The Antiplanner has argued that Congress should abolish New Starts and other mass transit grant making programs and distribute the money through formulas instead–preferably formulas that reward transit agencies for increasing ridership. However, I warned, the formulas probably should be based on fares rather than ridership counts as the latter are far easier to fake.
Case in point: Knoxville Area Transit (KAT) has its bus drivers count every boarding rider, and it was foolish enough to have the driver ring a bell for each count. A television news team decided to ride some KAT buses to see if the bells correlated with actual passengers.
On one trip, for example, the reporter heard “the driver hit the bell almost 30 times – when only seven riders had boarded. A short time later, two passengers were counted as 10.”
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The story points out that money is clearly involved in over counts. “Some federal dollars rely on the number of passengers who use the services,” and those funds have “increased each of the past three fiscal years, jumping from $4.5 million in FY 2011 to its current $5.3 million” thanks to increased ridership. But the reporters are clearly skeptical that ridership has grown as fast as the agency reported.
If Congress is going to hand out dollars to local agencies, it needs to give those agencies incentives to do the right thing. Among other things, these includes not creating a moral hazard, that is, an incentive to do something unethical to get more dollars. Unfortunately, Congress pays little attention to the incentives it creates so all too often these moral hazards pop up in transportation and other programs.
Civil servants lie? Of course they do, everybody does. The surprising thing is that we too often give credence to civil servants when in fact they lie more than the rest of us. They have no incentive not to lie and plenty of incentives to lie.
Anti-planner, you did not play the movie to the end, to where the dishonest KAT bus drivers suffered no punishment at all. I don’t know that for fact, but conclude it from past and similar behaviour.
Here’s another question for all of you planner types. Did any planner ever take any steps to verify the KAT data, or attempt to review or critique the data collection scheme? Is there any documented case of any planner even being skeptical about data presented to them when they “like” the data?
The particular ache in my craw is community associations. Lefties always take them over, always. They are the only ones with the time and drive for power. When a community association says to municipal planners that their community does not want such and such a type of development, do planners ever ask for proof? Do they ever ask the community association what percentage of the community belongs to it? Do they ever ask what proportion of members are tenants rather than owners? Do they ever independently poll the community?
It’s bad enough with bus drivers and planners, but Radley Balko’s reports on police run amok are truly chilling.
Fred Z asks: “Did any planner ever take any steps to verify the KAT data, or attempt to review or critique the data collection scheme? Is there any documented case of any planner even being skeptical about data presented to them when they “like” the data?”
As a planning consultant I can tell you that this is essentially my life. Now do I go out of my way to publish scathing articles that embarrass my clients and ensure a bad reference? No. That said, so much of my professional existence is focused on improving data collection. The scenario usually goes like this:
1. We get hired to write a plan or make service recommendations. 2. We ask for basic data (service miles and hours, ridership, costs, etc). 3. After a cursory review of the data it becomes obvious that the data is not very good. 5. We go and ride all the routes, which generally identifies what the problem is. 6. We recommend new ways to collect data.
In large urban systems passenger counts are by and large automated and relatively accurate. Fare boxes count passengers, bus passes are scanned, no big deal (except the technology costs a lot). In small urban and rural areas buses are not equipped with the latest technology and passenger counts are often left up to the driver. For busier routes this is going to result in bad data. A vehicle operator has a lot to deal with and consider without counting customers.
As for punitive actions for deliberate falsification of ridership numbers, State DOT’s generally are the ones that dole out transit grant money. State DOT’s often want to build highways and hate transit. State DOT’s do not want mud on their face. If the state agency that distributes the grant money finds out about deliberate inaccuracies in ridership counts, I guarantee you that the first thing they do is look at how that can cut the dollars going to that agency.
I don’t think civil servants are any more or less honest than anybody else. But in government activity, everyone in the agency has an incentive to skew the data in a certain way to increase their budget, so you can bet that all the margin of error in the system will be designed to skew toward the desired result, even if they are honest.
In private companies, dollars are the most common counting mechanism, and even if something else is used it is also connected to dollars with indicators like cost per passenger and profit per passenger. Because no one will “add dollars” to the system, and “subtracting dollars” is fraud and highly audited, the dollar measure is much more accurate. Just one of the many important signals provided by the simple “price”.
A great example of how traffic and passenger counts are manipulated is in the city of Anaheim. The city has built a new $190 million train station based on the number of passengers (that is, Disneyland patrons) that the California High-Speed Rail system — which is thankfully on its deathbed — would be bringing into the city. The numbers were purely fiction and it’s more and more evident that CAHSR can’t be built for lack of funding and being blocked by a very smart (and responsible) State Superior Court Judge. Still the city is nearly finished with this glass barn, replacing its perfectly adequate station that serves commuter rail and Amtrak (and is only the third busiest in Orange County) — the County Supervisor’s office for the district says there are only 250 riders/day at the station now.
