The Antiplanner

The 2008 Transit Data Are Here!

28th October 2009

The 2008 Transit Data Are Here!

posted in Mission, Transportation, Useful Data |

The Antiplanner is a data junkie. When the Federal Transit Administration publishes each year’s National Transit Database, I feel like running down the street like Steve Martin in The Jerk: “The 2008 Transit Database is here! And I’m in it!” (I did, after all, ride the Washington Metro more than a few times in 2008.)

As in previous years, the 2008 database comes in two very different formats: the database and the data tables. Both are self-extracting exe files (if, like the Antiplanner, you have a Macintosh, you may need a special program such as File Juicer to extract the data). Each has more-or-less the same data, but the data tables are easier to read while the database is easier to manipulate in an Excel spreadsheet.

The Federal Transit Administration posted the 2008 transit data about a week ago. Ridership, operating costs, capital costs, and other information are contained in separate files. To make them easier to use, I’ve put the data I most often access in one file (2.4 mb). This adds to my collection of similar files for 2007, 2006, and 2005.

All these annual files have the same basic format. This year, the first 1480 rows list every mode of transit provided by every transit agency that reported to the FTA. Then there are about 14 rows that summarize the data by mode — light rail, heavy rail, motor buses, trolley buses, etc. Because energy and carbon dioxide data are not available for all transit systems, I repeated those 14 rows summarizing just those systems for which energy data are available. Finally, rows 1520 through 1869 summarize the data for each of 350 urbanized areas.

The data columns in all three parts of the spreadsheet are the same: trips, passenger miles (PM), vehicle revenue miles (VRM), vehicle revenue hours (VRH), operating costs, capital costs, fares, vehicles, seats, standing room, average number of seats per vehicle, average standing room per vehicle, BTUs of energy consumption, pounds of CO2 emissions, and directional route miles of rail transit lines (DRM).

Most of these data are taken directly from the database. The average numbers of seats and standing room are calculated by dividing total seats and standing room by numbers of vehicles. BTUs of energy and CO2 emissions are calculated by multiplying the gallons, kilowatt hours, or other fuel volumes by standard factors, most of which are published by the Energy Information Agency. The BTUs required to produce a kilowatt hour are from table B.6 of the Transportation Energy Data Base, and the pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour vary by the mix of electrical energy produced in each state.

The remaining columns are all calculations based on the preceding columns: BTUs and CO2 per passenger mile, operating costs, capital costs, and fares per trip and per passenger mile, the percentage of seats filled and the percentage of capacity filled. I’ll probably add more calculations later and may post an update then.

To better understand the data, I added a new mode of transit: vintage trolleys. The FTA classifies vintage trollies and streetcars as light rail, but they are really very different. I classified the Tacoma streetcar as a vintage trolley even though it makes no pretense of being vintage. The data for the Portland streetcar are mixed with Portland’s light rail.

I also adjusted the urbanized areas for some commuter-rail lines. Maryland transportation officials tell me that 90 percent of their commuter-rail customers go to DC, not Baltimore, so I put Maryland commuter rail in the DC urban area. Similarly, I put Connecticut commuter trains in New York, the Portland, Maine commuter rail in Boston, the Altamont Commuter Express in San Jose, and the planned Delaware commuter rail in Philadelphia. New Jersey has three light-rail lines, two in the New York urban area and one in Philadelphia, but the data are not separated so I grouped them all in New York.

A few early observations:

First, thanks to the increased ridership due to high gas prices, most forms of transit were about 1 to 2 percent more energy efficient in 2008 than in 2007. An exception was the demand-responsive buses (paratransit), but this appears to be more because more transit agencies reported the fuel used for such routes in 2008 than in 2007. Interestingly, the most energy-efficient forms of transit are vanpools and the Puerto Rican públicos or public cars, a private transit service that is almost entirely unsubsidized (the only subsidy seems to be to the Puerto Rican government agency that monitors the public cars).

Second, Denver still has the emptiest light-rail cars in the nation, carrying an average of 14 riders compared with a national average of 24. San Jose is second with just 16 riders per car. I don’t know much about the North (San Diego) County Transit District; it claims to have the fullest light-rail cars, with 48 riders, but it also admits to having by far the heaviest subsidies per trip. This seems peculiar.

