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Should Transit Subsidize Ride Hailing?

By | | Transportation
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A recent report from the Chaddick Institute, which is known to Antiplanner readers for its work on intercity buses, examines a dozen “partnerships” between transit agencies and ride-hailing companies. I put partnerships in quotation marks because I suspect these arrangements could easily prove predatory on one side or the other.

Click image to download a copy of this 37-page report.

The report notes that transit agencies have sought such partnerships for one of three reasons:

  1. To provide transit riders with a first or last mile service between transit stops and their actual origins or destinations;
  2. As an alternative to regular service in areas with low demand;
  3. As an alternative to paratransit services to seniors and/or disabled people.

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Transit Industry Demands $32 Billion More

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) wants Congress to have the federal government “invest” — meaning pour down a rathole give away — another $32 billion to keep transit systems running. This is after Congress had already given transit systems $25 billion in March.

Taken together, $57 billion is more than all federal, state, and local transit subsidies in 2018, which were $54 billion. “Fare revenues are down 90 percent and our state and local funders face a financial crisis of their own,” says Paul Weidefield, the CEO of Washington Metro. “How are we going to provide the essential service” if they don’t get more subsidies?

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It’s Essential to Say “Transit Is Essential”

By | | Transportation
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The coronavirus has made it essential that every transit supporter use the word “essential” in their discussions, as in how essential it is that transit carry essential workers to their essential jobs. Ridership may be down by more than 80 percent, but the remaining 19 percent of riders are really essential, so that makes it essential that we keep giving more subsidies to essential transit agencies.

Transit Is Essential is, in fact, the name of a new paper from the California Transit Association. The paper skips over the whole messy part about why transit is so essential and instead goes immediately to demanding more subsidies. “Another round of emergency funding is critical to preventing significant and permanent reductions in transit services.” In other words, subsidies aren’t just essential, they are critical.

According to the New York-based TransitCenter, “an estimated 2.8 million American workers in essential industries commute[d] to work on transit” in 2018. That doesn’t say how they are commuting to work now, in the midst of the pandemic. But let’s say it is still 2.8 million: for less than the cost of the annual subsidy to transit in a normal year ($54 billion in 2018), we could give every one of those people a brand-new car, which the CDC says is safer than transit during the pandemic. So, tell me again, why is transit so essential? Continue reading →

Don’t Trap the Poor in Second-Class

By | | Transportation
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Some have argued that subsidies to transit are “socially just” because they help poor people, and some have even gone so far as to say that social justice requires that transit be free. But an opinion piece in Friday’s San Antonio News Express responds that transit is second-class transportation. Those who want to help low-income people should instead focus on helping them acquire first-class transportation, namely automobiles.

Automobiles are so much superior to transit that, except in New York City, it is overly generous to call second class. Steerage is more like it, since transit is so much slower, inconvenient, and less comfortable than traveling in your own private automobile. (I would have used the word steerage in the headline, but I was told that many people wouldn’t know what it was, at least out of context. I guess it’s been a long time since Titanic came out.)
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San Antonio is the largest urban area in the United States that hasn’t succumbed to the fad of building nineteenth-century rail transit. Some people would like to change that. Maybe this op-ed will help dissuade them.

Rebuild the Interstate Highway System?

By | | Transportation
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A new report from The Road Information Project (TRIP) estimates that rebuilding and expanding the Interstate Highway System to meet twenty-first century needs will require increasing annual expenditures on the system from $23 billion to $57 billion per year. The report says that the highways “are wearing out and showing signs of their advanced age, often heavily congested, and in need of significant reconstruction, modernization and expansion.”

However, the numbers in the report don’t necessarily support this. The report admits that only 3 percent of interstate highway pavements are in poor condition, while another 8 percent is considered mediocre and 9 percent fair. That leaves the vast majority of the system, 79 percent, in good condition. Similarly, only 3 percent of interstate highway bridges are in poor condition or considered structurally deficient.

