Why Are the Buses Empty?

Many taxpayers get irate when they see huge buses taking up road space with almost no passengers on board. Transit agencies tint or screen bus windows either to reduce air conditioning costs or to allow billboard-type advertising, but to an outside observer it looks like they are trying to cover up the fact that so many seats are empty.

Is this bus full or empty? It is difficult to see through the tinted glass, but since it is in Pinellas County, Florida, whose buses carry an average of just 7.7 riders, it is likely to be on the empty side. Flickr photo by Bill Rogers.

According to the 2013 National Transit Database, the average urban transit bus (including commuter buses and rapid transit buses) has 39 seats but carries an average of just 11.1 people (calculated by dividing passenger miles by vehicle-revenue miles). That’s actually an improvement from 2012, when the average load was 10.7 people. But it’s a big drop from 1979, when the average loads appear to have exceeded 15 people.*

Bus occupancies were much higher in the 1970s than in the 1990s, and have only slightly recovered since then–and much of that recovery has been due to cuts in bus service.

Low bus loads explain why buses use about as much energy per passenger mile as the average SUV. But buses don’t have to be empty. Buses that transit agencies classified as commuter buses, which operate mainly during rush hours, carried an average of 19.6 passengers in 2013. Some are much higher: commuter buses in Sherman, TX; Hyannis, MA; Everett, WA; Baltimore; Hoboken; and Lompoc, CA all manage to fill more than 30 seats on average. Most of these lines use motorcoach-type buses, with around 55 cushy seats but little standing room. Some of Everett’s buses are double-decker buses.

But transit agencies don’t have to cut service to rush hours to increase bus loads. Some operators of regular buses (listed as “MB” in the National Transit Data Base) have much higher-than-average loads. Honolulu buses carried an average of 20.9 people in 2013. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority carried an average of 20.4 people.

One reason these transit agencies do well is they serve high-density cities with urban-growth boundaries, which means they don’t send a lot of buses to low-density suburbs. In 2010, urbanized Oahu had nearly 4,800 people per square mile, while urbanized Los Angeles County was nearly 6,900 people per square mile.

Population density isn’t enough, however; you also need some concentrated job centers. Nearly 92 percent of Pinellas County, Florida is urbanized with more than 3,600 people per square mile, yet Pinellas buses carried an average of less than 8 people in 2013. Pinellas commuter buses are even worse, carrying an average of just 5 people on buses with an average of 49 seats.

Complaints about empty buses led the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority to put out the above video claiming that buses may be empty at their extremities but are fuller near city centers. This doesn’t explain why the average Los Angeles bus carries more than 2-1/2 times as many people as the average Pinellas bus. Even at their fullest, the videos show empty seats and few standees.

Back in 1991, Pinellas buses carried an average of 10.1 people. Over the next decade, PSTA increased bus service by 42 percent only to see a 29 percent decline in ridership, with the result that buses in 2001 carried an average of just 5.5 riders. Since then, occupancies have grown partly due to a 6 percent cut in service forced by the recession after the 2007 financial crisis.

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This argument suggests that anyone should be able to live anywhere they want and expect taxpayers to provide them with transportation. The alternative point of view is that people who want to use transit should move to areas that have lots of transit service.

The truth is that transit agencies don’t extend service to low-density areas to meet a social good; they do it to capture more tax dollars. Low-density suburbs tend to be wealthier, so transit agencies want to include them in their tax districts. This obligates them to provide transit service to neighborhoods where people already have three cars in their garages or driveways.

Although the average bus carried 11.1 passengers in 2013, the median bus transit agency carried just 6.5 passengers. Many of the agencies that attracted fewer than 6.5 riders still operated standard buses with close to 40 seats. Why would agencies buy such big buses when they are empty most of the time?

One answer is that they are the same as any family buying an automobile. Much of the time, the car will have only one or two occupants, but sometimes everyone in the family and possibly some friends will ride, so they buy a car that is big enough to meet their maximum need, not the average need.

Still, with average bus loads falling from 15.1 in 1979 to under 10 in much of the 1990s, recovering to 11.1 in 2013, it is clear that agencies could do better than they do at filling buses. The reason why average bus loads grew from 10.7 in 2012 to 11.1 in 2013 is that transit agencies reduced total bus service by 8 percent, but suffered a mere 4 percent loss in passenger miles as a result. This suggests that transit agencies are running way too many buses and should cut back rather than extend hours.

The alternative is to buy smaller buses. But with the federal government being willing to fund 80 percent of the cost of new buses, transit agencies reason they might as well get the biggest they need. After all, they need to hire a driver no matter what the size of the bus, so they might as well get a big one. This erroneously assumes that the cost of operating the bus is limited to the driver’s pay.

Under the 2004 transportation bill, SAFETEA-LU, federal grants for buses were part of the bus and bus facilities fund. This was a discretionary fund, which means transit agencies applied for grants and the Federal Transit Administration supposedly funded the best projects. In fact, fund was almost always entirely earmarked in appropriations bills, which forced transit agencies to lobby to persuade Congress to give them the money. Since there wasn’t much point in spending money on lobbying for small grants, agencies tended to ask for more than they needed.

The 2012 transit bill, MAP-21, changed the bus and bus facilities program to a formula fund. Under the formula, each state gets $1.25 million per year, while about $370 million per year are allocated to urban areas based on populations, population densities, bus passenger miles, and vehicle revenue miles.

Transit agencies may use their share of funds to pay for up to 80 percent of the cost of buses. However, they can use the funds to cover up to 90 percent of the cost if the buses help meet clean air requirements. This explains why transit agencies are so willing to pay twice as much for a hybrid, natural gas, or other “clean” bus as for a regular bus: the amount they pay out of local funds is the same. Yet they wouldn’t do that if they really needed a lot of new buses, which suggests in turn that they have already saturated service with the number of buses they have.

While Congress could tinker with the bus and bus facilities program to reduce the incentives to waste money on big buses (not to mention expensive transit centers), the only way to eliminate them entirely would be to completely eliminate federal transit funding. Short of that, Congress could just put all transit funding into one formula fund based on the fares each transit agency collects. This would give the agencies an incentive to be more responsive to riders than to political demands.

In short, federal funding gives transit agencies incentives to buy buses that are bigger than they need, while transit tax districts give agencies obligations to run those big buses into neighborhoods that won’t fill them. These perverse incentives lead to empty buses and are a predictable outcome of government funding of transit.

* Appendix A in APTA’s Public Transit Fact Book has vehicle revenue miles back to 1995 and vehicle miles back to 1977. Between 1995 and the present, vehicle revenue miles have averaged 87 percent, plus or minus 2 to 3 percent, of vehicle miles. If that average was true in 1977, then the average bus load that year was 14 and in 1979 it reached 15. The APTA Fact Book warns that a change in definitions led to a discontinuity between 2006 and 2007, but it doesn’t appear to have significantly affected occupancy calculations and the numbers were about the same between those two years.