Given the ballooning budget of the California High Speed Rail (CAHSR) project, I was tasked with connecting projected ridership of CAHSR to current existing networks. Planners often use their ridership projections, and resulting revenue projections, as the primary reason to persuade the public to build public transportation projects.
My team, Sue Dexter and Shinhee Lee, and I focused on the first phase of the CAHSR project in the visualization below. We used California census numbers and projections from the CAHSR station locations' corresponding counties. CAHSR annual passenger projections are taken from the California High Speed Rail 2018 Business Plan. The annual ridership estimate on existing networks are based on rail ridership numbers from Metrolink, Metro, Caltrain, BART, and Amtrak. The estimate treats all 365 days of the year as a day of average daily ridership and is purposefully high to provide a very rough but closer number to 2030 ridership on existing networks in 2018.
We highlight the significant differences between regions and ridership. CAHSR will have to tailor market development to attract riders by region, particularly in the Central region where there is currently 1 rider for about 4 projected riders. High regional travel out of the Central region will have significant implications for both local and regional economies where travelers will go.