Average ridership is one-third of what it was in February of 2020.
By Hank Silverberg
CORRESPONDENT
Despite a 76% on-time rating and a relatively smooth ride to points in Northern Virginia and Washington D.C., ridership on the Virginia Railway Express has yet to fully recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CEO’s September report puts ridership over the last 12 months at a daily average of 6,662 passengers for the Fredericksburg and Manassas lines combined, with the Fredericksburg line handling about 66% of those commuters.
That is up an average of just 300 riders a day from 2023. But it is way below the pre-pandemic daily ridership in February of 2020, when the combined daily average stood at 18,275.
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Ridership reached its low point over several weeks in April of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, when there was an average of only 425 riders on the trains.
Why is ridership down? The railroad did increase fares by 5% this past July. But a spokeswoman for VRE points to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Government’s most recent “State of Commute” report. It notes that most federal agency employees are no longer working four or five days a week at the office as they did pre-pandemic, and about 70% of the pre-pandemic passengers on VRE were federal workers.
The decline in people using the trains has also put a significant hole in the budget with a downturn of 34.7% in ticket revenue, which now stands at $23 million over the last year.
The railroad’s management is proposing an operating budget of $117.7 million for fiscal year 2026, which begins July 1, an increase of 9.2% from fiscal year 2025. At this time, no fare increase is proposed for next year.
The railroad is projecting an 8% hike in subsidies from the nine jurisdictions it serves and will use a projected $39 million in pandemic relief funds.
As a result of the financial shift, VRE may consider a change in the number of trains it runs and the number of cars on each train. An expansion of service to Saturdays is still in this year’s budget and the proposed FY2026 budget. But no date has been set for that service to be launched because VRE is still working with the owners of the tracks—Amtrak, CSX, and Norfolk Southern—to make that happen.
Among other items in the September report, the greatest use of parking facilities is at the Lorton Station in Fairfax County, but on average only about 43% of the parking spaces along the entire 19-station system are in use each day.
One other statistic in the report—VRE carries an average of 20 bicycles brought on board by passengers each day.
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