OK. Recall the other day I said that CATS number for the South Blvd. line did not add up — not even the 12,000 daily rides and CATS’ pre-operation assumption of 66 cents in revenue per rider?
Hold on. Let’s reverse engineer this thing.
CATS says it is taking in about $7135 a day from operations. At 66 cents per ride that would be almost 11,000 rides. Figure another five percent of riders are using passes and another five percent at riding for free — wham! — you got the 12,000 number.
In other words, CATS may just be looking at the amount of money it collected and applying its “revenue formula” to that to get its ridership numbers.
The crucial missing data point: How many tickets has each machine sold? Forget the money — for now, that’s all messed up. There has to be a ticket sale number associated with each machine, each day. We need that number because it will tell us if 6000 rides a day is the more likely number or if 12,000 a day is the more likely number.
