[PRCo] Re: STREETCAR RIDERS

[Fred Schneider]

It would be really nice to get them to pull all of the 1918 and 1920  
reports for us.   That would give us a pretty good idea of what peak  
ridership was on all the systems in the state.

On Sep 3, 2007, at 2:05 PM, Edward H. Lybarger wrote:

> We don't have any F&S data...just H. C. Frick Coke Company maps,  
> aerial
> photos from 1939 and an abandonment petition submitted after the fact.
> Would you like to go to the Archives Tower in your spare time and  
> dig the
> rider numbers out of the DIA reports?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
> [mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org]On Behalf Of  
> Fred
> Schneider
> Sent: Monday, September 03, 2007 1:02 PM
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo] STREETCAR RIDERS
>
>
> The Louge Report Data is interesting to me for another reason.   It
> shows just how voluminous city transit riders were.
>
> Last year a friend of mine called me to task for putting too much
> emphasis on small city trolley system.   He pointed out that most
> riders were in the largest cities.   Being prone to ask test such
> statements, I did just that.   I went back to the 1907 U. S. Census
> of Electric Railways, which was the last time data for revenue
> passengers was given by company.   I placed the data into a spread
> sheet for every company in the U. S. by large city, small city, and
> interurban.
>
> What did I decide was a large city?   Well, back in Nineteen-Aught
> and Seven I figured that One Hundred Thousand People constituted a
> pretty big city.   There were not too many of them outside the
> east.   Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver made
> the cut.   There were no big cities in Texas then nor in Kansas.
> What was the result?   Big cities accounted for 77.7% of all fares
> lifted.   Small cities, small towns .. those under 100,000 ...
> accounted for about 15 percent of the fares.   The interurbans were
> the rest, about seven percent.
>
> Locally?  My local system in Lancaster, Pennsylvania was the sixth
> largest in terms of fleet and miles of track in Pennsylvania.
> Conestoga Traction Company had 165 cars running over 163.75 miles of
> track.   In their best year they lifted about 11 million fares.
> Note that the 88 FRANKSTOWN cars in Pittsburgh pulled in more than 12
> million riders in 1948.   The two Highland Park lines together moved
> more than the Lancaster system.
>
> I can only suspect that Fineview might have moved more than all the
> streetcars in Warren, PA.   Maybe????
>
> Did Thornburg haul more than the Fairchance and Smithfield?
>
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