50-Million Milestone for TRAX
None by KCPW
(KCPW News 10-26-06) Unusually high gas prices over the summer helped TRAX hit a milestone of 50-million riders last month. UTA General Manager John Inglish says that's far more than was projected for the first seven years of light rail in Utah:"We've been ahead of projections from the day we opened," says Inglish. "We were supposed to be carrying 23-thousand riders a day by like 15 years from now. We've always carried more than that and now we're carrying closer to 50-thousand."
Inglish says ridership spiked over the summer as gas prices peaked. He says both the Sandy and University TRAX lines are running at a brisk pace - in large part because they link all the major events venues downtown, including the Delta Center, LDS Church Conference Center and Rice Eccles Stadium.
More ridership does mean more ticket revenue for UTA, but Inglish says the two offset each other, because more cars are required to meet the need.
Email to a friendPosted in KCPW Newsroom. Copyright 2008 KCPW
1. Michael T Packard said:
What Inglish is saying is that ridership is down a lot from the last great UTA propaganda push. Naturally, they had to find a way to put spin on the drop. So, it's 50 million . ra ra ra. It is also a carefully crafted canard.
Mike
2. M Packard said:
Mr. Inglish echos an ongoing UTA lie about orth south TrAX line exceeding the original projection. TrAX's ridedrship was below the prediction when the margin of error is included.
Two local and one national expert have put the error margin of the original 14,000 rider prediction at 5,000 to 7,000. When they got 19,000 riders or less over the first two years, (In June 2002 it got down to 15,500), they were still within the error margin of the original prediction.
Uta lies in a way that Dan Jones never does. He always tells the margin of error of the prediction.
Nearly every time they put out a statistic, they oversimplify, spin, hide, or lie!
Mike