New data from Metro show the Expo Line hit a daily average of 64,000 boardings—a goal that officials didn’t expect the Downtown-to-Santa-Monica light rail line to reach until 2030, Urbanize LA reports.
The first section of the Expo Line to be built—which went from Downtown to Culver City—also hit its 2020 ridership projections early, in 2013, says Urbanize LA.
The Expo Line’s second phase—which brought it to Downtown Santa Monica—opened in May 2016. In March 2017, it saw its best ridership numbers to date.
The Expo Line extension to the beach had a lot of early hiccups, including late trains and overcrowding. There are now more frequent arrivals and more train cars.
The Expo Line’s success is especially notable, because, across Metro, ridership is down. In the last fiscal year, Metro’s bus boardings fell 9 percent over the previous year’s. There’s also “a concerning trend of rapid ridership loss” on the Blue and Green lines, Urbanize says. (It’s worth noting that transit ridership dropped last year in many major cities, except those few with re-designed bus networks, says Streetsblog.)
Correction: An earlier version of this post said that the Expo Line had reached its 2020 ridership projection. It hit its 2030 projection.
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