The Antiplanner tends to agree with Dilbert that New Year’s is a random calendar date, but everyone else is looking back at 2018, probably because it provides a good excuse for a blog post. From my point of view, the two most important events of 2018 were the continuing decline of transit ridership and urban planners’ latest victory in their battles against single-family homes.
November ridership data will be out in a few days, and December a month after that, but October data show that year-over-year ridership fell in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York subways were recovering from major delays due to repairs in July 2017. Over the last decade, annual ridership in some urban areas has fallen by nearly 50 percent, and it has fallen by more than 15 percent in more than half of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas.
While some of the decline is due to increasingly unreliable rail systems in New York, Washington, and a few other cities, most of it is due to factors beyond transit agency control: the growth of ride hailing, the growth of other alternatives such as electric scooters, and the growing affordability of driving as oil prices remain low. The question isn’t whether transit will recover; it is whether it will be able to survive at all, especially outside of New York City and the six other cities (Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington) where transit still makes a difference in the day-to-day life of the average resident. Continue reading