I’ve witnessed overcounting of people at NPS visitor centers. In some VCs, we used hand-held tally counters and clicked each time a visitor walked through the door. (Busier and larger VCs had scanners at the door.) When things got hectic, the clicker was forgotten until the crowds dispersed, and then rangers would click away until reaching a number that felt right. Other times rangers were simply overly enthusiastic when clicking and counted more people than entered. Supervisors told us that visitors=our jobs, so of course rangers had an incentive to overcount.
bennett, you are a planning consultant not a civil servant. If a civil servant lies, or misconstrues the evidence, nothing bad happens to him. If you do the same, all hell breaks loose for you personally and your employers.
Sandy Teal says civil servants are more or less as honest as the rest of us. Heinlein rightly said:”No matter how lavishly overpaid, civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid — but all public employees have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn’t be feeding at the public trough.”
One of the many positive aspects of the Swiss system is how well coordinated the routes are; when you transfer from one route to another (which is often), there is seldom a wait for the connecting train/tram/bus. Because they have good data.
For inter-city routes, the data can be collected easily enough from the ticketing system (although it is a massive amount of data). Inner-city and suburban transit (buses, trams and trains), however, are on the honour system; transit employees occasionally (and randomly) appear to check your ticket. Big fine if you don’t. About half the time the controller also asks you where you got on and where you are going, and enters the info on a handheld device. Seems to work pretty well.
bennett wrote:
In large urban systems passenger counts are by and large automated and relatively accurate. Fare boxes count passengers, bus passes are scanned, no big deal (except the technology costs a lot).
Though if a count of transit patrons passing a certain point or screenline is desired, having people observe how many are on each vehicle may make sense, especially for buses (and probably trolleys as well).
Ideally, those counts are done by people that are not associated with the transit provider and have no incentive to over-count (or under-count, for that matter).
Maybe the FTA should make a special grant to KAT to outfit their buses with APC systems so that they don’t have to rely on such antiquated and abuse-proned methods. The amount of savings from reductions in pure fraud alone should make such a grant worthwhile.
State DOT’s often want to build highways and hate transit.
That isn’t a true statement.
Fred_Z. About asking if they were “tenants rather than owners”, does it make any difference?
Dave, most tenants are either young and inexperienced or older and financially unwise. There are tenants that have carefully assessed costs, are financially clever and have decided to rent and invest the difference between ownership costs and rent. I’m a landlord by trade and I can assure you that latter class is infinitesimal.
Tenants honestly believe they can have something for nothing and that they have a right to have a large influence over the property of others. Owners know that a restriction on my development rights is a restriction on their development rights. If my property’s upside goes away, so does theirs. Tenants might even know those things but they do not care because they own no property affected by a development restriction. They have no upside, it’s all downside.
“most tenants are either young and inexperienced or older and financially unwise.”
Fred, you are so full of shit. Show me some kind of evidence for this assertion. Also consider that in markets like Seattle, HALF the population rents. According to you, that means half are young and inexperienced or financially unwise. Please.
Frank, you are citing Seattle? Portlandia? Where huge chunks of the population are hippy dippy socialists? Where the lefties have made home ownership at an affordable price damn near impossible? That Seattle?
I thought we were talking about the places not yet sucked into the socialist whirlpool, not third world hellholes. Sorry to hear about your pain.
As for full of shit, yes daily, but I can relieve myself every morning, unlike socialists.
Fred, I asked for evidence that renters are “either young and inexperienced or older and financially unwise”, but you provided none.
The socialist thing is a red herring that has nothing to do with why people rent. Nor does it support your assertion.
Try again. Or not. But if you do, please stop the hand-flapping to use a Danism.
Here you go: Renter Demographics:
Nothing about “older and financially unwise” although there is some support for being young, but nothing about inexperienced—more about flexibility.
Many rent because they want flexibility and don’t want to have to directly pay to maintain property for 30 years. Keep in mind that buying a home is NOT an investment; it’s an expense. It’s only an investment if you buy a property to rent out to tenants at a profit (when factoring maintenance and taxes and inflation and etc.).
Anyway…isn’t this post about overcounting transit riders?
Anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the Olympics in Sochi. There’s a road they constructed so they can actually get to the event. It’s total cost, 10 billion. The equivalent of 1000 miles of interstate in the US. And then get on board the most expensive ski jump in the world. The most expensive winter Olympic game in history, more than all others put together. Cities all over the world get down and dirty for a shot at bringing the globe’s greatest games to their country. It’s like the Hunger Games of the adult world, only without the starvation, murder and incest. While being a respected city that hosts the Olympics is great, it’s the costs that set you back. Greece’s initial budget for the 2004 games was 4.5 billion euros, but the actual cost doubled and grew again. When all was said and done, the cost was 5% of Greece’s GDP, years later, the country hasn’t recovered from the debt. The Nagano Olympics in 98 plunged the city into a recession. Bern, Switzerland , Detroit and Denver all rejected the Olympic bids. And all of those new venues and housing have to go somewhere, and usually that somewhere is where the poor people live. Thirty thousand Atlanta residents were displaced by the 1996 games, and 720,000 were forced from their homes in Seoul, Korea in 88′. The ones who were unlucky enough to not have a roof over their heads were rounded up and housed out of sight during the games. But nothing compares to Beijing 1.5 million people were forced out of their homes in the lead-up to the 2008 games. Residents not displaced can look forward to higher rents. As for all those beautiful sports venues, in Greece 21 of the 22 stadiums are now homeless colonies and bird poop collectors. Russia is no exception and at 50+ billion dollars this is fiscally disastrous and after the games are over it’ll all be a leftover wreck. I don’t think you’ve been to Russia, but they have a huge assortment of financial, economic, environmental and social problems and spending 50 billion for a contest to see who can skate the gayest isn’t the wisest use of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_MBOeqSYVk
“a contest to see who can skate the gayest”
I don’t usually respond to your inane and poorly written comments, but you’ve shown yourself to be a narrow minded biggot with your latest off-topic tripe.
