Comment 16541

By mark (registered) | Posted January 02, 2008 at 12:39:22

To clarify, I have never made any kind of ridership level claims based on the number of employees working at the airport. I am not sure why Don incorrectly cites me as saying that 25% of the airport staff would ride transit if it was offered, but I have never made such a claim in any of my posts here. This does not bode well for his credibility on this discussion.

Don does, however, provide us with an excellent example of how to incorrectly extrapolate statistical information to construct misleading results. While it is true that only 6% of all citizens use Hamilton's transit system, this number cannot be used to estimate individual line ridership in the way that Don uses it to estimate the potential level of ridership to the airport by its employees. Let me illustrate the fallacy of such an exercise.

McMaster University has about 30,000 full-time students, staff and faculty. Using Don's 6% rule, of these 30,000 people, only 1800 would use the HSR to get to Mac. The campus is currently served by approximately 180 HSR trips to McMaster's Sterling Street stop. This averages out to only 10 riders per run. So, using the exact same logic that Don does to estimate the airport ridership, we can make the (equally incorrect) assumption that McMaster is currently over-served by HSR runs and should be drastically scaled back. And I am being more generous than Don with my estimation because I include employees and visitors to Mac, where he based his estimate for the airport exclusively on airport employees. The logic in using this percentage to determine ridership levels is just as seriously flawed as using air movement counts to measure airport sustainability.

Jason, I stand corrected on the number of articulated buses recently acquired for the east-west RT route. While twelve hybrid buses were acquired, only seven of them were the higher-capacity articulated buses. Thank you for setting the record straight. I agree with you that service levels should be increased on the east-west line. However, I feel this should be along with, not instead of, introducing a north-south line. Since the cost of the buses for the north-south line is being picked up entirely by the province via Metrolink, the city should be able to focus capital investment on additional rolling stock for the east-west line, as well as the new routes it is going to introduce this year.

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