Gas prices pancake but OCTA sets new ridership record anyway

I’ve been gathering up transit ridership from agencies around the state, curious as to whether the number of passengers has dipped now that gas prices have cratered since their summer highs. Not all the numbers are in yet, but most agencies have seen a slight dip in ridership since it peaked in July.

One exception is ridership on buses run by the Orange County Transportation Authority, or OCTA. Ridership jumped to an all-time high of 6.3 million for October, surpassing the 6.2 million in July.

“I think there’s a long-term relationship between gasoline and ridership,” Art Leahy, the chief executive officer of OCTA, told me Thursday afternoon. “I was a bus operator in 1974” -– that’s right, he actually drove a bus in Los Angeles –- “when the energy crisis caused a jump in ridership that never really went down. We actually saw a similar thing on the Metrolink system after the [1994] earthquake and people tried it out and stayed. It only dropped off a little.

“There’s a long-term problem here in that oil consumption worldwide is climbing and production is not keeping pace,” he added. “We’re going to see increased market competition for fuel and energy and I think that leads to the conclusion that prices will continue to be unstable and we’ll see fluctuations. I hope it doesn’t happen, but the fact is it’s a fragile market. I think independent of why people take a bus or not, we should prepare for uncertain energy markets in the future.”

In fact, OCTA started preparing for such problems more than a year ago. Instead of selling off old buses that it was replacing, the agency kept about 150 of them in storage, figuring it was worth the $1 million annual cost of maintaining them.

“If we slip into a serious crisis where people can’t get gasoline or if gasoline prices did what they did a few months ago, those buses will be like gold because you won’t be able to get new ones,” Leahy said.

--Steve Hymon

Comments

[Dan W.]

Hopefully everyone realizes that these lower prices are temporary.

India and China are still increasing their demand for oil and once the recession ends, prices will shoot up again.

It's always possible that people tried public transit and found out they liked it.

[Damon]

Another thing attracting new riders may be that nearly all the old diesel buses have been replaced by CNG ones. They're quieter, much cleaner, and the interiors are vastly improved.