Seattle light rail 2012 average weekday ridership of 26,000 reached 80% of the pre-construction forecast made for 2011, and is continuing to mature year by year.

This page is a living document that is revised and updated periodically, most recently May 14, 2013

PITF calculates average weekday ridership of Central Link at 25,954 for 2012, up 10 percent over 2011.  The 2013 forecast is 27,900 per weekday.

This updated page covers Seattle's light rail passenger counts from the first day of revenue service July 20, 2009 through March 31, 2013.  Sound Transit has provided PITF with the data presented here, all of which are estimates subject to change. Archive of data sheets from Sound Transit is at the bottom of this page.

Thanks to Seattle Transit Blog for posting interesting charts from data archived at the bottom of this page. 

PITF posted comments below the October 26, 2012 Seattle Transit Blog story on light rail ridership.   
And here.    And here.

New Sound Transit release of station boarding and exit counts over two years.

Sound Transit's forecast for Central Link Light Rail ridership in 2013 is 27,900 weekday boardings and 9.2 million annual boardings.  In the first quarter of 2013, the weekday average was 25,606 which is below the all-year forecast. That is the result of the normal seasonal pattern, with the winter quarter being traditionally a period of weak ridership, as seen in the charts below. Ridership is expected to rise month by month through August. First quarter ridership overall is 12% above the first quarter of 2012, so the slowly maturing ridership continues to mature with every passing month.

Sound Transit's Central Link Light Rail between downtown Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport achieved its highest ridership ever on the occasion of a Seahawks-Raiders  football game, attracting 36,555 boardings on August 30, 2012.  Ball games in the Century Link and Safeco stadiums near Stadium Station are proving to be an important source of ridership on light rail. PITF calculates that from May through September this year, sporting events brought in an additional 71,000 riders per month. 

Click here to go down the page for more on Stadium Station ridership on light rail.

The Sound Transit budget forecast for 2012 ridership set before the year started was 8.4 million. Based on stronger than expected ridership as the year progressed, the agency boosted its 2012 forecast to 8.6 million. The official count released by the agency in January 2013 is 8,699,821.

Dividing the observed annual ridership of approximately 8.7 million by the average weekday ridership of approximately 26 thousand yields an annualization factor of 335, higher than the expected factor of 304 used before ridership patterns were understood by Sound Transit management. Click to jump down the page for an explanation of why a high annualization factor means a greater reliance on  weekend and holiday customers to reach ridership goals.

Higher ridership means more standing on the light rail instead of sitting, as shown on the front cover of Sound Transit's 2011 annual report at right. Meeting the ridership forecast would require that even more passengers must stand instead of sit for part of their trip. This condition has been totally expected by agency planning, but perhaps not so much by Seattle transit riders. Crowded trains may discourage ridership by those who have options. While light rail cars can be packed safely by design with up to 200 riders, PITF has observed the reluctance of passengers on a platform to board after about 150 folks have stepped into a rail car. Sound Transit light rail trains are currently limited to two cars by the track capacity where trains reverse direction at the north end of the Downtown Transit Tunnel.

Short-term ridership forecasting at Sound Transit is improving year by year. In 2012 the target was exceeded by one percent.  In 2011 the average daily weekday boardings came in at 23,617, 5.5% below a dramatically-lowered budget target for 2011 of 25,000, set after the year began.  In 2010 the actual ridership of 7 million all year was more than one million below the forecast of 8.1 million. The average weekday ridership for all of 2010 was 21,026, which was 21% below the short-run forecast. The 2010 forecast was made in fall 2009, a year after the beginning of the recession in 2008 that was incorrectly blamed by Sound Transit for the ridership being below the short-run forecast in 2010. 

More significant has been the been the failure in the agency's long-run forecasting, PITF has recently learned that the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) was told by Sound Transit in 2003 -- when the $500 million Full Funding Grant Agreement (FFGA)  was awarded -- that the predicted fall 2011 average weekday light rail ridership would be 32,500, a number not yet reached as of the end of 2012, and higher than the most recent forecast for 2013 of 27,900.  Quoting Sound Transit's July 2012 draft Before and After Study, "For all of 2011, Central Link carried 7.8 million passengers compared to the FFGA prediction of 10.7 million, or about 27% lower than predicted."

