[PRCo] *In Pittsburgh...* *......the Greatest City In The U.S.*

[Fred Schneider]

Do not know where you find positive Cleveland numbers…..  

Since it was not posted to the website, I can only believe the year over year steady gains were revenue losses or ridership losses that impressed you.   

Light rail, aka Shaker Rapid … Peak year was 1948 with 7.437 million.   In 1996 they hauled 3.847 million. In 2012 it was 2.855 million fares.    The 1995 and 2013 numbers were those that the RTA reported to APTA.

The heavy rail numbers for 1995 and 2013 sere 5.140 million and 6.240 million.   Herb Brannon once told me that the highest average weekday volume before the airport extension was around 50,000 a day … that would be about 15 million a year.

Bus numbers for 1995 were 50.2 million and for 2012 38.5 million.   

Overall, including demand responsive riders, it has dropped  10.6 million a year since 1996, not risen.   It has dropped 22% while the population has done down about 21% in the same period … cannot tell exactly because we can only extrapolate the the population drop in the intercensal periods.   But it looks like its going down proportionally with the loss of people living in Cleveland.   

Here is the APTA website:

http://www.apta.com/resources/statistics/Pages/ridershipreport.aspx

On Nov 24, 2013, at 8:10 AM, PC wrote:

> I was very much impressed with Cleveland transit statistics Mr.Brannon; they realized year over year steady gains.  One would suspect such to be 'a' measure
> of economic health--people traveling back and forth to work and-or to shopping.  Yet the situation for the nation is still bad; maybe Cleveland is still doing better than the
> average nationally.
> 
> The city has received some bad press with the women captives recently released and negative police reports.  But such is possible most anywhere today.
> 
> I have not been in Pgh in decades.  I shall look into these books.
> 
> 
> Phil
> 
>