October 2016 Link Ridership Report – Whole New World

Welcome everyone to the return of Link Ridership posts. I took a bit of break and what do you know, ST went and opened up a couple new stations.

Turns out they are quite popular and not only are running at 2018 projections for ridership, but they appear to have broken the previous pattern. We're in a whole new world here. Aside from its first few months of operations, Link ridership has always experienced significant seasonal variation, with summer peaks and winter lulls, but U-Link is reducing it sharply. For the first time since 2009, October ridership was higher than September. It's obviously very early and we won't see an solid patterns until a couple years of Year-over-Year (YOY) data, but it's certainly interesting.

Average daily ridership for Link in October was:

• Weekday: 68,387 (+84.3%)
• Saturday: 42,440 (+90.4%)
• Sunday: 35,769 (+48.6%)

Other modal ridership stats:

• Sounder, +3.2%
• Sounder North, -3.4%
• Sounder South, +3.9%
• Tacoma Link, -0.3%
• ST Express, -0.3%
• Sound Transit Systemwide, +25.4% Weekday, +23% Total Boardings

The complete October Ridership Summary is here. Another milestone reached was that for the first quarter ever Link Weekday ridership surpassed ST Express in Q3.

Charts below the break.