[www.petaluma360.com]

And a few comments...

It's not unusual for transit agencies, even big ones, to not publish hourly, daily, and weekly ridership figures. They collect the data, but only monthly and annual (mostly annual) is required to be reported to the funding agencies. It's interesting that GG & BART do report it (hourly for BART???). SMART is small enough that it should be able to report by train - and since they report monthly and annual boardings (as required) they have at least some of that raw data. Whether it's in a form that a news organization could use without a lot of analysis work, and whether it's feasible to provide it without cutting into other staff responsibilities, is another question.

As to Farhad saying there's no great conspiracy, feel free to take that with a grain of salt, as statements by CEOs in general should be. Once you get to a reporting granularity that's smaller than what's actually required to be reported, anything is possible. Tinfoil hats recommended. IMO SMART should be reporting at least monthly, though almost certainly not in real time. And the news people did get some daily data out of MTC (not actually published; email from a staff member) based on Clipper Card usage.

For comparison, Sacramento reports monthly performance (usually several months behind current date): [www.sacrt.com]