Metrolink struggles to regain pre-pandemic ridership
There were seven cars in the parking lot of the Metrolink station in Ventura’s Montalvo neighborhood when the first train of the evening pulled in on Monday. This is the end of Metrolink’s Ventura County Line, so the trains here are always emptier than at other stations, but in recent years they’ve grown close to literally empty.
An average of 16 people per day use this station, according to data provided by Metrolink, about half as many as used it in 2019. On Monday five commuters got off the 117, the first of three evening trains from Los Angeles.
“When I first started taking the train, it was standing room only. Now, the cars are pretty empty,” said one of those commuters, Matt Tholl. He lives in Ventura and works for the Transportation Security Administration at Burbank Airport. Tholl takes Metrolink five days a week.
There aren’t many like him these days. Ventura County’s five Metrolink stations — in Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, Moorpark and Simi Valley — had an average of 287 riders per day from July 1 to Nov. 30 of this year, down 62% from their weekday average in the last full fiscal year before the COVID-19 pandemic started.
That’s consistent with the decline throughout the Metrolink commuter rail system, which has 62 stations spread across six counties and serves around 17,000 people per day — down from more than 43,000 before the pandemic.
Metrolink lost about 90% of its riders nearly overnight, in March 2020. Its numbers have been recovering steadily, but slowly, ever since.
But it’s not clear whether they’ll ever reach 2019 levels. Metrolink is built around the idea of people commuting every weekday from their homes in the suburbs to their jobs in Los Angeles, and for many people, that sort of commute is never coming back.
By summer 2022, more than two years into the pandemic, total trips to work were still down 22.8% in Ventura County and 26.6% in the Los Angeles metropolitan area from their pre-pandemic levels, according to research from the Brookings Institution.
The traditional Metrolink rider, the kind of person the planners of the service had in mind when it opened 30 years ago, is a white-collar office worker, and that type of person is especially likely to be working from home.
The office security company Kastle Systems issues a weekly report on the occupancy levels of office buildings where it provides keycards and other services. In the Los Angeles area, office occupancy has never reached half of its pre-pandemic levels, and the week of Dec. 12, it was around 45%. Fridays are becoming a standard work-from-home day, with about one third of workers coming into their offices, according to the latest Kastle report.
Most commuter rail systems in the United States have seen ridership declines similar to Metrolink’s, said Metrolink CEO Darren Kettle. To adapt, he said, commuter rail systems will need to expand beyond their traditional 9-to-5 office worker customers. That will involve running trains throughout the day, which would make Metrolink more useful to hospital workers and other people with irregular schedules and make it a better option for people going to an airport or taking a day trip to a downtown museum.
“We’re not alone in this,” Kettle said. “It’s a massive industry change. There are 33 commuter railroads in the United States, and all of us are looking at how we adjust our schedules and our service delivery model. … We’re not getting enough value for the investment by just being a service for commuters. We need to pursue these other markets, and that’s going to take time and patience, for people to recognize that it’s a safe, reliable service for those trips.”
Metrolink’s annual operating budget is about $300 million, and an influx of federal stimulus funding during the pandemic has allowed it to maintain its pre-pandemic revenue levels. But its revenue from ticket sales has plummeted, leaving it more reliant on contributions from federal, state and local governments. In the 2018-19 fiscal year, passenger fares accounted for 40% of Metrolink’s revenue; now, Kettle said, that figure is about 18%.
Kettle said Metrolink has tried cutting fares to boost ridership, including a 30% discount on passes in October and November to mark the system’s 30th birthday, and a $15 unlimited day pass over the summer. Each promotion resulted in only a small bump in riders, he said.
Role of 2028 LA Olympics
Metrolink is facing a deadline of sorts to modernize its services: the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which Kettle said are “right around the corner” in terms of transit planning. Those Olympics will be “car free,” which means spectators and employees won’t be able to drive directly to the venues.
By those Olympics, Metrolink will have the capacity to run trains every half hour on the Ventura County Line, Kettle said. That ability won’t extend into West Ventura County, though — until it reaches Moorpark, Metrolink uses publicly owned tracks, but farther west it uses tracks owned by Union Pacific, so running more trains all the way to Ventura involves negotiating with the private freight railroad.
Metrolink could make something approaching that level of service permanent, but it would need to find a way to pay for it. Apart from fare revenue, most of Metrolink’s funding comes from regional county transportation boards in Ventura, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
“We’ll never have 10-minute frequencies, but what if you could count on the train every hour?” Kettle said. “If you just knew that every hour there was going to be a train at the Moorpark station to take you to LA Union Station, that would be a huge difference.”
In the coming year, Kettle said, Metrolink is likely to change some routes to better align with the region's new travel habits. For example, even regular office commuters tend to want later trains, because their work day can start when they board the train and sit down with their laptops. The system remains committed to the Ventura County Line, he said.
Kettle himself is emblematic of Metrolink’s new reality. He lives in Camarillo and works in downtown Los Angeles, and he uses Metrolink when he goes to the office, but he only goes to the office two or three days a week.
If everyone does that, Metrolink doesn’t lose any regular riders, but it loses half of its daily trips and half of its fare revenue.
Gene Schwartz, a banker who lives in Camarillo and works in downtown Los Angeles, has adopted similar habits. Before the pandemic, he rode Metrolink every weekday since 2009. Now, he takes it two or three days a week, and works from home the rest of the time.
Schwartz’s commute takes him by Metrolink to Union Station, and then on a shuttle to the Bunker Hill neighborhood. Without the train, it wouldn’t be feasible.
“You can’t beat it,” he said. “It’s an 80-minute ride and that’s faster than driving, and you can do your work on the train.”
When asked what Metrolink could do to get more people riding, Tholl and a few of his fellow Ventura commuters laughed and said they prefer the trains the way they are, nearly empty.
But they realize that isn’t sustainable for the system, and they said an expanded schedule would help, especially if it included trains that left Ventura later in the morning. Right now, the first morning train out of Ventura leaves at 5:21 a.m., and the last one leaves at 6:59 a.m.
“The biggest issue is the schedule,” Tholl said. “They don’t run a lot of trains, and most of them don’t stop here in Ventura.”
Better transit throughout the Los Angeles area would also help, because Metrolink stops are rarely within walking distance of a commuter’s workplace. This is especially true in the San Fernando Valley, where the Ventura County Line runs on its way to Union Station.
Maria Lesseos lives in Ventura and works for Kaiser Permanente in Van Nuys. She has a car at home that she drives to the Ventura Metrolink station every weekday, and she keeps a second car in Van Nuys to drive between that station and her workplace.
“I know not everybody can have a car just for that,” she said. “But it saves me a lot of stress.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation's Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Ventura County Metrolink ridership below half of pre-pandemic level
