Peter Callaghan writes an excellent piece for MinnPost “So how, exactly, do officials figure out how many people will use mass transit projects?” I was interviewed, as was Marty Wachs of UCLA and local planning officials and planners.
Selected quotes:
In a seminal 1992 study of the effects of the federal funding system, however, transportation economist Don H. Pickrell found that cities favored expensive capital projects over improved bus systems, largely because that was where the money was. The funding system had produced an incentive to overestimate ridership and underestimate costs. And why not: local agencies weren’t held accountable for the accuracy of their forecasts.
“You had grade inflation,” said David Levinson, the CTS Chair in Transportation Planning at the University of Minnesota. “Forecasts were being abused to achieve a particular outcome because there was a lot of money at stake.”
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Levinson agrees that ridership forecasting is…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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