Last week, the Antiplanner argued that transit is going extinct and, rather than fight this trend, regional officials should find ways to smooth the transition. One way of doing so is to improve the mobility of low-income workers.
Transit advocates love to use phrases like oil dependency and auto dependency to suggest that automobiles are environmental disasters that have reduced our freedom. In fact, the 2015 National Transit Database shows that the only transit systems use less energy per passenger mile than driving are those in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco-Oakland, Portland, and Honolulu, while automobiles have liberated Americans, giving them far more mobility and economic opportunities than the people of any other country.
Unfortunately, not everyone enjoys the benefits of this liberation. According to the 2015 American Community Survey, about 5 million workers who take transit to work live in households with either no or one car. About 2 million of those are in New York City and most of them presumably choose to live without cars, but it may be reasonable to estimate that about 2 to 3 million workers nationwide take transit because they can’t afford a car. Continue reading
