Staff reports ridership is higher after uncounted validations; APC validation due in July

Staff presented updated ridership figures and a timeline for validating the data.

Isaac, a staff member, told the board that monthly reports currently rely on farebox counts that do not include many mobile validations. He said the agency has “about 85,939 validations” not being counted and that those will be geocoded to individual routes as part of an integration with the agency’s technology vendors. "Our ridership is actually 1,961,159, which represents about a 2.5% increase over FY 2023," Isaac said.

The presentation explained that automatic passenger counters (APCs) on buses are also being validated. Staff said they are working with GMV Syncromatics (on-vehicle AVL and APC systems) and Masabi (mobile validation) to reconcile counts, and that the agency will submit data to the Federal Transit Administration’s national transit database for formal validation. Staff expects that validation work to be completed sometime in July, after which the authority will update its FY2024 ridership totals.

Board members asked whether any month has surpassed 2019 ridership levels. Isaac said that question cannot be definitively answered until APC and mobile-validation data are fully validated and reconciled; he added that farebox counts undercount passengers because drivers do not capture every boarding, while APCs capture every boarding event automatically.

The report also noted known limitations of the AVL/geotagging system used by the public transit app: staff said occasional cell reception problems can delay geotag updates, making a bus appear farther away than it actually is. The agency is working with its providers to reduce those lags.

The board did not take action on the ridership report; staff said they would return with corrected, validated FY2024 figures after completion of the FTA validation in July.