Ralphie, that's not enough for your assertion, but nice try, for your first assignment. but you don't have nearly enough to make your case, or prove your meme, whichever the case may be.

If you worked for me, you'd have to find more answers, Like:

1. What is the ethnic and racial make up of Marin and Sonoma Counties?

2. How does this compare or vary from that underlying demographic distribution?

3. What is are the income level quintiles of SMART users?
, by
4. How does that income distribution by quintile compare with the estimated income quintiles for Marin and Sonoma Counties?

5. What percentages of SMART Riders are employed, retired, students, or other?

Now, when you get that, and can show that these folks are somehow "richer" or "whiter" than the community the system is operating in, then you can prove your "meme". The work you've turned in to Professor Bob, so far, wouldn't cut it for my planning class and doesn't seem to prove your thesis or assertion one way or the other.

And, by the way these were exactly the same claims made about Metrolink 25 years ago, using the same stereotypical kind of claims as the clarion call of the angry libertarian anti-rail types. Which, when Metrolink actually surveyed their trains and riders on all of there routes, by all of these variables, and answered that very same stereotypical "meme", by showing it wasn't true, using real data.

Don't get me wrong this is a line built by the taxpayers of two very wealthy Counties, and if it were run right, they might get there monies worth.

Your second assignment, and Farhad really should count and release this data, to educate himself, and his Board, the on-off survey counts by stop. so, you can look at your utilization by stop, where are folks getting on, and getting off?

I suspect that part of the "fixation" the SMART bashers have, and the other part of you "meme", with the what is admittedly as terrible connection at the Ferry, is the promotion of the idea that SMART is a "failure", because SMART was designed or primarily intended to be primarily a connection to SFO, via the Ferry, which I think the actual station by station boarding and alighting data will show is, and has never been the case.

One should then compare the distribution of trips within the 101 corridor to SMART's distribution of trips in that corridor.

What percentage of those trips are from origins to destinations within the Sonoma Marin portion of the 101, compared to origins in Sonoma and Marin, to the City? I suspect that many more do drive, based on bridge volumes, than take the ferry. How does that compare to SMART's ratio of intersystem trips to ferry transfers?

Now you can answer more of the questions related to the "ferry" connection with actual data, as to how it compares to other "observed" data on corridor travel patterns and trip distribution.

If I were Farhad, I'd also like the Board to know, what are the starting points and final passenger destinations, and what kind of trip type (work, business, school, shopping, tourism, other) folks are making, how they got to SMART (drive, bus, ferry, bike, walk, drop off, uber, lyft…) to determine how best to improve SMART's service model, to assess how it is working for some folks and why? And, use it to assess what steps, to provide better service to attract more riders..

That's why we all of the data, and compare that to what we would expect to see, in the case of income and demographics, before concluding this is some giant race based equity issue for you "meme". And, that's why your grade in an incomplete.