Third, there are some crazy commuter-rail lines and proposals out there. Commuter rail seems to be the poor city’s light rail (which in turn is the middle city’s heavy rail): cities build it because it uses existing rail lines and seems cheap, but compared with buses it is ridiculous.

Nashville, for example, spent just $33 million to start running commuter trains on a 31-mile line shared with freight trains. But the “Music City Star” carried an average of just 264 commuters to and from work on weekdays in 2008, and taxpayers had to pay more than $3 per passenger mile subsidizing train operations (compared with less than $1 for Nashville buses and 50 cents for transit buses nationwide).

Portland’s commuter rail is too recent for the 2008 data base, but in September it carried an average of just 563 commuters to work each weekday. Commuter-rail lines in Seattle, Dallas, and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale aren’t much better; Seattle and Dallas both lose more than $2 per passenger mile on operations. Operating the Ft. Lauderdale trains only loses about $1 per passenger mile, but they recently spent hundreds of millions of dollars double-tracking the route and have only a few new passengers to show for it. Proposed lines in Akron, Atlanta, Denver, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, and elsewhere are not likely to do much better than these.

In any case, I hope those of you who are also data junkies find the spreadsheet useful.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Mission, Transportation, Useful Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 11 responses to “The 2008 Transit Data Are Here!”

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  1. 1 On October 28th, 2009, msetty said:

    Thanks for doing this. It means that the rest of us don’t have to do it!

    Looking at the bus results for small cities, it is obvious in all but a few cases, these systems are mainly providing basic mobility for those who can’t drive for various reasons. With larger cities of 200,000-1,000,000, you have a much more mixed bag. Ironically, those places with better systems tend to have higher utilization and lower costs per passenger and per passenger mile, contrary to some anti-transit propaganda.

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 9:53 am

  2. 2 On October 28th, 2009, John Thacker said:

    @msetty:

    Sure, but don’t commit cum hoc ergo propter hoc.

    Suppose that every city builds out their transit system until the last line they put in has a certain marginal loss per passenger that is common nationwide.

    The larger the city, or the more transit it can sustain, the better its average cost per passenger and per passenger mile will be. It will have some profitable routes and some unprofitable, whereas a smaller city only has unprofitable routes.

    That in no way implies that the smaller cities would be better off if they just built more transit. It’s entirely reasonable to assume that any city would build its most profitable route first. It’s far from clear (and I’d say quite unlikely) that any synergy on old routes from building a new route would overcome the fact that the new route itself is less profitable than any existing route.

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 10:43 am

  3. 3 On October 28th, 2009, John Thacker said:

    Or to put it another way, it’s not just (or I’d said, even significantly) that cities with bigger transit systems can sustain more transit traffic. It’s that cities that can sustain more transit traffic build bigger transit systems on average.

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 10:44 am

  4. 4 On October 28th, 2009, prk166 said:

    It’s nice they make that data available. Too bad they don’t have a database(s) file it’s to download.

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 11:05 am

  5. 5 On October 28th, 2009, Scott said:

    No matter the expense & how little used, many people (politicians, ignorant voters) still like certain “things” that seem good due to supposedly feel-good measures & the best of intentions, despite the data showing the bad results.

    Misconceptions & little knowledge can go a long way to creating worse conditions.

    The current recession is a huge example. The market & capitalism did not fail. It was government intervention that caused it. Particularly, the push for more home-ownership [to those who don't quite have the means], and the local policies that increased housing prices (the bubble) via limiting supply (UGBs & other restrictions/regulations) in only about a dozen markets.

    Here are a few articles that explain:
    http://www.appeal-democrat.com/articles/inside-76904-bipartisanship-newest.html
    http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmU3OWZkMDVmZDUwNzFiZGMxNzIwOWNlZDE3YWE5YTU=
    http://townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2009/05/27/the_housing_boom_and_bust
    http://www.reason.com/news/show/133593.html
    http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/04/29/the_housing_boom_and_bust
    http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTE0YmIwNjg1NjA1N2QxNGUzNGUyMmZiZThmN2UwNTg=
    http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html
    http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10570
    http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_homeownership.html

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 1:36 pm

  6. 6 On October 28th, 2009, msetty said:

    JThacker spake:
    That in no way implies that the smaller cities would be better off if they just built more transit.

