The San Jose Mercury News points out the “staggering drop in VTA bus ridership” and suggests “dramatic changes” are needed to reverse that decline. However, it misses the elephant in the room, namely that the drop in ridership is directly due to the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) cutting bus service in order to fund its rail transit fantasies–fantasies that have been repeatedly endorse by the Mercury News.
The Mercury News reports “ridership on buses and light-rail trains has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001.” This understates the problem as light-rail ridership actually grew by about 19 percent during this time period, mainly because of an expansion of light-rail lines from 29.2 route miles in 2001 to 40.5 route miles in 2014. The small ridership increase gained by a 44 percent growth in route miles is distressing in itself, especially considering that the area’s 13 percent population growth accounts for most of the light-rail ridership growth.
The real tragedy is what happened to bus ridership, which declined by 32 percent from more than 48 million trips in 2001 to less than 33 million in 2014. (Light-rail and bus ridership and service numbers are from the National Transit Database Historic Time Series.) As it happens, in the same time period vehicle miles of bus service fell by 22 percent, a drop that explains most if not all of the decline in ridership.
The Mercury News argues that VTA must make a difficult choice of cutting little-used bus routes, even though a few people may depend on them, so that it can increase service on more heavily used routes. This suggestion comes from consultant Jarrett Walker, who thinks it would increase overall ridership.
The Antiplanner has little sympathy for the argument that little-used bus service should be maintained because a few people in the area are utterly dependent on transit. If people choose to live in a place with little transit, they have no reason to expect everyone else to subsidize their transportation.
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At the same time, Walker and the newspaper are both ignoring the real problem, which is that light-rail expansions and the BART-to-San Jose project have diverted resources away from VTA’s core market. Despite spending billions on light-rail lines, buses still carry nearly three-fourths of VTA transit riders. While that’s down from five-sixths back in 2000, the decline in bus ridership is directly due to cutbacks in bus service as a result of the high cost of rail construction and borrowing for that construction.
Such cutbacks are almost inevitable when transit agencies build rail. Last week, Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD) opened a new rail line to Denver International Airport. This heavily subsidized line will compete against a wide-variety of profitable private services.
(Sad side story: Even though the new rail line doesn’t go anywhere near any University of Colorado campus, it will be officially named the University of Colorado A-Line because the University paid $5 million for naming rights. The university claims the $5 million doesn’t come from tax dollars, but it does come from funds that could otherwise be used to pay for things that now will have to be paid for with tax dollars.)
When originally proposed, the Denver airport line was expected to cost $316 million (about $440 million in today’s dollars). Even at that price, RTD’s major investment study for the line found that it was less cost-effective than expanding the existing freeway or providing bus-rapid transit (see page 39). One measure of how little faith Colorado transportation planners have in the rail line is that they are planning to expand the parallel freeway even though the rail line is done.
Though rail was the least cost-effective solution at $316 million, it actually ended up costing $1.2 billion, nearly three times the original estimate. When RTD asked Denver-area voters to increase taxes to fund this and other rail transit lines in 2004, the agency promised it would also expand bus service. Instead, due to rail cost overruns, bus service has contracted by 13 percent in the last decade. Ridership hasn’t declined yet, but no doubt Walker will soon get a contract from RTD asking which unproductive bus lines it should cut in order to restore bus ridership.
Can’t wait to see how local self-professed expert msetty explains this one.
In 1999 I went on a tour of housing hosted by the Silicon Valley Manufacturer’s association. The tour gave us day passes for light rail and took us through high density houses built along the rail lines. Most of the others on the tour were local city planning staff who thought this was great. I tried pointing out to these staff members the slow speed of light rail and most were not interested. I finally got into an argument with the head of the Silicon Valley Manufacturer’s association over the merits of light rail. He had all these carefully constructed data sets to try to show light rail was useful, such as “someone living withing a half mile of a light rail line is three times as likely to take public transit as someone who doesn’t”. I kept pointing out that this was 0.2% of those who otherwise would have driving in Silicon Valley. Eventually, exasperated, he finally said “but you cannot build high density housing unless it is next to light rail!” So presumably this means planners don’t care how cost effective or what ridership is. It just allows them to build high density housing along its route. The fact that most of the inhabitants of these projects drive everywhere is not a consideration. This is what is supposed to be “smart growth”.
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The Antiplanner has little sympathy for the argument that little-used bus service should be maintained because a few people in the area are utterly dependent on transit. If people choose to live in a place with little transit, they have no reason to expect everyone else to subsidize their transportation.
” ~Anti-planner
If there was a free market for transportation and transit, sure.
The current paradigm was based on the idea that transit is a public good because there are those who can not afford private transportation. That is, we’re doing it to ensure the poor and disabled can still get around. How many would or could use it matters less than the need.
The problem with rail transit is that it represents a 180′ change by these public transit agencies. Without public input on why we have transit, without explicitly telling the public, these transit agencies have been using rail to shift their objective from providing transportation for those who can’t afford private transportation ( aka, a public good ) to providing transportation for those who influence gets them the most $$$ from politicians. They’re transforming into a subsidy not for the few in great need, but for the well of but numerous.
Not surprising, but I always come back to San Jose as an interesting case study. This is a region with rapid population and employment growth and increasing density. That fact that VTA consistently fares so poorly is somewhat difficult to explain. It strikes me as a place with a bimodal income distribution — that is, a large number of households with very high incomes, along with a sizable class of low-income, low-skilled service sector workers. One would think that the latter would be a source of significant ridership growth. Perhaps they are just not as well-served. If Paul’s comment is any indication, they probably aren’t.
San Jose has one of the more mature modern LRT systems in the US, having built or extended several lines since the mid/late 1980s. Yet it continues to be among the most lightly used. I think its reliance on a sales tax for funding has been problematic. San Jose got absolutely battered by the tech crash in 2000 and 2001, which led to steep declines in discretionary spending. The kind of service cuts that result can be hard to recover from, as users who abandon the service are often reluctant to come back and rely on it in the future. That effect, along with the continued expansion into increasingly thin markets, seems to have hastened its decline.
Did I read correctly in the linked story that RTD is predicting over 10 million boardings per year on the “A Line” commuter rail route between DIA and downtown Denver? That’s the equivalent of about 30,000 or so riders per average weekday and sounds extraordinarily high by the standards of American commuter rail systems, especially for a mid-sized city like Denver with only a moderate amount of downtown employment.
As proposed, the line only has 6 stations, yet is anticipating as many riders as per day as a fairly heavily-used (again, by US standards) light rail line. Something just doesn’t add up here. I guess they’re anticipating a lot of tourist traffic coming through the airport on its way to downtown Denver. But outside of traditional peak hours one can get to downtown via taxi, shuttle van or Uber fairly easily — probably significantly faster than the proposed route with its intermediate stops. I guess they’re planning to run it every 15 minutes throughout the day, which leads me to believe there may be some rather empty trains operating for the first year or so, similar to the initial experience with the “H” route light rail line after the completion of the T-REX project.