Transit’s Dim Future

Despite a “growing population, a rebounding economy, growing total employment, and an aggressively argued hypothesis that the millennial generation is meaningfully different than their forefathers,” says transportation researcher Steven Polzin, “transit ridership has remained stubbornly modest.” That’s a generous view that takes into account slow ridership growth between 2012 and 2014 but ridership declines in 2015.

Polzin points to numerous factors that work against transit: lower fuel prices, increased auto sharing, increased cycling and walking, and diminishing returns on extensions of existing transit services. He also points out that, contrary to claims that Americans are substituting transit for driving in large numbers, recent data suggest that “the new normal for travel trends is looking more like the old normal.”

However, he misses a couple of key points. First, Polzin compares transit ridership over time with the population, concluding that per capita transit ridership “is a pretty straight horizontal line since about 1970.” In fact, he should have compared transit ridership with the urban population, as few rural residents are served by transit. Since the urban population is growing faster than the overall population, per capita urban transit ridership has declined by about 15 percent since 1970. This makes transit’s future appear even dimmer than Polzin suggests.

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Second, transit agencies have been extraordinarily inept in making investments in transit service. Among the factors that transit agencies can control, ridership is most closely linked to vehicle miles of transit operations. Yet numerous agencies have sacrificed those vehicle miles in order to provide big-box transit like giant buses and various forms of rail transit. The result is higher spending but lower ridership in many urban areas.

Finally, despite all the billions of dollars spent on transit, the biggest factors influencing ridership are employment and fuel prices, both of which are beyond transit agencies’ control. Rather than try to get people to ride fixed transit systems by controlling land uses and subsidizing so-called transit-oriented development, agencies need to be flexible and respond to changes in demand as they happen, not after the years and decades it takes to build expensive rail lines.

In contrast with the Antiplanner, Polzin is not a virulent critic of transit. He has served on the board of a major transit agency and conducts objective research on transportation. Yet his mild words suggest that transit is in serious trouble and needs to change course if it is to remain relevant in the near future.