As a planner for a transit agency who deals extensively with ridership statistics, I hope this post will be widely read.
Fare revenue would indeed be a better metric than boardings for the reasons given, mainly that there are more internal controls. Another very simple, very needed improvement would be to use passenger miles instead of boardings. You can boost boardings just by splitting a long line into two lines, forcing passengers to transfer. With that one simple decision, you’ve made life worse for all your riders, but you’ve increased “ridership” by 10-15 percent. That same scenario would not boost passenger miles one bit.
For the largest federal formula funding program, passenger miles have always been the metric for ridership, which is factored in with other factors like population, density, etc. As the article says, it’s the New Starts program that is screwed up, because it uses boardings. Make no mistake about it, every city that wants a streetcar system has lobbied for boardings to be in the equation. It’s the only way that streetcars projects, which have some boardings, but negligible PMT, can compete on paper with light rail, which actually moves people over distances. In this way, money that is supposed to go to transportation is co-opted for streetcars. Streetcars are real estate development schemes or economic development experiments, not transportation. But cities sure love getting FTA money for them! I know this blog is anti-light rail, and many of the arguments are quite valid, but light rail is at least debatably a good mode, and that debate will and should go on. But streetcars basically have all the drawbacks of rail, with none of the obvious capacity benefits! Streetcars have no business whatsoever getting a dollar of transportation money.
Regarding accuracy of statistics, virtually every American transit agency must submit basic ridership statistics to FTA’s National Transit Database annually, which has been mentioned on this blog. Believe it or not, FTA actually set up guidelines for preparation of these statistics, including PMT, that are actually fairly sound, and which can usually be understood by at least one person in even the smallest, least-sophisticated agency. They have a central system that does a battery of simple, effective checks on the data, like comparisons with the previous year of every statistic and every conceivable ratio. This system is effective in detecting errors, and they improve it gradually every year. Agency processes and procedures must also undergo an audit every year, except for very small systems. Given the likely variation in technical and analytical abilities at transit agencies throughout the country, large and small, and given the limited amount of time and organizational energy an agency’s management is justifiably going to deem appropriate to spend on making sure all these statistics are perfect, the NTD program is actually astonishingly right-sized. We can thank the bureaucrats at FTA for that. For the idiotic use of boardings instead of passenger miles or fare revenue in the New Starts program, you can thank Congress.
J Austen – Those are very interesting and thoughtful comments. Thanks!
J_Austin hit the nail on the head with a few exceptions. RE: “fare revenue,” Many small urban and rural systems are fare free, so fare revenue is not a viable metric. RE: NTD data, again rural providers are not required to submit data. In my business, small urban and rural providers are the ones with the biggest data concerns. The urban systems generally have data collection under control.
MJ,
It depends on the State. The Peoples Republic of Maryland loves transit. The Republic of Texas… Not so much.
OT: Housing report: Tech hubs see prices and rents soar
It ain’t the salt water. It’s the silicon: Trulia found that prices were 82 percent higher in tech hubs than in other large metro areas.
So much for the UGB primary price driver myth. Fed + consumerism = phony economy.
Can’t wait for the next collapse.
Another very simple, very needed improvement would be to use passenger miles instead of boardings. You can boost boardings just by splitting a long line into two lines, forcing passengers to transfer. With that one simple decision, you’ve made life worse for all your riders, but you’ve increased “ridership” by 10-15 percent. That same scenario would not boost passenger miles one bit.
To an extent, I agree. I think there are good reasons for reporting both, especially considering the different characteristic of trips by different transit modes. Long-distance modes like commuter rail benefit from the use of PMT statistics, while shorter-distance modes which involve more transfers (like the streetcars you mention) look better when counted as unlinked boardings.
To me, the best way to resolve this issue would be to develop survey protocols for estimating linked trips by asking users of various modes how many transfers they make during their daily trips. I’m pretty sure some transit agencies already do internal rider surveys like this, but don’t often report the results publicly.
Doesn’t matter if 5 or 500 people drive by house during a day the road is there.
So numbers count and don’t count at the same time!