Less than 15 passengers per day on average rode the Garden District Trolley during its first year in operation, and CATS officials say they will take a long, hard look at the route in the next couple of months and decide whether to continue it.
“It’s on the table for serious consideration as to whether or not we keep it,” board Chairwoman Donna Collins-Lewis says.
In 2015, a total of 4,983 passengers rode the trolley, which makes a loop from downtown through the Garden District over the Perkins Road Overpass to Cloverdale Avenue then back again. That’s an average of about 415 passengers a month. Between July and December, however, no single month had even that many riders. August saw the highest ridership, with 392 passengers; December had the lowest, with 182.
During the first half of the year, ridership numbers were stronger than later in the year. After a slow start, ridership climbed to 733 in March—its highest month of the year—before dropping to 460 in June. It continued to decrease through the late summer and fall.
CATS spokeswoman Amie McNaylor confirms the agency will be evaluating the route, which was implemented last January to try to attract more riders of choice to the transit system. Market surveys had indicated there was interest among Garden District residents and others for the trolley.
She says a new metric called Measures of Success will enable administrators to evaluate the Garden District Trolley and all the routes using a set of specific criteria that measures such factors as utilization, cost, and effectiveness.
“This will give us an empirical way to look at all the routes and measure them against the same criteria,” she says. “We will be focusing on any underperforming routes to see what we can do to help them.”
Before any decision is made on the fate of the Garden District Trolley, CATS will roll out a long-awaited marketing campaign, targeting potential riders of the service. CATS had said last summer the campaign was forthcoming, but the agency switched marketing firms so the campaign was delayed.
Collins Lewis says it is disappointing that the Garden District Trolley has not been better received by the community.
“We say we want a robust system and we say we want this or that,” she says. “But then we try something like this and it could be a great route, but people aren’t taking advantage of it.”
—Stephanie Riegel
