Monthly Archives: April 2017

Public transit helps the poor, saves energy, and cleans the air, right? Not really. Transit is a subsidy to the wealthy as much as it is to the poor, and it really isn’t any greener than driving.

Some low-income people ride transit, but the people most likely to use transit to get to work are those who earn $75,000 and up. According to table B08119 of the Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey, 6.6 percent of people who earn $75,000 and up take transit to work, as opposed to just 6.2 percent of people who earn $15,000 or less.

Nor is transit particularly green, at least, not according to the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book. The average car uses about 3,100 BTUs per passenger mile while the average SUV uses about 3,500. By comparison, transit buses and light rail average about 3,800. While heavy rail averages just 2,150 BTUs per passenger mile, that is heavily weight by New York City. Outside of New York, the only heavy-rail lines more energy efficient than cars are in San Francisco and Atlanta. By operating mainly during rush hours, commuter rail does okay at 2,700 BTUs, but many commuter lines, including those in Dallas, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Philadelphia, are worse than driving. Continue reading →

Transit advocates like to claim that transit is somehow crucial to urban vitality, even in cities where only a few people use it. The reality is that lower taxes play a bigger role in urban growth–and spending more on transit means higher taxes.

Transit almost certainly is crucial to New York City, where 58 percent of commuters take transit to work. It also is important in Washington, DC (40%), San Francisco (37%), Boston (34%), Philadelphia and Chicago (28% each). It is somewhat important in Baltimore, Hartford, Pittsburgh, and Seattle (all about 18%-19%). These numbers apply to the cities; transit is far less important in most of their suburbs. There are only a few more cities in which transit has a double-digit share of commuters: Buffalo, Honolulu, and Minneapolis (14%), Portland (13%), Atlanta, Cleveland, and Los Angeles (12%), and St. Louis (11%), but these percentages are hardly crucial.

These numbers are for commuting, but transit’s share of other travel is much smaller. New York is the only urban area in which transit carries more than 10 percent of urban passenger travel; in fact, it was 11.5% in 2014. San Francisco-Oakland is a distant second at 7.6%. No other area comes close: Honolulu is 4.4%, Washington 3.9%, Chicago 3.8%, Seattle 3.3%, and Boston 3.1%. Every other urban area is under 3 percent. Such small percentages are hardly crucial to the future of those regions.

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In 1960, when most of the nation’s transit was private (and profitable), 7.81 million people took transit to work. By 2015, the nation’s working population had grown by nearly 130 percent, and taxpayers had spent well over a trillion dollars improving and operating urban transit systems. Yet the number of people taking transit to work had declined to 7.76 million.

The share of households that owns no vehicles has declined from 22 percent in 1960 to 9 percent today, while the share owning three or more vehicles has grown from 3 percent to 20 percent.

Although 7.76 million isn’t a few, commuting is only a small share of the travel people do. In 2014, Americans drove 5.1 billion miles a day in urban areas, which (at 1.67 people per car) works out to 3.1 trillion passenger miles per year. The 57 billion passenger miles carried by urban transit was just 1.8 percent of the total. Add walking, cycling, motorcycles, and other forms of travel, and transit’s share is even smaller.

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In 2015, the American Public Transportation Association issued a press release whose headline claimed that transit ridership in 2014 achieved a new record. However, the story revealed that 2014 ridership was the highest since 1956. That’s no more a record than if it was the highest since 2013.

The truth is that America’s urban population more than doubled between 1956 and 2014. Using the ridership number that really counts–trips per urban resident–2014’s number was a near-record low of 41 trips per person. The only time it was lower before 2014 was a few years in the mid-1990s, when ridership dropped to as low as 38 trips per person. The rate may fall to nearly that level in 2016.

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Fifty-three years ago, the transit industry was mostly private and earned a net profit. Today, it’s almost entirely publicly owned, and subsidies have grown out of control. It’s time to take a stand and say all transportation subsidies are bad, but transit subsidies are the worst.

The National Transit Database says agencies spent more than $64 billion in 2015 yet collected less than $16 billion in fares. They carried about 55 billion passenger miles, for an average cost of $1.15 per passenger mile, of which 87 cents was subsidized. No other major mode of passenger transportation is anywhere near this expensive.

Americans spent about $1.1 trillion buying, operating, repairing, and insuring cars and light trucks in 2015, but they also drove their autos nearly 2.8 trillion miles. At average auto occupancies of 1.67 people (see table 16), that’s 4.6 trillion passenger miles by auto, for an average cost of about 24 cents per passenger mile. We don’t have 2015 data yet, but in 2014, government agencies spent about $72 billion subsidizing roads (add the $98 billion in “other taxes and fees” to the minus $10 billion in “less amount for nonhighway purposes” and the minus $16 billion for “less amount for mass transportation”).

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