

All this implies an average travel distance of about 12 miles for the
Washington and 
Charleroi services.

I'd like to have a "separate" passenger count for each service. It
seems disarmingly simple 
to divide the reported passenger counts by 6 (6 zones = 12 miles)

Charleroi: 9,959,000 / 6
=1.7 million.

Washington: 6,231,000 / 6
= 1.0 million.

I've come up short, and the reason is probably because Lougee
allocated some of the 
Charleroi passengers to Donora. Subtracting 600,000 "zone passengers"
for the Donora 
branch, then dividing by 6:

(1,558,000 - 600,000) / 6
= 160,000

I feel reasonably secure in presenting "annual ridership" at "2
million" and "1 million," 
respectively, for the Charleroi and Washington services.

For route 37, the average travel distance was somewhere between 3 and
4 miles. I'll use 4 
miles, and adjust Lougee's passenger count - 2,409,000 - upward by
1.33 to account for 
transfers. That gives 3.2 million passengers. This I'll leave "as is"
because it gives a nice 
"round" sum of 6.5 million passengers for all services that operated
over the "interurban" 
lines. 

The "weighted average" travel distance is 7.2 miles, which goes into
the "traffic density" 
table as 7 miles.

As noted previously, the passenger traffic density carried by the
downtown - Castle 
Shannon segment was roughly four times greater than carried by the
"entire" interurban 
division.

Ed also estimated "about 3,600 weekday passengers on the Charleroi
line and 2,200 on 
the Washington line within Allegheny County. (He also suggested adding
50 percent for 
local passengers within Washington County.)

>From the above, I estimated about 1.25 million annual passengers on
the Charleroi line, 
and 750,000 on the Washington line, within Allegheny County.

This permits the following comparisons, which go into the "traffic
density" table as a 
footnote:

The current Dormont - Mount Lebanon - Castle Shannon line carried very
roughly 4.5 
million passengers at 1948, compared to roughly 3 million today.

The remaining portion of the "interurban" line carried very roughly 2
million passengers at 
1948, compared to roughly 4.5 million today.

Just one more installment to go!

Leroy W. Demery, Jr.

--- End forwarded message ---