Congestion is a problem, but it is confined mainly to urban roads. Only 18 percent of interstate highway miles are considered congested, says the report. Continue reading →

We Have No Customers So Give Us Money

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are stepping up their campaigns for more subsidies to make up for their lack of riders during the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times reports that, unless Congress forks over billions more than it has already given the agencies, transit systems could experience a death spiral.

Technically, a death spiral takes place if cuts in service cause a loss of customers leading to more cuts in service. But if they don’t have any customers, they can’t spiral much further downward.

Out in California, Caltrain, which operates commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose, has lost 95 percent of its customers. Before the pandemic, Caltrain riders earned an average of $120,000 per year, which means most of them are probably now working from home and many will probably never return to commuting. The logical thing for Caltrain to do would be to reduce service for the duration and start up again when riders return. Continue reading →

Freeways: The Egalitarian Transportation

By | | Transportation
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In the past month or so, we’ve seen the destruction or defacement of statues of Confederate generals, the Father of our Country who was also a slaveowner, the Great Emancipationist, the Great Reconstructionist, and an Abolitionist. So it’s not exactly surprising that someone has proposed to bulldoze urban freeways because of the myth that they were located by racists through black neighborhoods.

There are a lot of institutions associated with American racism that I would abolish long before worrying about freeways. Start with public schools, many of which used to be segregated by law and many of which are still segregated, even in (perhaps especially in) the North.

Second would be public transit. Remember Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott? Many state laws used to require that people of color sit only in the back of the bus and give up their seats if a white person wanted them. Many transit systems, including those in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco-Oakland, are still semi-segregated today, with rail lines built to serve white neighborhoods while buses serving black and Hispanic neighborhoods are cut back to pay for the trains. Continue reading →

Recent Opinions

By | | Transportation
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A couple of weeks ago, an article in the Orange County Register discussed transportation resiliency. “In spite of anti-auto policies, 80 percent of passenger travel and 90 percent of urban travel is by automobile,” concluded the article. “It’s time to take back cities for people and the automobiles that have liberated them to reach more productive jobs, better homes, lower-cost consumer goods, and greater recreation and social opportunities.”

Last week, Real Clear Policy published an article on a transportation bill recently passed by the House of Representatives. This bill, said the article, was perfect for the ’20s — the 1920s that is. The bill would effectively quintuple federal subsidies to intercity passenger trains and increase federal subsidies to urban transit by 50 percent, with a heavy emphasis on rail transit.
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The use of both rail transit and intercity passenger trains, the article notes, peaked in 1920. Tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies to these modes since 1970 haven’t prevented the continuing decline of these obsolete technologies and businesses. The proposed law “was designed for a century ago,” concludes the article. “It’s time to let go of the past and write a bill for the future.”

Stupid Responses to Collapsed Ridership

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies are “struggling” as a result of the coronavirus, says one reporter. “Flailing about” would be a more accurate term. As noted yesterday, Bay Area transit agencies carried 86 percent fewer riders in May 2020 than May 2019. They basically have no idea how to cope with this other than to demand more subsidies from taxpayers and concessions from cities.

CalTrain, which offers commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, says it is carrying twice as many riders per day as at the low point of the pandemic. That means weekday ridership is up from 1,500 to 3,000. That’s still less than 5 percent of the usual number, which in 2018 was 64,000.

AC Transit, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, warns that it may have to cut dozens of bus routes and reduce service on many more. But that’s an appropriate response when no one is riding transit. Continue reading →

May Transit Ridership Down 81 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit systems carried 81 percent fewer riders in May, 2020 than in May, 2019, according to data posted yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This drop is almost as great as the 84 percent decline reported for April.

Rail was hardest hit, with an 89 percent fall in ridership, while buses lost 74 percent of riders. For the year to date, nationwide ridership is down 41 percent, with rail losing 44 percent and bus 38 percent.

The biggest declines were in urban areas that see the most transit ridership: New York lost 90 percent of its riders, Washington 89 percent, Philadelphia 88 percent, and Boston and San Francisco-Oakland 85 percent. Falldowns were smallest in urban areas such as San Antonio (-45%) and Las Vegas (-54%) where transit plays a relatively insignificant role in the region’s transportation. Continue reading →