Do you think that a bus ride or trip means a journey between two points? Not if you are the Federal Transit Administration. According to it, every leg of a journey is a separate ride or trip, and a journey is counted as two rides or trips if it requires a transfer. Metro uses the federal definition to track its ridership. As the city expands and changes, Metro is continually changings its routes and increasing the need to transfer. When it increasingly requires transfers for the same journey, counts that journey as two trips instead of one, and then claims that its ridership has changed, are you seeing an actual change or an artificial one based on the way statistics are compiled? Do you really know if ridership is increasing, decreasing or staying the same? How do you interpret the claim that Metro ridership is the highest it has been in 30 years? The transfer points did not exist 30 years ago.

Educators are constantly trying to get people to understand statistics but, as you can see, they are not particularly successful. Decades ago, when I took my first statistics course in college, our class was required to read a little book entitled “How to Lie With Statistics.” We then saw examples of how statistics were being misused all the time, especially by journalists and government officials who did not understand the nuances involved. Being college educated was supposed to mean that we knew better. As I do not teach statistics now, I have to wonder if students are asked to read something comparable these days. I have to wonder if they are being exposed to the frequent misuse of a potentially powerful tool.

What is actually the case, and what statistics are used to claim something, are not necessarily the same thing. What has happened to counting rides is very similar to what has happened to the way the Labor Department calculates an “unemployment rate.” That “rate” is actually a ratio that depends on what is used in the numerator and denominator. We all know that with unemployment, the numerator no longer reflects people out of work, only people who were looking for work in the last two weeks. We all know that people who have either given up looking for work or who are underemployed but not strictly unemployed are not counted. So people tell us what the official unemployment rate is but also that it is an underestimate of the “true” rate. The same holds true for the artificial definition of "ridership" and "trip." Do you think it legitimate to compare an “unemployment rate” calculated earlier under the old definition with a rate of the same name calculated later under the new definition, or would that be comparing apples and oranges? Do you think it legitimate to compare ridership before and after changes were made to a bus route, changes that could require a transfer for a journey that required no transfer before?