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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

The better acceleration and faster service almost have to eventually improve ridership, and electrification should improve operation cost, but YoY ridership numbers post-covid are still weird, and I'd like to see finer-grain numbers before claiming this after just a month or two.

tl;dr: nothing to see here just yet.

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I agree that it's too soon to call but the article does say that ridership is above pre-covid levels:

> The trains have also surpassed pre-COVID-19 ridership levels, with weekends becoming increasingly popular. Saturday ridership has increased 169%, and Sunday ridership has increased 142% since last October, the release said.

Possibly there's some novelty factor to riding the new trains. My 70-something year old aunt, visiting from another continent, wanted to ride the new trains (and they weren't even fully converted yet, it was day 2 of the soft launch and only a couple trains had been switched over so I had to check the train sightings on Discord). Obviously they're not all that unique outside the US but it's exciting to see them here.

But weekend service is now twice as frequent (now every 30 minutes) which is a game changer, so it's not a surprise that those numbers in particular have shot up since they were pretty weak to begin with.

Reminds me one thing they could do that would improve BART ridership is to run buses between BART stations after hours.

Take BART in the early evening, miss the last train out, take the bus back.

every mode of transit along commute routes in the bay (rail to downtown, freeways to southbay) seems to be at a 4 year high in terms of utilization

It was hard to tell from the article whether it was electrification, new seats, some other affordance of the new purchase, or simply more ridership overall...

Well the main affordance is higher frequency and better travel times.

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