Metro’s ridership and revenues have fallen well below the transit agency’s projections since fares were raised this summer for rail and bus passengers.
Metrobus transported about 21 million passengers in July and August or nearly 2 million fewer riders than a year earlier, according to Metro’s monthly financial report.
The transit agency had projected bus ridership would increase slightly year-over-year.
Metro trains carried about 18.5 million passengers in August, roughly 600,000 more than during the same month last year. But rail ridership still fell more than 100,000 riders below projected ridership levels in August, the most recent month for which data is available.
Metro’s rail system is almost a half-million riders short of budget projections through the first two months of the fiscal year.
The transit agency in July and August implemented multiple rounds of fare increases for bus and rail riders in an effort to fill a $189 million budget shortfall. The fare increases were expected to generate an extra $108 million for Metro. But through July and August, Metro’s revenues are falling roughly $7 million short of its projections.
Metro Chief Financial Officer Carol Kissal told The Washington Examiner that she believed the economy, not the transit agency’s fare increases, was responsible for the shortfall.
“We haven’t had the economic upsurge that we’re looking for in the District and the region, and because of that we’re seeing the continued effect in declines in ridership,” Kissal said.
The Washington region posted the lowest unemployment rate among the nation’s large metropolitan areas in August at 6.2 percent, although the District’s rate was a much higher 10 percent.
Kissal said her office in January had assembled its ridership projections based on 2 percent growth over 2009’s numbers but had not seen those prognostications come to fruition.
“If I was a good predictor of the economy I’d be working on Wall Street,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll see some of the impacts of a recovering economy impacting our ridership soon so we can get it back to budgeted levels.”
