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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Flawed bus-ridership counts going back at least eight years may have cost the Utah Transit Authority in federal funding.
UTA Chief Operating Officer Jerry Benson says bus-and train-ridership numbers show mistakes stretching back to 1995. He says the problem is due to inherent shortcomings in the counting systems UTA uses, which can't measure ridership numbers with absolute certainty.
But it wasn't until 2004, when federally required random sampling seemed to show about 8,000 fewer riders on weekday buses that UTA managers realized something was wrong.
It turned out that a UTA employee responsible for tracking the random samples failed to follow the rules and reported falsely.
That employee has since retired.
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Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune
(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
