Quick Note on Ridership Estimation and the STOPS Model

The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has a model for ridership estimation for public transit lines, called STOPS. It’s designed to be simplified enough that transit agencies can compute rough projections with it without having a large permanent in-house team dedicated to it (the MTA has a team of about 12). At the Transit Costs Project, we’ve taken to using it to do estimates for potential extensions under various assumptions on speed, frequency, and service pattern. For example, the Effective Transit Alliance’s statement in support of QueensLink for the budget vote later today quotes a figure of 105,000 expected daily riders, with 75,000 of them new and 30,000 existing at the Rockaway stations. I’d like to both go over this figure in this post and explain why at the same time, STOPS must be used with caution, especially in New York. The QueensLink ridership estimate At the program, Franklin Tang is responsible for the use of STOPS. Using the tools of the model, he computed that…