Update: First Hill streetcar ridership on the rise in Seattle

Update

With new data from its First Hill streetcar, the Seattle Department of Transportation knows what riders like: Free rides.

After a glitch prevented the department from reviewing how many people were actually using its new streetcar line on First Hill, it has fixed the problem and knows how popular the line has been. One thing is clear: the promotional free-ride Thursdays caused ridership to dramatically spike on the streetcar by hundreds.

But ridership has been doing well overall. The average weekday ridership between April 14-30 was 2,305, and 3,158 between May 3-14.

That’s good news for SDOT which used a Sound Transit forecast to set its ridership goals: 3,000-3,500 average daily riders by 2030. It already hit that goal in May — peaking on May 5 with 3,881 riders.

Original story – May 11

Seattle’s First Hill streetcar has been a popular attraction after opening earlier this year. Just how popular, however, isn’t exactly known.

The Capitol Hill Blog reports that the First Hill streetcar that opened in January – after 18 months of delays – was unable to report daily ridership numbers. The counters on the streetcar have been collecting data, yet the Seattle Department of Transportation has not been able to access it. In other words, SDOT has software to handle the data, the streetcar just isn’t sharing it.

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The streetcars use a light sensor in its doors that monitors when a person enters and exits. That is how counts are made.

The blog also reports that SDOT did not project any expectation of how the streetcar should have performed initially. The only forecast the department had was based on a 2010 Sound Transit study. That study projected daily ridership up to 3,000-3,500 by 2030. SDOT was able to see how many ORCA cards were used on the streetcar – 50,159 rides, which translates to about 1,618 rides each day.

SDOT has since fixed the glitch and the streetcar’s automated counters have been communicating with the department’s servers as of May 10.

“Prior to yesterday there were technical issues transmitting data to our source software program, we have since corrected the technical issue,” said Norm Mah, with SDOT.

SDOT doesn’t have any ridership numbers just yet, however. They still need to dig through the data to see how many people are using the streetcar.

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