Section 15 Patronage Reporting for Barrier‐Free Transit Service

In order to qualify for federal operating assistance, transit operators in the United States are required to report annual unlinked passenger miles carried on bus and fixed guideway systems. In order to ensure fair apportionment of federal operating subsidies among various transit operators, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) requires that annual unlinked passenger miles statistics be reported within an accuracy of ±10% at a 95% confidence interval. If a statistical sampling method is used to compute annual unlinked passenger miles, transit operators must select an adequate sample size that will yield the desired results. Guidelines for collecting and reporting unlinked passenger miles data for transit systems with controlled passenger access have been provided in UMTA Circular 2710.4. However, this revenue‐based method is not suitable for barrier‐free transit systems in operation. A partial ride check‐based methodology can be utilized to develop these statistics. From sample ride checks, an analyst can estimate the average number of boardings and the average trip length per trip. These averages can then be utilized to establish annual unlinked passenger miles. Using Los Angeles' Metro Blue Line data collected during the first year of operation, this paper provides the estimates of variance and covariance in boardings per trip, and sample size requirements. Issues pertaining to daily, monthly, and quarterly patronage estimation are also addressed.