Earthquake: The Long Road Back : Rail Ridership Drops as Commuters Return to Roads

Average daily ridership on the Metrolink commuter trains dropped 30% this week, disappointing mass-transit advocates who hoped the earthquake might motivate commuters to permanently relinquish their cars.

Officials, who said they anticipated the decline but hoped it would be more gradual, attributed the lower ridership to recent openings of better freeway detours.

At its peak, ridership on the commuter trains soared to a record high of 31,276 daily passengers last week. More than two-thirds of the riders were Santa Clarita Valley residents who bypassed quake-damaged freeways.

This week, however, Santa Clarita ridership fell by 40%, to 13,149 from nearly 22,000.

“It’s natural that people would want to see what the commute (on freeways) is like right now,” said Richard Stanger, executive director of Metrolink. “It was obvious that people were going to try the roads again.”

For the year-old rail system, the throngs of travelers still represent a boon in post-quake ridership as well as publicity. In December, for instance, about 10,500 passengers rode the periwinkle-and-white trains on an average day; of those, only 1,439 rode the Santa Clarita line.

“If we thought three weeks ago that we’d be up to carrying 13,000, we would have been dancing in the street,” Stanger said. “It’s a tremendous gain in ridership.”

Similar fluctuations in ridership were experienced in the weeks after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake on Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains. After that earthquake, ridership reached an all-time high of 357,000, up from the average pre-earthquake ridership of 210,000. But BART, too, suffered a disappointing drop of about 100,000 riders when the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge reopened after it had been shut one month.

“We knew we weren’t going to keep all those riders because we knew that the bridge would open,” said BART spokeswoman Vicki Wills. “We were just hoping we would keep more than we did. But they found another route--the automobile. It’s a shame.”

Urban planners say ridership on the Metrolink will probably mimic the pattern of BART. But fluctuations may continue as commuters continue trying out different methods of reaching their jobs--train, bus, car pool and driving solo. Patterns of behavior are affected by employers, who in some cases are demonstrating a newfound flexibility, offering more accommodating work hours or allowing people to work at home.

“We are in a period of tremendous flux and experimentation,” said Genevieve Giuliano, associate professor of urban and regional planning at USC. “For those who experimented with the train and found problems, they have probably moved on to other things.”

In the days after the Jan. 17 quake, which damaged portions of six freeways, Metrolink officials had an all but captive audience along the Santa Clarita train line. But last weekend, Caltrans opened shorter, vastly improved detours around the Golden State Freeway.

At its worst, motorists suffered delays last week of more than two hours as they attempted to navigate the Golden State-Antelope Valley freeway interchange during rush hour. By contrast, on Monday, with additional detour lanes open, the delay around the interchange had shrunk to seven minutes, said Caltrans spokesman Russell Snyder.

In an effort to diminish additional ridership dips, Metrolink officials are attempting to better their service in the months ahead, hoping to carve off 10% of travel time, Stanger said. On the newly opened tracks from Lancaster to Union Station, for instance, the 78-mile trip takes two hours and 25 minutes. By June, the trip should take 40 minutes less as workers improve the old freight tracks, which have slowed trains to speeds of as little as 35 m.p.h. along certain sections, Stanger said.

On Wednesday, Los Angeles County transportation officials also approved a two-for-one monthly deal for passengers from the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

Under the motion unanimously adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, Metrolink passes bought by north county commuters for February will be valid through March as well.

“Because of the earthquake, we have a captured audience here,” MTA board member Mel Wilson said. “Let’s not gouge the captured audience. Let’s help them where we can.”

Metrolink officials opened new stations in Palmdale, Lancaster and Acton after the quake. But some new riders have complained about ticket prices. Currently, a monthly Metrolink pass for travel into downtown Los Angeles from the Santa Clarita Valley costs $144 and $208 from the Antelope Valley.

Some passengers have said they were led to believe the 2-for-1 special was already in place when they purchased their passes. Metrolink officials traced the confusion to a bureaucratic tangle. Although Metrolink officials approved the idea of a discount two weeks ago, the reduction had still to be ratified by the MTA on behalf of Los Angeles County as the affected area.

In other action, MTA board members also approved $316 million for the construction of 85 miles of new car pool lanes over the next three years, including several projects on San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope Valley freeways. Car-pool lanes are scheduled to be built on sections of the Ventura, Antelope Valley, Hollywood, Simi Valley and San Diego freeways, in addition to other locations throughout the county.