The Antiplanner has focused on a few themes in recent years: density is expensive; buses can move more people than rails; transit systems are mismanaged; transit is losing rides to ride hailing. Recent research papers from a variety of sources have confirmed these ideas, at least in part.
First, Steve Polzin and Jodi Godfrey at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transit Research have examined transit ridership trends, noting that ridership in Florida is declining twice as fast as the rest of the nation. These declines aren’t due to decreasing service, as some have said; in fact, service in many Florida urban areas has increased and, if it decreased, did so only after ridership declined. Instead, they blame the decline on “the fact that more travelers now have additional options,” notably ride hailing, working at home, and increased auto ownership.
Transit systems in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area have been hit particularly hard by ridership declines. Broward County Transit (Ft. Lauderdale) has lost more than a quarter of its riders since 2014. To make matters worse, the agency is under investigation for falsifying overtime records for favored employees and, for some reason, hiding buses from Federal Transit Administration inspectors.
A new report from Moody’s confirms that major transit agencies have huge unfunded pension and health-care obligations. Of the ten transit agencies reviewed by Moody’s, the Chicago Transit Authority is worst off, with debt and unfunded liabilities equal to 560 percent of its gross annual revenues. New York’s MTA is next at 520 percent; followed by Boston’s MBTA at 436 percent; San Francisco BART at nearly 400 percent; Atlanta’s MARTA at 369 percent; Washington Metro at 355 percent; and Portland’s TriMet at 336 percent. All of these agencies also have large unfunded infrastructure backlogs.
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As it happens, a report from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy reached the same conclusions. Since buses are far less expensive yet can move more people than light rail, says the report, “there are currently no cases in the US where LRT should be favored over BRT.” The “perceived advantages” of light rail over buses “are primarily aesthetic and political rather than technical.”
The main purpose of the report is to show that buses can do as well as rail at generating economic development. The Antiplanner would agree: neither buses nor light rail will generate economic development, so they are equal at zero.
Finally, a paper written by Jordan Rappaport of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City finds that density negatively correlates with population growth. Rappaport doesn’t explore in detail why that would be true, but the Antiplanner has argued that it results from the high housing prices that are an inevitable consequence of higher densities.
