Search Results for: trimet

TriMet Wants Another Tax Increase

Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, “knows the key to increasing ridership is offering more frequent bus service.” But, guess what, the agency is devoting all of its resources to building rail lines that hardly anyone will ride. So the only way it will actually be able to increase ridership is to get a tax increase.

Portlanders voted against expanding the convention center (the twin glass towers), but the city expanded it anyway and now is mostly empty. Portlanders voted against expanding the light-rail system, but TriMet expanded it anyway, and now it says it doesn’t have enough money to improve bus service. (I think the high rise visible between the twin glass towers was also subsidized — JK will know for sure.)
Flickr photo by ahockley.

TriMet is funded out of an “employee tax” (it’s really an income tax, but it doesn’t appear on people’s paychecks as a payroll deduction, so most people other than employers aren’t aware of it) that is scheduled to increase over the next decade.

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Why Bus-Rapid-Transit Has Become Popular

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.

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32 Years of Transit Data

When the Federal Transit Administration released the 2022 National Transit Database, it also released updated time series data tables. These tables have operating data (including costs and ridership) from 1991 through 2022, capital costs from 1992 through 2022, and fare revenues from 2002 through 2022.

This chart shows ridership for six urban areas that I consider to be basket cases, with ridership steadily declining despite — or more likely because of — the construction of light-rail or some other transit infrastructure. Of course, ridership declined everywhere due the pandemic, but most of these are among the slowest to recover to their already low 2019 levels.

The release includes six data tables, but I find just two of them useful as they are the only two that break down data by mode. Table TS3.1 has capital costs by transit agency and mode. Table TS2.1 has all other information — operating costs, fares, service in miles and hours, ridership, passenger-miles, and miles of rail lines — by agency and mode. Continue reading

A Polycentric Plan for Portland

Portland’s TriMet transit agency is attempting to serve a 2020s urban area with a 1910 transit system, says a new report published by the Cascade Policy Institute. The agency’s infatuation with rail transit underscores this problem, as rail transit makes no sense for rapidly evolving regions with multiple economic centers. TriMet’s current route map works well only for downtown employees: while more than 40 percent of downtown workers took transit to work before the pandemic, less than 3.5 percent of workers in the rest of the urban area used transit.

The Cascade Policy Institute report proposes to replace TriMet’s current bus route map with a hub-and-spoke system using nine hubs. Yellow circles are the hubs. Blue lines represent non-stop buses from every hub to every other hub. Red lines represent local buses radiating away from each hub. The lines are not exact routes and only show the origins and (in the case of the red lines) approximate destinations of each route. Click image for a larger view.

All of these problems were made worse by the pandemic, which hit rail transit especially hard and which greatly reduced the importance of downtown Portland as an economic center. According to the latest report, Portland’s downtown has the second-worst recovery of any of the nation’s 50 largest downtowns, with less than 40 percent the economic activity of the pre-pandemic period. Yet TriMet still wants to build two new light-rail lines to downtown even though the last line it opened gained no net new riders for the transit system. Continue reading

Transit Tax Delinquents

Nearly 2,000 people and corporations owe the state of Oregon and state transit agencies more than $330 million in delinquent taxes, according to data recently released by the Oregon Department of Revenue. The list includes taxpayers who owe more than $50,000 apiece. Unfortunately, the list isn’t linkable (you have to go to the Department of Revenue web site, scroll down to “Tools,” and click on “Delinquent Taxpayer List”), it isn’t sortable, and you can’t view more than 5 percent of the list at one time.

American Patriot Brands, doing business near Medford under the name of Urban Pharms, owes Oregon more than $27 million in corporate income taxes.

To remedy these problems, I’ve copied and pasted the entire list into a single Excel spreadsheet. The links from the spreadsheet to “detailed information” on individual taxpayers don’t work, but if you want more information, the spreadsheet lists the order in which the taxpayers are listed. Divide by 100 and add 1 to get the page on which they are listed on the original list (for example, taxpayer 405 is on the 5th of 20 pages). Continue reading

Steve McCarthy R.I.P.

My first real job was a summer internship with the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) in 1972. Steve McCarthy was the flamboyant director of OSPIRG, and my work that summer on low-cost ways to improve TriMet, Portland’s transit system, helped propel him into the job of TriMet’s general manager. He implemented some of my suggestions and made other improvements and by the end of the decade Portland was one of the few urban areas in America where transit ridership had grown faster than driving.

Steve McCarthy growing pears in bottles that will soon be filled with Clear Creek pear brandy. Photo courtesy of Clear Creek Distillery.

Nearly two decades later, Steve invited me out to lunch in Northwest Portland where he had started a new business making pear brandy. Over lunch, he told me that after leaving TriMet he took over his father’s business making hunting accessories and then bought a pear orchard in Oregon’s Hood River Valley, where his family had been in the fruit-growing business since 1910. He wanted to prove to other orchardists that they could make more money by adding value to their fruit than by just selling fruit to grocers. Continue reading

One Boondoggle Down, Hundreds to Go

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has killed the LaGuardia AirTrain, a ridiculously expensive people mover that had been supported by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. “I don’t feel obligated to accept what I have inherited,” Hochul said, noting that there were lower-cost alternatives that had been ignored by Cuomo and rejected by the Port Authority.

This bridge has become a symbol of Portland, but it really should be read as a symbol of the Portland light-rail mafia‘s willingness to spend $1.5 billion on a new light-rail line that added no net new riders to the region’s transit system, which carried fewer riders the year after it opened than the year before. Photo by Steve Morgan.

Of course, those lower-cost alternatives are still going to cost a lot of money, and spending that money is problematic in an age when many people are no longer comfortable in crowded conditions. As noted here earlier this month, New York City offices have some of the highest vacancy rates in decades, and even offices that are still under lease may be nearly empty as the number of people entering those offices is down by more than 70 percent. Downtown groups have released similarly dire reports for Seattle and Washington, DC, among other cities. Continue reading

National Obsolete Transportation Month

From San Francisco to North Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be “Transit Month.” “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,” says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”

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

From a transportation viewpoint, agencies don’t have much to celebrate this year. Cities have proven they can get along quite well without transit. With more than half of all American employees working at home at the beginning of this year, roads are less congested so people who continue to work outside of their homes can more easily drive to work. While driving recovered to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels by June 2021, transit remained stuck at 50 percent in June and July. Continue reading

Moving from Transit Apartheid to Transportation Equity

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

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