    First, that’s not what I said.

    It’s entirely reasonable to assume that any city would build its most profitable route first.

    Well, no. It is NOT a reasonable assumption! At least not in the U.S. where transit is relatively primitive compared to say, small cities in Europe or Japan.

    Most smaller cities in the U.S., particularly those under 200,000 without major four year universities, have no clue where to put productive routes in their areas, despite the fact that most urban areas from 50,000-200,000 have at least a few corridors where more than basic hourly or half hourly bus service can be justified. However, most places in this size category have simple hourly or in the better cases, at best, half hourly service on some routes.

    These systems are essentially transportation only for transit dependents, e.g., those who for whatever reason–age or economics–cannot drive. To paraphrase something I heard decades ago (“private splendor, public squalor”): in this context, “poor people, poor transportation.” Such systems cannot make any significant contributions to environmental or energy savings objectives, due to low frequencies and catering far more to relatively unproductive, and most often indirect “coverage” of their service areas rather than direct “frequency” in the usual handful of busier travel corridors.

    posted on October 28th, 2009 at 5:39 pm

  7. 7 On October 29th, 2009, the highwayman said:

    Scott said: The market & capitalism did not fail.

    THWM: We gave up that bullshit on July 4th 1776.

    Scott: It was government intervention that caused it. Particularly, the push for more home-ownership [to those who don't quite have the means], and the local policies that increased housing prices (the bubble) via limiting supply (UGBs & other restrictions/regulations) in only about a dozen markets.

    THWM: Though that works for the far political right as much as for the far political left.

    posted on October 29th, 2009 at 1:23 am

  8. 8 On October 29th, 2009, ws said:

    Scott:“The current recession is a huge example. The market & capitalism did not fail. It was government intervention that caused it. Particularly, the push for more home-ownership [to those who don't quite have the means], and the local policies that increased housing prices (the bubble) via limiting supply (UGBs & other restrictions/regulations) in only about a dozen markets.”

    ws: You’re also forgetting the area where the banks were giving easy loans to the sprawl developers, which is basically where the market crisis originated, coupled with some other things you mentioned. Nobody held a gun to the private banks and made them make loans to people who normally wouldn’t qualify.

    posted on October 29th, 2009 at 12:55 pm

  9. 9 On October 30th, 2009, JimKarlock said:

    msetty said: Such systems cannot make any significant contributions to environmental or energy savings objectives, due to low frequencies and catering far more to relatively unproductive, and most often indirect “coverage” of their service areas rather than direct “frequency” in the usual handful of busier travel corridors.
    JK: Transit systems in general “ cannot make any significant contributions to environmental or energy savings objectives, due to” using more energy than cars. And using a lot more energy than efficient cars. Even light rail’s alleged advantage disappears when you look at rail containing transit systems as a whole.
    See http://www.portlandfacts.com/top10bus.html

    Thanks
    JK

    posted on October 30th, 2009 at 3:17 am

  10. 10 On October 31st, 2009, Dan said:

    The market & capitalism did not fail. It was government intervention that caused it. Particularly, the push for more home-ownership [to those who don't quite have the means], and the local policies that increased housing prices (the bubble) via limiting supply (UGBs & other restrictions/regulations) in only about a dozen markets.

    These tired talking points were refuted long ago. Fortunately, the vast majority of the population no longer parrots them. Some just can’t let go of their shibboleths, I guess.

    ————

    Thank you for doing it, Randal. We see again that density favors transit and dense areas have less VMT.

    DS

    posted on October 31st, 2009 at 10:44 am

  11. 11 On November 2nd, 2009, Stuck in the 1960s » The Antiplanner said:

    [...] of data, when I downloaded the 2008 National Transit Database last week, it occurred to me that in past years the Federal Highway Administration has always [...]

    posted on November 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 am

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