Analysis of Sound Transit’s East King County Technology Report
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3.0 Ridership Estimation Errors
A surprising element of the Sound Transit report was the fact that monorail was estimated to have lower ridership than light rail in all cases. Even more surprising was the claim that the bus systems would have higher ridership than monorail on several segments. According to the Sound Transit documents, the primary reason for low ridership estimates on monorail was due to the assumption that the monorail system would terminate at a single point in downtown Seattle, forcing a transfer to other systems for access to other parts of the city. The claim is that this forced transfer is necessary because the Green Line is "not built to accommodate interlining with additional monorail routes".
However, we have verified with the Seattle monorail agency that a monorail coming from the East Side can be linked in to the Green Line. Moreover, we have verified that Sound Transit never consulted other than minimally with the Seattle Monorail Authority on this point or other issues.
It is clear that because of the assumption of a forced transfer, monorail ridership is underestimated in the ST report. This pervades the comparative chart following page 9 of the report. Even without this suppression of monorail ridership, the chart indicates that monorail and light rail fair about equally over all segments studied by ST. If you correct the chart for the artificially and erroneously low monorail ridership numbers, monorail apparently would come out ahead. This is totally at variance with the reporting and conclusions that have been drawn from the report, which is that monorail somehow is fares poorer than light rail.
Another issue with the ridership estimates is that it fails to take into account the passenger-attracting benefits of time certain travel. Many of the light rail and bus options in the report assume at-grade operation, where the system will be forced to operate at a speed that is safe for the cars, trucks, and pedestrians whose path it will cross. In contrast, all monorail segments are grade-separated and automated and will thus provide fast, dependable performance for riders. Such speed and dependability will be a key decision point for commuters who want to escape the traffic jams that are common on the roadways.
A correction of these errors and recalculation of ridership would show monorail to be the ridership leader if the calculations included the effects of travel time and assumed easy access to downtown Seattle for monorail riders via the Seattle monorail.
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