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Atlanta’s Transit Future

By | | Transportation
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“Mass transit is collapsing everywhere,” argues an op-ed in The Hlll. One such collapse is taking place in Atlanta, where ridership has fallen more than 20 percent since 2008.

In 1980, transit carried more than 9 percent of Atlanta-area commuters to work, and ridership peaked in 1985 at 155.7 million trips. Since then, the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Agency has added 28 miles of rail lines, more than doubling the length of its heavy-rail system. The region’s population has grown from less than 1.9 million to 5.0 million people, an increase of 166 percent.

So how many rides did transit carry in 2017? About 131.3 million, a 15 percent decline from 1985. Worse, transit trips per capita crashed from 82 in 1985 to just 26 in 2017, a 68 percent decline, while transit carried just 3.8 percent of commuters to work in 2016. Continue reading →

The Utah Transit Authority Is No More

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Utah Transit Authority is dead. Long live the Transit District of Utah! Actually, it would be better for taxpayers and most travelers if it didn’t live very long.

“Lavish” is a word that applied to the Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which until last week served Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Orem. As of 2016, the agency had spent $1.4 billion in capital costs on commuter trains that carried an average of 8,100 round trips per day. That alone is enough to buy a new Toyota Prius for every round-trip rider every three years for the next 20 years. On top of that, fares cover just 15 percent of operating costs.

The people who run the agency are also lavishly paid. A 2014 legislative audit revealed that the agency’s general manager was paid $350,000 a year, including benefits. He wasn’t even the highest-paid person in the agency: the rail service manager was paid more than $450,000. At least one other executive was paid more than $300,000 a year. For comparison, Utah’s governor is paid around $150,000 a year and the head of the state department of transportation receives around $221,000 a year. Continue reading →

Auto Fatalities Declined in 2017

By | | Transportation
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Motor vehicle fatalities declined slightly in 2017, says a new release from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Where 37,461 people were killed in traffic accidents in 2016, the number fell to 37,150 in 2017 — not a big decrease, but it is going in the right direction. Since miles of driving grew by 1.2 percent, the fatality rate per billion miles declined even more.

NHTSA doesn’t have the data broken down by kinds of accidents yet, but that didn’t stop the Detroit Free Press from simultaneously publishing a scare-piece claiming that “pedestrian fatalities skyrocket in U.S.” I’m not sure what the news is in this article since it is based on data reported here a full seven months ago.

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Nashville Light-Rail Post Mortem

By | | Transportation
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It’s been a little over a week since Nashville voters rejected that city’s light-rail plan, and the pundits are wringing their hands in despair. Many of them have a common set of assumptions:

  • Rail transit is the only real transit — buses don’t count — so voters who reject rail are rejecting transit itself;
  • Transit relieves congestion, so it is surprising that voters in a congested city would reject spending more on transit;
  • Transit is morally superior to driving and both are subsidized, so the fact that subsidies to transit passenger miles are roughly 100 times greater than to highway passenger miles is irrelevant.

Nashville is “gridlocked,” says Wired magazine, so voters should have supported the plan. But no one except out-of-town reporters really believed that spending at least $5.4 billion building 29 miles of light rail would do anything to relieve congestion. Continue reading →

More on March Transit Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit is “obsolete and costs taxpayers billions, yet its ridership and productivity continue to decline,” observes an op-ed in Governing magazine, concluding that, “we should stop subsidizing it, saving taxpayers’ tens of billions of dollars a year.” More data supporting this position can be gleaned from the March ridership data recently published by the Federal Transit Administration.

In addition to ridership numbers, the FTA spreadsheet also includes revenue-vehicle miles. I’ve now enhanced that worksheet to include annual, agency, and urban area totals and have uploaded the result. (If you downloaded yesterday’s file after about noon Pacific Time, it already includes this update.)

Previous data have shown that, as some cities build light rail, they cut bus service, thus losing more bus passengers than they gain in rail riders. That may influence March numbers, but it is not the only factor. For example, Los Angeles Metro increased light-rail service by 3.7 percent while it cut bus service by 2.7 percent. Yet both bus and light rail lost riders: light rail declining 7.5 percent and bus 9.6 percent. Continue reading →

March Transit Ridership Drops 5.9%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Some have blamed declining transit ridership on low gas prices, but gasoline was about 10 percent more expensive in March 2018 than March 2017, yet March transit ridership was 5.9 percent less than in the same month in 2017. To be fair, March had one fewer work day in 2018 than in 2017, which could account for some of the decline, but January had one more work day in 2018 than 2017, and ridership still declined.

