November ridership numbers for the Cincinnati streetcar show the transit system attracted slightly fewer riders than it did a year ago.
The report from the Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority shows that 34,674 people rode the streetcar in November — just less than the 34,721 who rode in November, 2017. This year’s numbers were buttressed somewhat by a surge on Friday, Nov. 23, when 4,155 people rode the streetcar for free in conjunction with Black Friday. Another 3,257 rode for free that Saturday.
Even with the boost, however, ridership numbers were lower than the previous month, when 38,519 riders boarded the streetcar. That was significantly lower than the 46,327 riders budgeted to ride in October, continuing an ongoing trend in which the streetcar has missed its ridership projections and dropped in its year-over-year totals. In October 2017, 63,413 people boarded the streetcar.
The streetcar has seen increased ridership year-over-year only once, in March this year.
The drop in ridership is significant because a portion of the streetcar’s operating fund comes from fares riders pay. Revenue from fares was $11,000 lower than projected due to decreases in ridership.
Advertising revenue for the streetcar is also down by about $74,000 year to date. However, the system is about $86,000 under budget year to date a memo from City Manager Patrick Duhaney said earlier this month because it spent $110,000 less than budgeted on its Transdev contract and received $64,000 more than expected in federal contributions.
Cincinnati’s streetcar opened in September 2016 and has been hobbled by a number of problems since, from cold-weather outages related to compressor flaws last winter to issues with traffic blocking the streetcar tracks.
The streetcar this year has so far seen fewer problems with cold weather, though it is still early in the season. The rail transit system still struggles with hitting the 12- to 15-minute wait riders are supposed to experience. A traffic study two years in the making may help with that, though an interim report on that study presented this week raised frustrations in Cincinnati City Council. Safety incidents involving the streetcar have begun to drop, with a 67 percent decrease between October this year and the year prior.
Meanwhile, a comparable system in Kansas City is seeing big growth in year-over-year ridership. More than 143,000 people rode the Kansas City streetcar last month, a 12,000-rider increase from the year prior. November was the sixth straight month the system had seen year-over-year increases in ridership.
Kansas City’s streetcar is free to ride and draws from a somewhat bigger population of potential riders.
Performance issues with Cincinnati’s 3.6-mile system have triggered a flurry of potential changes. Some Cincinnati City Council members have called for a streetcar executive who could take the reins of the project from its current tangled management structure involving SORTA, the city and contractor Transdev, which controls day-to-day operations.
SORTA has considered stepping away from its management role, though it is still unclear how it would be able to do so under the constraints that come from the system’s initial federal funding.
And earlier this year, there were rumblings that Cincinnati Bell, which paid $3.4 million to name the streetcar the Cincinnati Bell Connector for a decade, might consider dropping its sponsorship over performance issues. The company said in a statement it did have “concerns” about the streetcar’s performance but hadn’t made any decisions about its sponsorship.
So far, data on ridership is only available for the first two days in December. Those days happen to be weekends — usually the streetcar’s strongest days — and both saw relatively high ridership. Saturday, Dec. 1, which was also free, saw 2,629 riders. Sunday, Dec. 2 saw 1,389. The streetcar was also free to ride Dec. 8 and will be free again Dec. 15, both Saturdays.
This article appears in Dec 12-19, 2018.
