WASHINGTON (AP) — Superstorm Sandy did little lasting damage in the Washington area, but it did cause a big dip in Metro’s ridership.
The Washington Examiner reports that the transit agency’s ridership was 9.5 percent below its internal forecasts for the month of October. Metro was shut down for almost two days as a precaution during and after the storm.
As a result, a Metro report says the agency’s buses, trains and shuttles lost an estimated 2.4 million trips.
Metro’s ridership was already 4.9 percent below the agency’s forecast for the first three months of the current fiscal year. The report says those losses add up to $13.4 million less revenue than the agency had budgeted so far. But agency officials say they are not over budget because they’ve been managing expenses effectively.
(Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
