Los Angeles’ brand new $930 million
Exposition light rail line is carrying so few riders and bringing
in so little revenue that it will, at best, take 65 years for the
train to earn back its capital investment (not including ongoing
operating costs). If the project completes its next phase and
establishes an at-grade train that runs through heavy street
traffic from Downtown L.A. to the city of Santa Monica, it will not
pay for its construction for 170 years. 

That’s the most optimistic figure Reason can come up with after
two days of counting weekday riders on the Expo Line.

The Expo Line opened the first of its planned two stages last
weekend, with service beginning at 7th Street Downtown and
continuing to the corner of Jefferson and La Cienega Boulevards in
the West Adams neighborhood. The University of Southern
California’s main campus and the Staples Center are both
destinations with easy access to the line. If both phases are
completed, the full line will stretch 15.2 miles from Downtown to
Santa Monica. (Destination map here)

Although Los Angeles County’s Metropolitan Transportation
Authority claims 44,000 people rode the train during a free-ride
opening weekend, this figure either dropped rapidly once the Expo
Line began weekday service or was vastly inflated. (Weekday transit
use is traditionally much higher than weekend use.) 

Observed passenger rates indicate the Expo Line is carrying no
more than 13,000 people a day. We have inflated our estimate by
presuming that all trains, all day, are running at the observed
peak ridership of 50 people. 

In addition to falling short of
the MTA’s reported numbers, actual ridership on the new train is
much smaller than it was projected to be prior to the Expo Line’s
opening. 

A
report on the opening weekend gala in the Los Angeles Daily
News referred to a projection that the Expo Line would
initially carry 27,000 passengers per day. That figure is expected
to grow to 64,000 daily passengers per day by 2030. These figures
appear to have been extrapolated from
MTA claims [pdf],
which presume that completing
both phases of the project [pdf]
will substantially increase ridership. 

To reach the 2030 goal of 64,000 riders, each and every train on
the Expo Line would need to run at near-total capacity. The
three-car Expo train seats approximately 260 people. The MTA’s
estimate of frequency indicates the line makes about 130 journeys
from West Adams to Downtown per day. We double the number of train
journeys per day to account for round trips. We then multiply that
number by the seating capacity to derive the following: If every
train runs completely full during both peak and off-peak hours, the
Expo Line can move approximately 67,600 people per day. This number
can be inflated slightly because not all people go the entire
length of the trip. 

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh and Scott Shackford rode the Expo Line
for its entire length and checked in on performance at platforms
and on trains to get an estimate of total ridership. Our finding is
that during both peak and off-peak hours, an Expo Line train
carries no fewer than 11 and no more than 50 passengers per
journey. 

To account for the
partial-journey variable described above, we counted both people
who boarded the train at the start of each journey and people who
entered the train on subsequent open-door stops. (Not all train
stations are open, and the La Brea and La Cienega stations are open
but under construction.) 

We made our observations Wednesday and Thursday during peak and
off-peak hours. We made exact counts on trains we rode and used
best guesses for other trains we observed. Where possible, we made
counts based on videos and photos of trains we were not riding
ourselves. 

Although we documented boardings and paid for tickets on all
trains we rode, we cannot verify that any other passenger paid the
$1.50 full one-way fare. Several passengers we interviewed were
receiving discounts. There also does not appear to be any apparatus
in place for preventing fare beaters from riding the train.

It’s worth noting that the Expo Line would not be paying for
itself even according to the MTA’s rosiest projections. Presume
that 64,000 people ride the train each day, and that each passenger
does what we did and buys two one-way tickets, for a total of $3
per passenger. That’s $192,000 of revenue per day and $70 million
in revenue a year. 

The total projected cost of both phases of the construction of
the line is $2.43 billion. At that rate, it will take 34.7 years
for the train to collect enough revenue to pay for the cost of
construction. And that math only works if the train carries 64,000
full-fare passengers beginning right now rather than in
2030. The Expo Line has been under development since 1990, but
the MTA now hopes that it can be paid for with a half-cent
sales tax [pdf]
approved by voters (for all traffic-relief purposes, not just the
Expo Line) in 2008. This tax is expected to raise $30 billion over
its 30-year life.