Gold Line ridership burgeoning

Anybody who thinks the Metro Gold Line is a failed endeavor needs only to drive into the parking structure at the Sierra Madre Villa station on any weekday morning.

I use the Gold Line every chance I get, which, unfortunately is not that often since I live in Glendora. Whenever I have to drive into downtown to cover a trial or a county supervisors' meeting, I hop on the train. The opportunity to relax, catch up on my news and even start writing my story on my laptop before I get back to the office -- and all that while avoiding the traffic and parking hassles that downtown L.A. has to offer -- is too good to pass up.

Up until about a month or two ago, as long as I got there before 9 a.m. I could still find plenty of parking spaces -- albeit on the top level -- of the 1,000-space lot at the end-of-the-line Sierra Madre Villa station. But on Tuesday, when I got to the station at about 8:45 a.m. I got one of the last spots. I saw several drivers turn back around, forced to find parking on surrounding city streets.

"The parking lot is too small," complained Jun Kim, a long-time Gold Line rider who has taken the train to his Wilshire Boulevard office in downtown Los Angeles four times a week since the Gold Line opened in 2003. "They should have planned for this."

Indeed, the observations of long-time Gold Line riders have been borne out by statistics compiled by Metro. The Gold Line hit a record 22,231 average weekday boardings in March, up about 3,496 riders, or nearly 19 percent, from the 18,735 weekly boardings recorded a year earlier in March 2007.

That's the biggest jump, percentage-wise, experienced by any other line in the Metro Rail system over the past year.

The Gold Line's numbers dropped slightly in April to 22,159, according to Metro spokesman Rick Jaeger. But that small dip was mirrored on all the other lines and is still well above the previous Gold Line record of 20,972 weekly boardings set in September 2006.

Officials had been predicting 20,000 weekly boardings for the Gold Line since before its inception in 2003. And critics might scoff at the fact that the Gold Line's record 22,000 riders are dwarfed by the more than 144,000 that ride the Red Line, or 78,000 that travel on the Blue Line on a weekly basis.

But that would be comparing apples to oranges considering the longer distances -- and denser population centers -- traversed by those two lines. And the fact that it took a few years for the Gold Line to beat and exceed that magic 20,000 number should not be seen as a failure, but as proof that the line still has more growth potential than any other Metro Rail line and that an extension east to Montclair can only increase those numbers further.

In fact, the Gold Line is not far behind the 38,909 weekly boardings recorded by the next-busiest line, the Green Line, which at seven miles longer than the Gold Line makes for a much more logical -- though still skewed -- comparison.

The Green Line runs through the more densely populated area between Norwalk and Redondo Beach. Nearly 564,000 people live in the communities along the Green Line, compared to the roughly 262,000 folks living along the Gold Line, including Chinatown and historic Los Angeles according to 2000 Census figures (Add all of downtown L.A. and the number of people living in the Gold Line corridor goes up to just over 300,000).

In addition to its larger service population, the Green Line also goes through many more low-income communities than the Gold Line, making its target ridership much more likely to use public transit.

Taking those factors into account, the Gold Line's 22,000 weekly boardings don't look too shabby at all.