Search Results for: jarrett walker

Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

By | | Transportation
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Am I ahead of my time or simply out of step with the times? When I began studying light rail, I quickly realized that buses could do everything light rail could do except cost a lot of money. I was especially heartened when Kansas City, whose voters had rejected light rail in something like eight different elections, spent about $3 million a mile (about $4 million a mile in today’s money) installing two bus-rapid-transit (BRT) lines and got 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership, which is more than some light-rail lines get.

So I should be happy about recent reports favoring BRT.

  • As noted above, the World Bank reports that “Bus Rapid Transit takes cars off the road and moves people quickly, providing the benefits of metros at a fraction of the cost.”
  • An article in Research in Transportation Economics found that the values of homes within a 20-minute walk of a bus-rapid transit station increased by 5 to 7 percent and the total increase in property values was six times the cost of the BRT projects.
  • Jarrett Walker reports “good outcomes” from a new BRT line in Portland, specifically a 30 to 40 percent increase in ridership.

Continue reading →

Scrutinizing July Transit Data

By | | Transportation
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The Antiplanner is back from Wheeler County where I happened to meet some Portland transportation consultants who were cycling through the area. If you are reading this, I hope you had a good trip with no more mechanical problems.

I promised I would take a closer look at the transit data that the FTA released last week. The data continue to show that rail transit is lagging behind bus ridership, with rail at 57 percent and bus at 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Yet worst off is commuter bus, at a mere 36 percent of July 2019 numbers. Rapid bus is 64 percent, and hybrid rail is at 82 percent — though that’s because a new line opened in North San Diego County since the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: The First Year of the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Transit agencies in 2020 carried 40 percent fewer riders than in 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. To do so, they provided 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle miles or hours) at 97 percent of the cost.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to the database, transit carried 5.9 billion trips in 2020. We know from the FTA’s monthly reports that transit carried 4.5 billion trips in calendar year 2020. The difference is that data in the annual database are based on transit agency fiscal years, not the calendar year. Continue reading →

Moving from Transit Apartheid to Transportation Equity

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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In 2014, the Metropolitan Council—the Twin Cities’ regional planning agency—proudly announced that it was adopting a regional transit equity program. Under this program, the region would spend billions of dollars building light-rail lines to wealthy, largely white suburbs. Meanwhile, it would spend a few million dollars building 150 to 200 bus shelters, most of them in low-income, largely black, neighborhoods.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

The claim that this was equitable was so absurd that the council’s announcement might as well have been written by the Onion. Yet this was a continuation of policies that had been followed by transit agencies for several decades. Continue reading →

Reinventing Transit for a Post-COVID World

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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As society rebuilds after the pandemic, the transit industry at a crossroads. It could totally reinvent itself to truly serve the residents of modern cities. Alternatively, it could come up with new reasons for ever larger subsidies despite continuing to be ineffective and wasteful. Since President Biden and Democrats in Congress seem eager to give it subsidies with few to no questions asked, it is likely to choose the latter course.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

Transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, losing 7.7 percent nationally between 2014 and 2019. During that time, transit ridership declined in about 85 percent of the nation’s major urban areas. On a larger scale, it has been declining for the last century, with per capita ridership falling from nearly 290 trips per urban resident in 1920 to just 37 in 2019. As of April, 2021, ridership was 60 percent lower than it had been before the pandemic, and it isn’t clear that ridership will ever recover to 2019’s already low levels. Continue reading →

$85 Billion for Empty Buses and Railcars

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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The future of public transit is nearly empty buses and railcars. Yet President Biden’s American Jobs Plan calls for spending $85 billion on transit. Although transit carries less than 1 percent of passenger travel in the United States, and no freight, this represents 28 percent of the funds Biden proposes to spend on transportation.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Considering that the pandemic has cut transit ridership by more than half, while driving has recovered to 97 percent of pre-pandemic levels, this a poor, and poorly timed, use of public funds. Biden’s plan claims that spending more on transit “will ultimately reduce traffic congestion for everyone.” Other transit advocates claim that it will help low-income people as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But none of these claims are true. Continue reading →

Rapid Bus: Finding the Right Model

By | | Policy brief
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In 2005, Kansas City opened its Main Street bus-rapid transit line, one of the first of its kind in the nation. The buses were “branded’ with distinctive paint jobs and, like light rail, stopped less frequently than regular buses, increasing their average speeds. They also ran four times per hour instead of the twice-per-hour schedules of many local buses.

Click image to download a six-page PDF of this policy brief.

Sharing lanes with other traffic, the buses didn’t have a dedicated right of way, didn’t require people to pay before they board, didn’t have priority at traffic signals, and didn’t use other advanced technologies. Despite this, the increased frequencies and speeds generated a 50 percent increase in ridership on the route. Continue reading →

Transit Lost 84 Percent of Riders in April

By | | Policy brief
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Transit ridership in April 2020 was 84 percent less than it had been in April 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. The media has reported falling ridership due to the coronavirus and resulting quarantines, but these data reveal exactly how much it has fallen for each mode and urban area.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

For example, ridership is down 92 percent in the New York urban area and 93 percent in Philadelphia but only 58 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District saw a 94 percent decline, but ridership in Tucson fell by just 44 percent. Continue reading →

CDC Recommends Single-Occupant Cars

By | | Transportation
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For more than a month, transit agencies have been telling people not to ride transit unless they are “essential workers.” Now those same agencies are outraged that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is giving people the same advice as they go back to work.

In an advisory page for employers of office workers, CDC urges employers to “Offer employees incentives to use forms of transportation that minimize close contact with others, such as offering reimbursement for parking for commuting to work alone or single-occupancy rides.”

It operates by creating a levitra online vacuuming impact that brings bloodstream into your erectile organ. You ought not to mistake them for irregularities or tadalafil sale tumors. As per the Journal of Sexual Medicine, men that work out 18 MET (metabolic equivalents) or more levitra pill click this link now a week had a higher sperm count than couch potatoes. Reliable Canadian pharmacies provide the cost effective solution for males’ sexual issues. pill viagra “We’ve never had a situation where everyone in authority told the public to avoid public transit,” observes my friend Jarrett Walker. “We’re basically training the entire public to view public transit as dangerous. That’s going to take awhile to come back from.” Continue reading →

Shut Down Public Transit Now!

By | | Transportation
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An op-ed in InsideSources argues that public transit should be shut down as it is a major source of viral infections. No one reading this will be surprised that the Antiplanner wrote the op-ed, but the Antiplanner isn’t the only one who thinks so.

Writing in yesterday’s USA Today, University of Tennessee law professor Glen Harlan Reynolds points out that “mass transit kills.” I know some commenters on this blog point out that New York subways didn’t have to be as deadly as they were, but just two months ago people didn’t know enough about the virus to know how to protect themselves, with some experts (relying on misinformation from China) even arguing that masks could do more harm than good. Since each infectious disease is different, the safest course is to avoid public transportation.

New York City shut down its subways yesterday morning for the first time in its history. The goal is to give crews a chance to disinfect subway cars and stations and open them up again, but just overnight may not be enough as cars can quickly become reinfected every morning. Continue reading →