I have found the data showing whether SMART is meeting it's ridership projections, which it claims on the front page of Saturday's SF Chronicle.

Here are the most recent ridership projections taken from the May 18 2016 SMART Board Meeting minutes:

SMART Board meeting minutes, see top of page 6

"SMART’s assumption is that the average weekday daily ridership will be 3,070; Average Saturday and Sunday ridership will be 307, which is 10% of the weekday riders."

Couldn't be much clearer.

On Sept 21st SMART published here on slide 8 data for Monday, Sat and Sunday; this covers 3 weeks of operations:

On Nov 1st SMART published this ridership data spanning September and October; this covers the subsequent 6 weeks of operations:

Taking these numbers one can then extrapolate and understand the big picture:

Google Spreadsheet analyzing forecast vs actual ridership

CONCLUSIONS
SMART is really about reducing peak commute weekday traffic. This is how it was sold. The weekend ridership is a bonus, and the low 307 rider estimate distorts total week and weekend estimates (this estimate looks like "spitballing").

Focusing on weekday ridership here is the bottom line, as shown in the Google sheet with citations and workings:

Weekday ridership in Sept was 19% below projections

Weekday ridership in Oct was 26% below projections

So the gap between projections and actual ridership is only widening.

It is inaccurate to be saying SMART is exceeding it's forecast. Comments and feedback welcome. As mentioned I want the data and facts to tell the story. SMART is not being especially helpful releasing data, but this has taken what data SMART has released to present the big picture. This data uses boarding counts, so it covers not just Clipper but app purchased tickets.

Richard
PS I am a train lover. I drag my family onto trains when vacationing in Thailand and in the UK. I have also travelled on trains in India. I don't hate trains as alleged.

My motivations are that I take issue with the many false promises and false statements that have been made about the SMART train. I believe Caltrain makes sense and so does BART, but SMART never made sense because
(a) it doesn't connect directly to major CBDs (E.g. downtown SF or Oakland)
(b) it does not serve a sufficiently large population catchment area and
(c) it is being used as an excuse to increase the population density to make the catchment area justify a train; yet it was sold to voters as "relieving traffic congestion".