ABQ Ride installs new tech showing ridership is up 25% since last July

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) –  More people are hopping on ABQ Ride city buses in Albuquerque since before the pandemic began; that’s according to new data the city has collected the past few months with new technology they installed in buses in July. They’re called “automatic passenger counters,” or “APCs,”and have counted more than a million riders since.

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Since its founding in 1964, ABQ Ride has been counting how many people are getting on and off their buses. “The way we used to collect our ridership data was through a fare box. We used to—as a passenger would board, they’d drop their money in or they use their pass and that counted the passenger,” said Bobby Sisneros, deputy director of the City of Albuquerque Transit Department. Then, when buses became free to ride, it was on the bus drivers to count people as they boarded. “Of course, any time you introduce the human element, it increases the likelihood of these inaccuracies,” Sisneros said.

However, life has become a little easier—and more accurate—for ABQ Ride when on July 1, all of the ART buses and the newer buses in the fleet were outfitted with new APCs. Some ART buses had previously had APCs in 2019—but they were not formally used for counting passengers.

“We have little monitors or little cameras inside of the bus so when you walk in and out, it recognizes the direction you’re passing and that counts you as either a boarding or an alightment.” Not only that, but it catches where people are hopping on and off by taking pictures overhead. “These APC’s are completely anonymous, we’re not tracking any individuals,” Sisneros said,

It’s useful information when ABQ Ride is considering where to allocate resources; and, it helps when it comes to federal funding, too. “The Federal Transportation Agency is the agency through the federal government that we work with here at a local level and it’s really important we get them our accurate ridership data because it helps with our funding,” Sisneros said,

The new data shows ridership reached nearly 646,000 in July, and that number rose to nearly 668,000 in August—the highest numbers since March 2020. “It’s exciting, it’s kind of scary because right now as everyone knows we’ve been dealing with staffing shortages, so what that means is we’re putting extra strain on our staff,” Sisneros said.

ABQ Ride recently massively cut their service; but still, Sisneros said ridership is increasing: “We’re seeing our routes, even though we’ve cut service by about two-thirds, we’re seeing our routes are very, very busy. That means our drivers are having to work extra hard, or our mechanic staff is having to work extra hard to keep up with them…It’s busy out there.”

71 buses have this technology, and at $7,000 per unit, it cost the department roughly half a million dollars to install them.

The department says they have been able to restore one route from the West Side to the University of New Mexico and added a bus to the San Mateo corridor—but they’re still pushing to have people come work from them so they can get back to pre-pandemic operations. “We don’t want to introduce too much service and put us back in the same situation we were before; we want to do it gradually, make sure we have enough staff to cover the introduction of new service,” Sisneros said.

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