I've decided to make a separate thread to host my blathering about Brightline's ridership statistics (such as I can generate them) and not overwhelm the main thread. Some notes to start:
Each Brightline train, at present, contains the followjng
Car 1: 48 Select seats, 1 wheelchair slot
Car 2: 32 Smart seats, 32 SmartPlus seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Car 3: 64 Smart seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Car 4: 56 Smart seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Totals:
-152 Smart seats
-32 SmartPlus seats
-48 Select seats
-7 wheelchair slots
--Overall total: 239 seats and slots (232 for purposes of my analysis)
Unless or until I can get someone to help me mount a program on a test harness to run checks, I have to basically use a clicker on the Brightline website and go through each day's trains to get a sense of ridership. With about 14-16 trains per day, this represents 84-96 separate checks I have to make for a full day of trains. A single run-through therefore takes about an hour, especially since on a packed train I may need to count Smart 2-3 times to be comfortable with the count. This means that I am not going to turn around and bother with the wheelchair spaces (I am ignoring them for my purposes). It also means that, in the vast majority of cases, I am only going to check Palm Beach-Miami or vice-versa, since checking to/from Fort Lauderdale would triple the workload. In some cases I may try to make a note of extra sales on a train between the Miami/Palm Beach departure and the sales cutoff for Fort Lauderdale. For example, on one train yesterday morning (the southbound 0700) I noted that an additional twelve seats were sold FLL-MIA after the train left West Palm.
Some things I have observed, on what is thus far a sample size of one day imperfectly observed:
-Somewhere around 30% of tickets yesterday were "walk-up" sales, being sold in the 60-90 minutes before a train departs. This tends to be a little bit lower for peak trains (e.g. peak hours in the main direction of flow) but higher for off-peak trains. Day-of sales tend to be higher for trains later in the day as well (no shock there), in at least one case exceeding 50%.
-Load factors yesterday were reasonably healthy at rush hour. Outside of rush hour...not so much. Rush hour trains seem to have load factors in the 45-70% range in the peak direction, just under 20% in the reverse-peak direction, and often 5-10% in the off hours. I observed some even lower numbers, but per the walkup ticket situation they likely came in a bit higher than I saw. Overall load factor was probably about 13-15% (I technically observed 11.4% northbound and 13.5% southbound [1], but as noted above I also probably missed out on about 100 ticket sales from my count within the methodology I was following.
--I may well have missed out on another 50-100 due to my methodology not being able to fully pick up either last-minute sales out of Fort Lauderdale or any cases where a seat is sold both Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach (or vice-versa). The former is likely to show up in a lot of cases; the latter is probably only a notable concern at rush hour (particularly heading south, since I presume that Fort Lauderdale is a net-pickup station SB and a net-discharge station NB).
-There are some cases where large blocks of seats sell out together, quite often in Car 4. I do not know if that is because of group sales, automatic sales in the system, or if there are "phantom sales" showing up.
[1] The southbound 0530 train did not run yesterday.
Edit: Explanation of charts:
-Each line is a departure from one of the origin stations (West Palm for southbound, Miami for northbound).
-I've used "F" to indicate Select, "W" to indicate SmartPlus, and "Y" to indicate Smart. This is based on airline coding practices (since being able to use a single letter makes the chart cleaner).
As further explanation, I will generally confine the data on a given day to a single post, even if I ultimately post 2-3 sets of data in here. For days I cover (which won't be all days), I'll try to have a "final set" (which will necessarily be incomplete) and at least one full "snapshot set" (usually taken between 2200 and 0400 the night before). I may occasionally keep another set from a day or two before as well, particularly if I think traffic is going to be particularly heavy on a given day.
Each Brightline train, at present, contains the followjng
Car 1: 48 Select seats, 1 wheelchair slot
Car 2: 32 Smart seats, 32 SmartPlus seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Car 3: 64 Smart seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Car 4: 56 Smart seats, 2 wheelchair slots
Totals:
-152 Smart seats
-32 SmartPlus seats
-48 Select seats
-7 wheelchair slots
--Overall total: 239 seats and slots (232 for purposes of my analysis)
Unless or until I can get someone to help me mount a program on a test harness to run checks, I have to basically use a clicker on the Brightline website and go through each day's trains to get a sense of ridership. With about 14-16 trains per day, this represents 84-96 separate checks I have to make for a full day of trains. A single run-through therefore takes about an hour, especially since on a packed train I may need to count Smart 2-3 times to be comfortable with the count. This means that I am not going to turn around and bother with the wheelchair spaces (I am ignoring them for my purposes). It also means that, in the vast majority of cases, I am only going to check Palm Beach-Miami or vice-versa, since checking to/from Fort Lauderdale would triple the workload. In some cases I may try to make a note of extra sales on a train between the Miami/Palm Beach departure and the sales cutoff for Fort Lauderdale. For example, on one train yesterday morning (the southbound 0700) I noted that an additional twelve seats were sold FLL-MIA after the train left West Palm.
Some things I have observed, on what is thus far a sample size of one day imperfectly observed:
-Somewhere around 30% of tickets yesterday were "walk-up" sales, being sold in the 60-90 minutes before a train departs. This tends to be a little bit lower for peak trains (e.g. peak hours in the main direction of flow) but higher for off-peak trains. Day-of sales tend to be higher for trains later in the day as well (no shock there), in at least one case exceeding 50%.
-Load factors yesterday were reasonably healthy at rush hour. Outside of rush hour...not so much. Rush hour trains seem to have load factors in the 45-70% range in the peak direction, just under 20% in the reverse-peak direction, and often 5-10% in the off hours. I observed some even lower numbers, but per the walkup ticket situation they likely came in a bit higher than I saw. Overall load factor was probably about 13-15% (I technically observed 11.4% northbound and 13.5% southbound [1], but as noted above I also probably missed out on about 100 ticket sales from my count within the methodology I was following.
--I may well have missed out on another 50-100 due to my methodology not being able to fully pick up either last-minute sales out of Fort Lauderdale or any cases where a seat is sold both Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach (or vice-versa). The former is likely to show up in a lot of cases; the latter is probably only a notable concern at rush hour (particularly heading south, since I presume that Fort Lauderdale is a net-pickup station SB and a net-discharge station NB).
-There are some cases where large blocks of seats sell out together, quite often in Car 4. I do not know if that is because of group sales, automatic sales in the system, or if there are "phantom sales" showing up.
[1] The southbound 0530 train did not run yesterday.
Edit: Explanation of charts:
-Each line is a departure from one of the origin stations (West Palm for southbound, Miami for northbound).
-I've used "F" to indicate Select, "W" to indicate SmartPlus, and "Y" to indicate Smart. This is based on airline coding practices (since being able to use a single letter makes the chart cleaner).
As further explanation, I will generally confine the data on a given day to a single post, even if I ultimately post 2-3 sets of data in here. For days I cover (which won't be all days), I'll try to have a "final set" (which will necessarily be incomplete) and at least one full "snapshot set" (usually taken between 2200 and 0400 the night before). I may occasionally keep another set from a day or two before as well, particularly if I think traffic is going to be particularly heavy on a given day.
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