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Transit ridership doubles in early days of Games

February 18th, 2010 · 33 Comments

TransLink officials have been hoping that the Games would let them show off what they could do with a healthy budget and a million riders. That hope is being realized. The system is actually hitting 1.5 million riders — almost double the normal 800,000. (My Globe story here.)

I know (thanks to gmgw) that not everyone is thrilled about having almost the entire city hop on the transit system every day. And I’m sure there have been some glitches out there. But it largely seems to be a success story (unless you tell me otherwise).

I’m having a little trouble getting reliable stats on other systems, but it looks like Toronto gets 1.5 million on average every day and New York (the third largest system in the world) gets either 5.2 million or 7 million, depending on which place you look.

BTW, here are some estimates of the volumes that TransLink cobbled together for me yesterday. (Sorry if your bus was late — it was because someone was stuck helping me out with this.)

Expo/Millennium/Canada Lines/ together
Normal daily ridership: 344,000
Peak on Sunday: 709,000
Canada Line alone
Normal daily ridership: 94,000
Peak on Sunday: 209,000
Expo/Millennium lines alone
Normal daily ridership: 250,000
Peak on Sunday: 500,000
Buses
Normal daily bus ridership: 710,000
Peak on Sunday: 900,000
SeaBus:
Normal daily ridership: 17,000
Peak on Sunday : 50,000
West Coast Express:
Normal daily ridership: 11,000
* We don’t run trains Saturday and Sunday regularly, but we are running them during the Olympics.
Sunday ridership: 3,400
Monday, Feb. 15: 17,000
99-B Line UBC not even in session.
Normal daily ridership: 45,000
Peak on Sunday 57,000
STATS FROM THE CITY (Dale Bracewell)
Streetcar line
Ridership record before Saturday was 15,000
Peak on Sunday 23,000
Pedestrians on all three False Creek bridges in one 24-hour period
16,000
Volumes normally recorded on summer days
7,000
Bike traffic on all three False Creek bridges
4,000
Normal summer traffic
5,000

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