The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) posted, then withdrew, its fourth quarter 2017 ridership report last week. The Antiplanner downloaded it during the brief time it was available and reposted it here. I’ll let you know if there are any changes when APTA posts it again.
APTA collects its own ridership data from transit agencies, including agencies in Canada and a few U.S. agencies not in FTA’s National Transit Database (NTD). But the U.S. data should be pretty similar to the NTD numbers. Annual NTD numbers are based on the fiscal years of individual agencies so won’t be exactly similar to APTA’s calendar year data. But NTD also posts monthly numbers that should be similar to APTA’s.
APTA’s 2017 numbers show a 2.9 percent decline in U.S. transit ridership from 2016, while transit in Canada declined by 0.95 percent. Every major mode of transit declined except demand response (paratransit) and “other” (which includes ferries, people movers, monorails, vanpools, and a few other types). Heavy rail fell by 2.1%; light rail by 0.8%; commuter rail by 0.2%; and bus by 4.3%. In previous years, light rail ridership has grown faster than other modes mainly due to the opening of new lines. Apparently, either no new lines opened in 2017 or the gains from those openings weren’t sufficient to offset losses elsewhere.
Light-rail results ranged from 20.9% gain in Seattle to 15.0% loss in Cleveland. APTA includes streetcars among light-rail results, which can be confusing because some agencies run both streetcars and light rail. Light-rail ridership fell in Baltimore, Boston, Norfolk, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake, San Diego, San Franisco, San Jose, and St. Louis.
Outside of Seattle, gains in light-rail ridership in the most of the cities that had gains were offset by losses in bus ridership. Charlotte lost 20 bus riders for every rail rider it gained; Denver lost 19; Dallas and Los Angeles Metro lost 9; and Minneapolis-St. Paul lost 2. Only Houston gained slightly more light-rail riders than it lost bus riders.
Almost every heavy-rail system lost riders except the Staten Island rail system and New Jersey trains into Manhattan and Philadelphia. Cleveland’s line lost 8.0%; Miami’s 6.7%; and BART lost 4.4%.
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APTA has also published its 2017 Public Transportation Fact Book, which also reports honest numbers but tries to put them in a positive light. That job is made easier by the fact that the 2017 edition only presents data through 2015, so the sustained ridership declines since 2014 only look like a blip. Some graphs show numbers through 2016, but they go back to 1996, which was an extraordinarily low year for transit, so it still looks like an overall growth trend. “Public transit usage is up 38% in the last 20 years,” the book brags, not mentioning that it has been falling by more than 2 percent per year since 2014.
Some of the fine print suggests why transit isn’t doing so well. Table 1 on page 30 shows that the average speed of heavy rail, also known as rapid transit, is 20.2 miles per hour. Light rail, which must be not-so-rapid transit, is 15.8 mph. Commuter rail is a little faster at 32 mph, but the only really fast transit is vanpools at nearly 40 mph.
Appendix A to the 2017 fact book is a spreadsheet presenting 136 historic data tables, some of which go back to 1890. For example, tables 1 and 19 show that, in 2015, the transit industry needed nearly 433,000 operating employees to carry 10.6 billion transit riders. Sixty years before, in 1955, the industry needed just 198,000 employees to carry 11.6 billion transit riders. That means the industry’s productivity per employee declined by 57 percent. The big difference is federal support, which was non-existent in 1955, suggesting that federal dollars for transit have done far more to help transit employees than transit riders.
Politically, APTA reminds us, the cost is the benefit: the very first fact presented in the 2017 transit fact book is that transit spending in the private sector has grown from $19.5 billion in 1995 to $35.8 billion in 2015. The first page of the book also mentions that the industry’s use of electric/hybrid buses has grown from 4.9 percent of the bus fleet in 2009 to 17.3 percent in 2015. This shouldn’t be surprising considering that the federal government will pay 90 percent of the cost of electric/hybrid buses but only 80 percent of the cost of diesel buses. This allows transit agencies to pay twice as much for an electric bus as a diesel bus at no extra cost to themselves. But electric buses won’t reduce much pollution if no one rides them.
APTA’s propaganda can’t hide the long-run trends, which is why much of the industry is on the verge of panic today. Despite claims by transit defenders that publicly owned transit is somehow more moral or more democratic than private transportation, it seems likely that ridership will continue to decline for the foreseeable future.
Oh you ^^ putting out relevant transit data as if people who hold political office will read it accordingly and make sound decisions.
The myriad of reasons transit is in decline, for one
– ROADS ARE CHEAPER.
In terms of construction costs per mile, maintenance/upkeep roads win. There’s over four million miles of paved road in the US, most of which is paid for using localized finances. Since the funds are seldom reinforced by outside force (the feds) there’s at least some incentive to manage road maintenance knowing overspending is not gonna be bailed out. Only the interstate highway is paid for using federal money and maybe a few boondoggles that shouldn’t have been built to begin with. Even if the funds are insufficient, neglecting road upkeep is not catastrophic. If a road cracks or crumbles it’s still driveable. As long as it’s not a bridge or tunnel or over/under pass a simple road is essentially idiot proof. And even if your car is a rusty piece of shit, if it’s still driveable…….it’s driveable. If your rails or train wheels are cracked, you’re in a heap of trouble.
Buses are also cheaper, they’re about 1% of the construction and capital costs of rail transit because they use pre-existing infrastructure; the roads. Buses can go virtually anywhere, Remember, four million miles of paved road in the US so the myriad of destinations that ca be selected is substantial, only 4% of the nations 155,000 miles of rail are for public utilization.
The Antiplanner is right, an electric bus is useless if no one rides it. That’s cause the bus services behave exactly like rail transit; they’re operated by the same organization of course. They wanna collect riders from a select few locations and move them to a select few locations. They pursue linear, monolithic transit instead of cellular distributive transit. The buses are too big for that. Mini-buses are not only simpler but they’re better scaled to drive through towns and cities. Since the Antiplanner states average buses are only 1/6th full, why carry around the other 5/6ths. Work commutes occupy the most amount of transit volume. The rest of the day; afternoons, late nights they’re nearly empty. Only a fraction of the vehicle fleet needs to run around during those off peak hours. Minibuses are about half the length and microbuses are no bigger than SUV’s or vans.
A gallon of diesel cost about 3 bucks a gallon at a typical 4-6 miles per gallon, that adds up; combined with oil changes, expensive emissions treatments, and brake repair. According to the Department of Energy the average transit bus uses over 10,000 gallons of gas equivalent worth of fuel per year. That’s $30,000 in fuel costs annually
Proterra’s new Catalyst 40 foot electric bus has a 660 kilowatt hour battery, with the average price of electricity at 12 cents per kilowatt hour charging the bus from depletion to 100% costs 79 dollars worth of juice. Assuming it’s 70% depleted by the end of the day, requiring recharge, annual costs are $20,000 worth of electricity.
https://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10308
Also the electric bus doesn’t pollute local air. Even if the power source that charges the bus does, power plants are often distant from the cities they power.
CO2 emissions per Megawatt-hour given the type of fuel used to generate.
Wind – 26.5 lbs
Solar – 119 lbs
Nuclear – 26.5 lbs
Gas – 1,051 lbs
Coal – 2,207 lbs