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Notes from All Over

By | | Transportation
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Tomorrow the Antiplanner will review more 2017 census data, but today I’ll briefly comment on a few events that took place while I was reviewing census data last week. First, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority is blaming subway delays on the passengers, claiming that late-arriving riders sticking their feet in the doors as they are closing are responsible for slow trains. Because no one ever did that before this year!

Speaking of the MTA, a member of MTA’s board is suing Mayor de Blasio and New York policy commissioner James O’Neill for their failure to release data on subway fare evaders. Because it is easier to blame financial problems on someone else than it is to actually do your job of overseeing the agency’s finances.

Speaking of fare evaders, San Francisco’s Muni is upset to discover that one out of four transit riders on the city’s famous cable cars aren’t asked if they have paid their fares. Since most riders pay before they board, this doesn’t mean that one in four haven’t paid, only that they haven’t had their tickets checked by the conductor. Continue reading →

Travel Time to Work in 2017

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The average American commuter spent 25.5 minutes getting to and from work in 2017, a 0.7 percent increase over 2016. Commuters who drove alone took 25.6 minutes, carpoolers took 28.2 minutes, while transit riders required 50.4 minutes. Curiously, the only method of commuting that averaged less than the national average was walking, but at 12.8 minutes it was enough to bring the national average below that of driving alone.

Average time to work was only 21.7 minutes in 1980 and 22.4 minutes in 1990. However, it has been hovering around 25.5 minutes since the 2000 census. One of the reasons for the increase between 1990 and 2000 was that the census data entry system allowed maximum commutes of 99 minutes in 1990 and earlier surveys but 240 minutes in 2000 and later surveys. This was estimated to add 30 seconds to average travel times.

Table B08136 of the American Community Survey reports the total time spent each way by commuters by mode of commuting. Since table B08301 presents the number of commuters by mode, it should be easy to divide one into the other to get the average number of minutes. Continue reading →

Motor Vehicle Ownership in 2017

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The number of households that lacked access to a motor vehicle declined in 2017 as did the number with only one vehicle. Meanwhile, the number with two or more rapidly grew. In fact, the more vehicles, the faster the growth: the number with two vehicles grew by 1.4 percent; the number with three grew by 2.8 percent; the number with four grew by 4.5 percent; and the number with five or more grew by an astounding 7.2 percent.


The shares of households with no cars and with three or more cars have practically reversed themselves since 1960.

The number with no vehicles declined by only 0.7 percent. But transit ridership is partly dependent on people who lack access to motor vehicles. Since transit carries less than 2 percent of passenger travel in all but a handful of urban areas, a small increase in auto ownership can translate to a large decrease in transit riders. Continue reading →

Commuting and Income in 2017

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The median income of American workers in 2017 was $36,903, while the average income was around $46,000. Average incomes are always going to be higher than medians because a few people with very high incomes will pull the average up without affecting the median. Since the lowest income people can earn is generally around zero but the highest is might be a thousand times greater than the $75,000 top-income class, the few people with vey high incomes aren’t balanced by people with very low incomes.

This point is important because in a post two months ago the Antiplanner erroneously blurred the distinction between median and average incomes. The post showed that the average incomes of transit riders were higher than the average of all workers, then concluded that “well over half of all transit riders earn” more than the national median income in 2016. That turns out not to be true: it appears that the average incomes of transit commuters began to exceed the national average in about 2008, but the median income of transit commuters did not exceed the national median until 2017.

At least, that’s what I calculate from table B08119 of the American Community Survey. This table shows how many people use various methods of commuting in each of eight income classes, ranging from below $10,000 to above $75,000. The Census Bureau doesn’t actually calculate average incomes, so I made the calculation by assuming that the average income of, say the $15,000 to $25,000 class was $20,000. For the under $10,000 class I used $7,500 and for the above $75,000 class I used $90,000. Continue reading →

Transit Commuting by Age

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Remember how Millennials and other young people were giving up cars and riding transit instead? It turns out, not so much. In fact, the latest word is that Millennials are the ones who are killing transit, or at least the DC Metro.

This is based on a study by a company called Teralytics. While the study itself isn’t available on line, charts published in the above-linked article indicate that Metro Rail usage by people in the 18-29-year age class dropped 21 percent between April 2016 and April 2018, while declines were successively smaller in successively older age classes, with the 60-year-plus class ridership declining by only 5 percent. Teralytics gathered this data from the movements of cell phones connected to one of the “big four” wireless carriers that serves more than a quarter of the DC population (no privacy concerns here, I’m sure!).