Authorities plan for the majority of light rail riders to be people commuting to work, and thus there is a focus by Sound Transit and Federal Transit Administration on weekday ridership on non-holidays. The blue line on the next chart below shows non-holiday weekday ridership day by day on Central Link light rail since July 2009. Friday is often the most crowded day of the week on the trains. The red line on the chart shows a 15 day moving average -- amounting to three weeks -- that smoothes out the daily fluctuations and allows detection of up or down trends in the weekday ridership. The trend is up, with seasonal variation, high in summer, lower in winter.  At the end of December, 2012, weekday ridership was trending strongly downward, the same trend seen in December of 2010 and 2011.  As of March 2013, the ridership trend is heading up for the spring and summer tourist season. 

45,000 boardings per day indicated by the straight orange line high on the chart was the 2020 expectation for the Airport to Downtown train service presented frequently to the public while the line was under construction prior to 2009.  Long-run forecast ridership has been shown on other light rail lines to be reached about 18 months after the line completely opens, which would have been July 2011 for Seattle. In response to not yet even coming close to 45,000 per day, Sound Transit claims its light rail is maturing more slowly than the average USA light rail service, which experience so far indeed indicates to be true.

In 2012 the expected weekday average was set in the approved budget as 25,455, shown as the level of the green line on the right hand side of the above weekday chart.  A revised forecast presented in the 2013 proposed budget has bumped up the forecast slightly to 25,500.  For all of 2012, the weekday numbers reported to PITF average to is 25,954, representing the first time Sound Transit has ever beaten a light rail forecast for Seattle. Beginning in the summer of 2012, light rail has been occasionally breaking 35,000 riders on a few weekdays where there is a game at one of the SODO stadiums.

Sound Transit has given up on the forecast of 45,000 weekday average by 2020 for the current number of stations. Last year, the actual ridership results from 2010 and 2011 plus Sound Transit's own forecasts for 2012 through 2015 formed a clear trend line seen in the chart below as the lower line that ended up in 2020 at around 36,000, not the 45,000 that was bandied about prior to 2009. Now this year a new, more optimistic forecast has the light rail ridership headed toward 42,000 per day, closer to what was promised to the Federal Government back in 2003 in exchange for a $500 million grant to build light rail from Tukwila to Westlake Center, called "Initial Segment." Significantly, the original forecast did not include riders from Stadium Station, a boarding location critical to the ridership that Link now actually experiences.  However, PITF is encouraged that Sound Transit has set strongly growing ridership over the next three years, 2013-2015 as an important objective for the region's significant light rail investment made to date.

Sound Transit is now planning light rail line extensions to open in 2016 serving two more stations northward to Husky Stadium and one southward to South 200th in SeaTac. Incredibly, the agency forecasts these three new stations will expand system ridership by over 74,000 riders per weekday. Sound Transit's present day ridership experience compared to earlier pre-opening forecasts does not bode well for this forecast. 

Thanks to Sound Transit's willingness to share data with Public Interest Transportation Forum, a unique record of day-by-day development of light rail ridership in a world class city is being established. All data sheets from Sound Transit are posted at the bottom of this page. The route of Seattle's Central Link light rail from downtown to the main regional commercial airport is shown here on a map that also depicts with dotted lines the forthcoming extensions both to the north and the south. Some history of how this line was developed is here on Seattle Transit Blog.

Return to the Public Interest Transportation Forum home page.

