SEPTA’s Regional Rail ridership was reported to be up 4.2% for fiscal year 2007, which runs from July 1, 2006 to the end of June, 2007. This is on top of a 6.3% increase the previous year, though the FY 2006 numbers were affected by a 7-day transit strike that brought more riders.
The FY 2005 annual ridership on the RRD was 28.6 million passengers, and my calculations show that FY 2006 was 30.4 million and FY 2007 was 31.7 million.
My ridership records go back to 1972, and it shows that 1977 (think oil crisis, Jimmy Carter) was their peak ridership at almost 34.4 million. They would need about 8.4% more to beat that record, which also was made at a time when SEPTA contracted for service to places such as Reading, West Chester, and Newtown.
The average weekday ridership went from 101,203 in FY 2005 to 106,999 in FY 2006 and to 111,493 in FY 2007 according to my estimate.
Since SEPTA didn’t put out an Annual Service Plan for 2008 this summer, I don’t have the actual numbers form FY 2006, but I hope that someone at SEPTA publishes their ridership census even as a separate report on their web site.
To put these numbers in context, I have some NJ Transit numbers. The NEC line carried 111,800 average weekday riders in FY 2007, and all NJT commuter rail lines combined totaled 267,700 weekday riders.
