It's not every day someone loses seven millioin people.

Rick Borland's not all that sure he lost them, either.

Misplaced, perhaps.

Trouble is, Winnipeg Transit's general manager said, he has to live with figures showing bus ridership declined seven million between 1986 and 1989 and he's not sure the numbers are accurate.

"It's impossible for us to count people every time they get on the bus," Borland said in an interview.

Transit regularly does head counts on routes and they didn't suggest any problems during 1988. Yet, at year's end, statistics showed 5.2 million fewer riders than in 1987.

"Personally, I don't believe we had that kind of ridership drop, but those are the number and I have to live with them," Borland said.

Ridership, officially, has varied from 57 million in 1982, to 61.3 million in 1986, 54.3 million in 1989, and about 54 to 55 million projected this year.

But a lot of that is guesswork.

Borland said the numbers come largely from attacking precisely known revenue with hi-tech math.

"We do various surveys throughout the year to determine how people are actually paying. Through a series of fairly complex formulas, we come up with ridership."

The math tells Winnipeg Transit how its cash translates to adult, senior or student fares, allowing for people who dropped in a looney and a quarter for a $1.10 cash fare, or people who stiffed the driver with 18 nickels for the same $1.10.

Transit goes by tickets used rather than bought. Machines weigh the tickets and tell transit how many there are, with calibrations regularly taken to ensure tiny changes in paper stock don't throw off the books.

Winnipeg Transit sells 500,000 monthly passes a year, but if the formula's assumption about each user's rides is short by one a week, that's shortchanging ridership more than two million a year, Borland pointed out.

The identified losses have been on evening and downtown rides, Borland said, primarily because core retail has lost ground to suburban shopping malls. Peak and midday ridership remains healthy.

Consequently, transit has been slowly paring evening service, creating a classic chicken-and-egg situation.

"There's just not downtown shopping, especially in the evening. The reduced importance of the downtown relative to the whole city has been a negative trend."

Downtown parking has steadily increased, he said, noting offices have replaced the core's "needle trade" industries.