The Federal Transit Administration released March ridership numbers over the weekend. As usual, the Antiplanner has supplemented the raw numbers with a spreadsheet that totals ridership by years (2002-2018) in columns GW through HM; by major modes in rows 2116 through 2122; by transit agency in rows 2131-3129; and by the 200 largest urbanized areas in rows 3131 through 3330.

Previous releases showed that transit has been declining in nearly all major urban areas except Seattle and, in some recent months, Houston. March’s numbers are even more dire, as ridership declined in all of the top 38 urbanized areas including Houston and Seattle. Of the top 50 urban areas, ridership grew only in Providence (by a mere 0.1 percent), Nashville (by a respectable 8.2 percent), Hartford (8.1 percent), and Raleigh (by 3.5 percent). Continue reading →

The Latest Non-Crisis

By | | Transportation
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Transit ridership is declining almost everywhere in the United States, partly because there are increasing alternatives to transit that are more convenient, including increased auto ownership and ride sharing. The Journal of Public Transportation has devoted a whole issue to the future of transit, as if to reassure the industry that it has one (most of the writers were optimistic, but at least one was more skeptical).

So naturally, transit advocates have come up with a new reason to spend more taxpayer dollars on a dying industry: transit deserts. According to someone’s painstaking but questionable analysis, the “demand for transportation exceeds supply” in large portions of major cities, including San Francisco (13.5% of which is supposed to be a transit desert), Philadelphia (8.5%), New York City (7.0%), and Chicago (6.8%).

Supposedly, they used the American Community Survey to count the number of “transit-dependent people” (people over the age of 12 who can’t drive) in each neighborhood and compared it with the transit services to that neighborhood. But the American Community Survey doesn’t ask about transit-dependency, so they had to use proxies that probably miss a lot of things. For example, people who can’t drive may have other people in their households who drive for them, or they may have ready access to taxis or ride-hailing services. Even if transit served their neighborhood, they might not use it. Continue reading →

H+T Not So Efficient

By | | Housing, Transportation
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One of the excuses planners have made for their support of densification is that, yes, housing costs are higher in dense areas, but this is more than offset by lower transportation costs. They call this the H+T Affordability Index, but — as the Antiplanner pointed out nearly five years ago — this claim was based solely on hypothetical and, in some cases, obviously inaccurate numbers.

Despite the lack of any real evidence, density advocates managed to persuade lending authorities to loosen mortgage loan criteria for people locating in dense, transit-rich areas. Since people living in such areas supposedly saved a bundle on transportation, they could afford to spend more on a mortgage.

Now a new study has come out that collected ten years of real data from 11,000 families who moved to compact, transit-rich areas. The study found that some people saved money on transportation, but others spent more, and the net overall effect was a wash. “We conclude that the location affordability literature may significantly overstate the promise of cost savings in transit-rich neighborhoods,” say the researchers. Continue reading →

Wave Bye Bye

By | | Transportation
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As predicted, Nashville voters have rejected a multi-billion-dollar light-rail plan by a margin of 64 to 36 percent. Some people are wondering “Now what?” But the reality is that no major changes are needed to Nashville transit except to figure out a way to back out of long-term obligations in the face of declining ridership.

Less predictable, it appears the Fort Lauderdale Wave streetcar project also died yesterday. The project, which was promoted by Broward County, received federal, state, and local funding. But when construction bids were opened last October, they came in much higher than expected. Skeptical members of the city council got the county to agree that the city could withdraw from the project if it didn’t appear it could be built for less than a 25 percent cost overrun.

The county put it out for bids a second time and the low bid was $2.2 million over the 25 percent threshold. As a result, the city commission voted yesterday to save its money. Continue reading →

The Key to Transit: 240,000+ Downtown Jobs

By | | Transportation
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An op-ed in last Friday’s San Antonio Express-News argues that San Antonio is “one of the least-suited big cities in the world for building rapid transit.” This is because, though San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city, it’s jobs are so spread out that transit just can’t work for most people.

According to Wendell Cox’s report on downtowns, in 2008 transit carried more than 10 percent of people to work in just five metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. These also happen to be the only metro areas that had more than 240,000 downtown jobs. Transit in Philadelphia, which had just under 240,000 jobs, carried only 9.3 percent of metro-area jobs. San Antonio has only about 60,000 downtown jobs, so is less than a quarter of the way to needing an improved transit system.

Note that Cox is counting jobs in metropolitan areas, which include all the land within the counties surrounding the cities, whether that land is urbanized or not. Most data cited by the Antiplanner is for urbanized areas, which only includes the urbanized land (roughly, land developed to more than 1,000 people per square mile). Transit’s share of commuting will be slightly higher in an urban area than in a metro area. Continue reading →