Since the Antiplanner is downloading 2017 American Community Survey data, I wondered if those data could confirm this conclusion. Table B08101 reports means of transportation to work by age classes. I downloaded this table for the usual states, counties, cities, and urban areas for every year from 2005 through 2017. It turns out that, if I squint at the data the right way, it seems to support Teralytics’ conclusion. But when I take a broader view, it isn’t quite so certain. Continue reading →

Commuting in 2017

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The total number of American workers who usually commute by transit declined from 7.649 million in 2016 to 7.637 million in 2017. This continues a downward trend from 2015, when there were 7.761 million transit commuters. Meanwhile, the number of people who drove alone to work grew by nearly 2 million, from 114.77 million in 2016 to 116.74 million in 2017.

These figures are from table B08301 of the 2017 American Community Survey, which the Census Bureau posted on line yesterday. The table also reveals that the number of people who carpool grew from 13.58 million to 13.60 million, while the number who take taxis (which probably includes ride hailing) grew from 226,687 to 303,441. The number of people who walked and bicycled to work both declined.

Transit commuting has fallen so low that more people work at home now than take transit to work. Work-at-homes reported for 2017 total to 7.99 million, up from 7.59 million in 2016. Continue reading →

Agencies Respond to Transit Decline

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last May, Nashville voters rejected a proposed light-rail plan by nearly two to one. In 2014, the state stopped a plan to convert existing road lanes to dedicated bus lanes. But that hasn’t stopped the city from coming up with ridiculous new plans for transit.

Dickerson Pike today.

The city is proposing to convert two of the five lanes on Dickerson Pike into bus-rapid transit lanes. The city expects the corridor’s population to grow by 35 percent in the next two decades, which means any congestion today will be much worse in the future. That certainly won’t be helped by reducing the number of lanes by 40 percent. Continue reading →

Transit Is About Downtown

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, likes to say that “transit is about downtown.” This is because most transit lines represent spokes focusing on a downtown hub, making it easy for people throughout an urban area to take transit downtown, but difficult for them to get from anywhere outside of downtown to somewhere else that is outside of downtown.

This can be seen in the above map of Denver’s 2004 rail transit plan known as FasTracks. All of the rail lines but one converge on downtown Denver, where about 20 percent of the 120,000 workers take transit to work. Even though downtown has less than 10 percent of the region’s jobs, 40 percent of all transit commuters in the region commute to downtown jobs. (All of these numbers are from Cox’s 2014 Central Business District report, which is based on 2006 data.) Continue reading →

Streetcar Roundup

By | | Transportation
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Milwaukee and Oklahoma City are both planning to open new streetcar lines later this year, so it is worth taking a look at how the dumbest form of transit is working in other cities. The table below shows all of the streetcar lines reported in the July, 2018 National Transit Database spreadsheet. Ridership numbers are shown for January and July and annual growth compares the last full year (August 2017-July 2018) with the year before that.

CityRail
Miles		1-18
Riders		7-18
Riders		Annual
Growth
Atlanta2.617,41643,915-16%
Charlotte1.630,16320,291-21%
Cincinnati3.617,22054,625-21%
Dallas-Oak3.611,09816,402-1%
Dallas-McK.4.531,76051,582-9%
Detroit3.384,456116,086
Kansas City2.297,194262,593-1%
Kenosha2.059310,293-5%
Little Rock3.51,5803,413-6%
Memphis10.545,457
New Orleans21.4497,771722,566-6%
Philadelphia217.32,139,2781,819,919-6%
Portland14.8400,370406,9574%
San Francisco21.7517,180863,3907%
Seattle7.9121,995148,2287%
Tacoma2.778,64462,810-3%
Tampa3.525,22126,112-1%
Tucson3.980,34343,4100%
Washington5.687,81688,56613%

Continue reading →

July Transit Ridership Up 0.2 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The beleaguered transit industry got a tiny bit of good news with the Federal Transit Administration’s release last Friday of July, 2018 ridership data: nationwide ridership was 0.2 percent greater than in July 2017. Ridership grew in 18 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, up from just 6 in June.

July 2018 had one more work day than July 2017, which helps explain the improvement in some of those urban areas. This was the first year-over-year improvement since October, 2017, which also had one more work day than October 2016.

However, the biggest reason for the nationwide increase was the 8.0 percent growth in New York City subway ridership and 6.6 percent growth in New York City bus ridership. July 2017 was the beginning of New York’s “summer of hell” as deteriorating conditions forced the partial closure of Penn Station, the city’s main transit hub, from July 10 to September 1. Many commuters who found alternate sources of transportation during that shutdown apparently returned to transit when the station fully re-opened. Continue reading →