Beaumont Transit: Ridership and Costs

At the Beaumont Council meeting of 26th September, City Administration presented the following statistics for Beaumont Transit which I have summarized into a single table. I have calculated the number of days of transit service in each year from the same data.

Now, my first thought is that this has become a very expensive service used by a very small number of people since the pandemic ended in 2021, so I decided to do a few more calculations using this data, plus some population statistics for Beaumont taken from the Alberta Government website.

So, I conclude that for this year (2023) so far:

• Each ride cost the rider $4.73 on average. That's 12% of the full cost.

• Each ride cost the Beaumont taxpayer $36.21 on average. That's 88% of the full cost.

• So each ride on the bus cost a total of nearly $41.

• The average number of one way rides taken each day was 33.

• Since virtually all riders will make an outbound and an inbound ride each day, then the average number of people using a Beaumont transit bus can only be about 17 per day.

• So, 99.72% of Beaumont residents who don't use Beaumont Transit daily, will be paying more than $300,000 for it this year.

For comparison a taxi or Uber ride from Beaumont to Mill Woods is usually about $40, and will take the rider door to door on demand.

But at the Council meeting, I heard no questions asked about current costs or ridership, only about expanding the service to run on weekends, adding on-demand service within Beaumont, or adding another transit route to the International Airport.