Below this point is considerable additional detail for diving deeper into Seattle light rail ridership:

In considering the weekday ridership, note that rail ridership on a new line in any U.S. city typically rises within 18 months to its ultimate level until more stations are opened or the line is extended. William Millar, head of the American Public Transportation Association, noted this pattern in an interview in 2009, reported by the P-I. Tacoma Link, open since 2003, illustrates this reaching of a plateau in the previous chart, red line. As noted earlier, the 2020 forecast -- ultimate ridership -- for the Airport to Downtown segment in Seattle -- considered by itself separately from future extensions -- was 45,000 average daily boardings per weekday. The new, revised Sound Transit trend line noted earlier appears to reach 42,000 weekday average in 2020, but PITF's reading of the numbers leads us to believe that for Central Link the ultimate ridership prior to its extensions north and south may be settling in at less than that.  Sound Transit now hopes for 31,100 in 2015, the last full year in which ridership on the Airport to Westlake Center line is forecast separately. Oscillation between 20,000 and 30,000 average per weekday is what PITF now believes likely until the next two stations open for service in 2016. This range has been the case May 2010 through March 2013.  As noted earlier, Sound Transit was confident when construction began that  a 32,500 weekday average would be achieved by autumn 2011.

Because weekend ridership has turned out to be important for Seattle's light rail, the next ridership chart provided below shows all days.  The first, second, third, and fourth years of light rail operation are displayed on the same time axis, with the July 20 revenue service start-up anniversary beginning each year. The fainter daily numbers jump up and down considerably, but to indicate what's happening more clearly, the 14 day moving averages of daily ridership are shown in thicker lines. The first year, July 2009 to July 2010 is in green.  The second year, July 2010 to July 2011 is in red.  The third year, July 2011 to July 2012 is in blue.  The fourth year, beginning July 2012 is orange, and covers just through the end of December 2012. 

As the chart illustrates, ridership in the second full year of Seattle's light rail service (in red) did not grow as strongly as in the first year (in green). The blue line of the third year tracked pretty much continuously just above the red line of the second year. The orange line of the fourth year is starting to trend downward after the SeaFair weekend 2012 summer peak moving average reached about 30,000 per day., although the combination of Seahawks and Husky football at Century Link Field near Stadium Station provided a visible surge during  September 2012.

More simple versions of this chart focusing on the month-to-month change in weekday, Saturday, and Sunday/holiday ridership have been created and posted by Seattle Transit Blog from the data posted in the archive at the bottom of this page.

The alignment and stations of Seattle light rail line this year are the same as last year, with the terminus points at Westlake Center in downtown and the Sea-Tac Airport south of the city limits, and eleven stations in between. In February 2010, King County Metro reduced bus services that ran parallel to light rail in the same corridor and deployed more bus trips to serve light rail stations. In 2011-12, King County Metro has had enough funding to maintain bus service to and from light rail stations and thus support Sound Transit's goal of increasing ridership.

The Mariners, the Sounders, the Seahawks, University of Washington, Sound Transit, and Port of Seattle all promote light rail use for attending baseball, soccer, and football games. Despite low ballgame attendance during the 2012 losing season, Mariners baseball with frequent games has been a big contributor to Central Link light rail ridership of all the SODO stadium sports. The photo shows a 2010 scene on a Link rail car before the opening day game.

Seattle Seahawks games also bring a surge of light rail ridership. The chart just above shows two 2012 ridership high points on Seahawks game days, against the Raiders on August 30, and against the Packers on September 24. 

PITF has compared light rail ridership on game event days vs non-event days during the four months of June through September, 2012.  Light rail weekdays without games average 26,843, while weekdays with games average 30,500 -- higher by 3,658, a gain of 14%. Spread across all weekdays, the Stadium boardings boost up the daily average by about 1,900.  On weekends and the two holidays July 4th and Labor Day, the difference is more dramatic.  The weekend/holiday average ridership on days without events came in at 19,675.  On weekend event days, including the SeaFair weekend, the average was 24,650, higher by 4,975 per day, or 25% above non-event weekend days.

