City staff has been showing us historical data and observations of the R-Line since it started in 2009. Key takeaways are that the ridership hit it’s all-time high in 2012 with around 30,000 riders per month. Something happened the year after that that started to chip away at the ridership and it slowly fell year-over-year.
Rideshare started to become a thing throughout the 2010s and today, I would argue, it’s just generally accepted. Dockless scooters and docked bikeshare started in the 2018-2019 timeframe and the decline of the R-Line continued. COVID was a thing yes but I’d argue that impacted transit overall.
Today, the R-Line gets 3000-5000 riders per month and at the level of service and infra that route has, it’s ranks as the least productive route in the entire system. It is also providing duplicate service to now more frequent routes.
I do think getting rid of the branding didn’t help but the decline has been happening for a long time now, not because of the route change or because of COVID. It’s just not holding up to competition from other options.
Thank you for this, it’s always good when someone can ground the conversation with the facts. Would making it a temporary route with reduced fares for large events (festivals, parades, large conventions, etc.) be an option?
GoRaleigh isn’t built for one-off events like that. You need a big time thing like the state fair but other than that it’s very hard to make a one-weekend event work. What I’ve learned from being on this board is how far in advance they plan and dedicate their buses/personnel to different things.
The way I see it is that GoRaleigh is great at running a bus network but they aren’t built for hospitality. My personal feelings on this is that the R-Line should become something that really feels like we’re serving downtown visitors (and Raleighites can use it too, of course) with a focus on customer service. What mobility thing are we missing? Who is underserved?
Whenever we identify this, if it exists at all, then we can come up with a proposed solution.
It seems to me that the RLine lost its way regarding its mission.
When the RLine was completing loops, wasn’t the point to hit major destinations so that folks could get to those locations by bus instead of car? For instance, the city wanted to make sure that folks could get to the Convention Center while staying at a hotel in Glenwood South, or folks could park once downtown and make an entire day or evening of it without moving their car. They could attend a show at the Performing Arts Center and then grab post show drinks in another part of downtown.
In order to have a successful program downtown, we need a clear mission, and it can’t try to be a little bit of everything for everyone while not being really good at anything for anyone.
Yes I feel the same. I’m hoping out of our ongoing conversations we end up with a specific need and target that need with a specific solution. Something serves people really well but not for everyone.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I rode the R-Line a few times, and stopped even before the fare went into place.
I’d say it’s similar to a stroad. It tries to do too many things at once, and in doing so fails at all of them. The large amount of stops makes it slow for riders and confusing for non-riders. It took me 30 minutes (time from getting to the stop to waiting for the bus to landing at my destination) to get from Wilmington Street to Glenwood South when it just was me and one other person. That’s about how much time it would have taken me to walk there.
If I was an R-Line dictator, I’d say pick the most populous area on the east side of downtown and the most populous area on the west side of downtown. Make the bus a direct no-stop connection. Back and forth. It hits the most amount of people and makes downtown feel smaller to them.
I’m following this effort from afar. I work for a transit agency in Texas (born and raised in Raleigh) and many of our cities are thinking of circulators, shuttles, or streetcars. Like the R-Line, there can be any number of objectives which sometimes compete with each other.
When R-Line first launched as a free service in a loop around Downtown, it was easy to understand the route and no fare meant almost no barrier to try it out. When I visited Raleigh in December and was told I’d need to download an app to ride the R-Line (or have cash), me and my friend decided not to explore further. Austin also uses the Umo app and I’ve heard negative reactions.
Austin is the only city I’ve seen that replaced a self-hosted fare card (the Amp Card) with Umo. Every experience I’ve had with self-hosted fare card has been better than my experiences with Umo, so I don’t know why they did it, except I think they’re the first Umo agency to support Open Payment.
