Ridership on Blue Line

The self-serving bookkeeping by local transit officials has gone unnoticed by your reporter (“Blue Line Ridership, Safety Praised After Initial 6 Months,” Metro, Jan. 17). He has bought the idea that ridership is “three times the number expected.”

When local planners first tried to sell the Los Angeles-Long Beach light rail line, they promised 35,000 daily boardings for the first year of operations with eventual patronage of 54,500. It was pure PR (facilitated by cheerleading news media) to conveniently lower the forecast to 5,000 riders per day just before the line opened operations, last July. (Also unreported by The Times was the May, 1990, forecast of 20,000 riders per day.)

It would have been more of a service to your readers to compute that at $877 million to build (or an annual capital service cost of $88 million) and projected annual operating costs of $33.6 million, costs per passenger round-trip are almost $40.

PETER GORDON

Los Angeles