One way of understanding the importance of weekend game day attendance to light rail ridership is to look at the relationship between the average weekday ridership and total annual ridership, a number called the annualization factor. The annualization factor reflects the fact that forecasts involve calculations that come up with daily ridership, and that daily ridership cannot sensibly be multiplied by 365 days per year to get annual ridership.  This is because not as many people use transit on weekend and holidays as use it on normal work days. In its forecasting work, Sound Transit expected this annualization factor to be 304. Before seeing the Link Light Rail experience, the agency forecast 26,600 average weekday ridership in 2010 and multiplied by 304 to reach the annual forecast of 8.1 million.  Instead, Sound Transit experienced 7 million annual riders with a weekday average ridership of 21,000. You have to multiply 21,000 by 333 to get a 7 million annual number. This means that Sound Transit light rail is now seeing a greater reliance on weekend riders than was expected earlier. 

Furthermore, as noted in the July 2012 draft of the Before and After Study, "Central Link experiences the most ridership during the summer months, due to an increase of airport travelers during the cruise ship / tourist season, and due to events in downtown and at the stadiums." 

One irony arises from the historical fact that the formerly forecast daily average of 45,000 per day was based on a system plan that did not even include Stadium Station and its game day riders.  Stadium Station was at first to be deferred until after construction of the Initial Segment was completed in 2009, but that decision was reconsidered in 2005 and station put back into the construction plans for opening in 2009.     

For the 2011 revised forecast, Sound Transit had 8.3 million annual riders equivalent to 25,000 per weekday average.  The ratio implies an annualization factor of 332, which means the agency is learning from and embracing its real world ridership experience. The 2012 budget forecast for Seattle light rail is 8.4 million annual riders equivalent to 25,455 per weekday average, revealing an annualization factor of 330, coming down a bit but still way above 304 because weekend ridership is so important. The 2013 budget forecast for Seattle light rail is 9.2 million annual riders equivalent to 27,900 weekday average, indicating the annualization factor being held at 330.  The actual annualization factor revealed in 2012 is 335, which indicates Sound Transit is sandbagging its 2013 forecast to be below what the actual is likely to be, given the weekday forecast is accurate.

All train rides were free over a year ago on the opening weekend July 18-19, 2009, and the ridership estimate counted by hand for these first two days of light rail was 92,397, with a machine count of 66,792. These two free days -- with boarding levels similar to the 45,000 per day forecast for 2020 even if further line extensions were not completed by then -- are not included on the charts.  Regular adult fares are $2.00 to $2.75, depending on distance traveled, up by 25 cents as of June 1, 2011, an increase that was expected to dampen ridership by 1.2%, according to the Sound Transit analysis results from 2010 posted here. Passenger loads during the opening fare-free weekend showed Seattle's light rail certainly has the capacity to deal with the original 45,000 forecast ridership in a day.

The pie chart shown next provides a comparison of Link Light Rail ridership for a strong recent month, July 2012 with the ridership for other modes in the same month. King County Metro clearly dominates the transit patronage picture. The comparison is somewhat unfair, because light rail and other rail services run on a single line, while the Metro Bus network covers all of urbanized King County. Central Link can be considered a single line in the King County Metro service territory.

On the other hand, the $2.5 billion Sound Transit capital expenditure over a decade to construct and buy vehicles and equipment for the light rail line has vastly exceeded the approximately $100 million per year capital expenditure for Metro Bus equipment and facilities over a comparable time period. 

The next chart shows how monthly light rail ridership in Seattle evolved in its first months of life compared to ridership on the Tacoma Link streetcar and the South Lake Union streetcar.

The ridership forecast made by Sound Transit ten years ago for this line as a justification for Federal funding was made station by station.  The 21,400 total daily passengers making up the ridership gap below forecast as of last summer are shown for each station in the next chart.  The Airport Station is not included because its ridership is already above the 2020 forecast by about 2,000 per day!

The stations from Tukwila to Beacon Hill can be considered the commute shed for Seattle's light rail, and the daily rider boarding shortage shown below for this series of stations comes to 9,900 per day.  The resulting 21,400 daily ridership gap below the 2020 forecast of 45,000 is by simple arithmetic not being made up from the 1,900 daily weekday average ridership gained in summer from Stadium Station plus the 2,000 unexpected daily boardings at the Airport.