The Antiplanner »

Monthly Archives: September 2022

July Transit Ridership Falls Below 60% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
2 Comments

U.S. transit systems carried 58.7 percent as many riders in July 2022 as they did in July 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is a major setback from June’s 65.0 percent of June 2019. Of course, the increase in June was due to high gas prices and the decline in July was due to falling gas prices.

Amtrak numbers are from its July performance report. Air travel numbers are based on TSA passenger counts. Highway numbers should be available in a week or so.

Amtrak, meanwhile, has pushed up from 83.6 to 84.3 percent while air travel dropped from 89.1 to 87.9 percent of pre-pandemic levels. The air travel numbers include both domestic and international travel; domestic travel numbers for July aren’t available yet, but the last numbers that were available, for April, stood at 97.2 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Continue reading →

Minnesota’s Embarrassing Licensing Board

By | | News commentary
3 Comments

The Antiplanner disagrees with Charles Marohn, of Strong Towns fame, about a lot of things. But I agree with him that the Minnesota Board of AELSLAGID (that’s Architecture, Engineering, Land Surveying, Landscape Architecture, Geoscience and Interior Design, in case it isn’t obvious) was wrong to fine him $1,500 and censure him for being late in renewing his license as a professional engineer.

Charles Marohn in 2016. Photo by SEAGreenways.

Marohn is trained as a professional engineer and started practicing, with a Minnesota license, in 2000. Though he stopped practicing in 2012 to form Strong Towns, he kept his license up and continued to call himself an engineer on his resume. However, he moved his residence in 2018 and forgot to notify AELSLAGID, so when they sent him a renewal notice he didn’t get it. He eventually renewed, paying a $120 late fee. Continue reading →

Colorado Transit Lies about Free Transit

By | | Transportation
3 Comments

Colorado transit agencies convinced the state legislature to subsidize free transit for the month of August based on the flimsy claim that doing so would reduce air pollution. At the end of the money, the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies claimed the program was a great success, with many agencies seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with August, 2021.

Transit buses in Pueblo saw a 59 percent increase in ridership in August, but Pueblo’s transit system normally carries less than 0.75 percent of all transit riders in the state, so this increase wasn’t very important. Photo from Pueblo Transit.

The problem with this claim is that Colorado transit agencies were already seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with 2021 before they offered free transit. Colorado transit ridership in the first half of 2022 was 37 percent greater than the first half of 2021. Most of the increase in August was due to the recovery from the pandemic, not to free transit. Continue reading →

Pandemic Reversal?

By | | Transportation
2 Comments

A recent article in the San Jose Mercury-News reports that transit ridership in “car crazy” Los Angeles has exceeded ridership in the “transit mecca” of the San Francisco Bay Area, a “reversal that could remake California’s mass transit landscape.” This would be a lot more interesting if the writer hadn’t done the arithmetic wrong.

Contrary to the implications of the Mercury-News story, Los Angeles has always been one of the biggest transit markets in the country and certainly bigger than that of the Bay Area. Photo by Downtowngal.

The story compares ridership carried by the major agencies in six San Francisco Bay Area counties with ridership carried by the main agencies in Los Angeles county. But Los Angeles County is not all of the Los Angeles urban area any more than San Francisco County is all of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Los Angeles urban area includes all of urban Los Angeles County and all of urban Orange County, while the Greater Los Angeles area also include three more counties. Continue reading →