Transit carried 16.6 percent of motorized travel in Honolulu, more than in any other urban area in the country. New York is second at 11.9 percent, followed by San Francisco at 7.9 percent, Chicago at 4.0 percent, State College PA at 3.7 percent, Seattle at 3.5 percent, Lompoc CA at 3.3 percent, and Boston at 3.2 percent. Philadelphia, Salt Lake (but see below), Portland, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Louisville, and six smaller urban areas are between 2 and 3 percent, and 35 urban areas are between 1 and 2 percent. Transit’s share in the remaining 350 or so urban areas is less than 1 percent.
The Antiplanner calculated these numbers using the newly posted table HM-72, “Urbanized area summary,” from the 2014 Highway Statistics, and from my summary spreadsheet of the 2014 National Transit Database. The National Transit Database has annual passenger miles of transit use by agency and designates which urban area is served by each agency; my summary spreadsheet totals the numbers for each urban area. Table HM-72 has daily vehicle miles of travel by urbanized area.
To convert daily vehicle miles to annual passenger miles, I multiplied daily by 365–unlike the transit people, the highway agencies use the average of all days in the week, not the weekday average–and then by 1.6 to account for vehicle occupancy. I calculated the 1.6 based on the share of urban travel by car, motorcycle, truck, and bus from table VM-1, using 1.55 for short wheelbase vehicles, 1.84 for long-wheelbase light-duty vehicles, 1 for motorcycles and heavy trucks and 11 for buses. There’s a slight bit of double counting as slightly less than 1/2 of a percent of urban vehicle miles is buses, and most of those are transit buses, but this won’t change the numbers much.
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The highway data were not available for a few urban areas, the largest of which was Albany, NY. For these I substituted 2013 numbers, which in most places were a bit smaller than 2014’s. A note in column G says “2013 data” for these cases.
Two urban areas, East Stroudsburg, PA and Williamsburg, VA, were not in the Highway Statistics, so transit appears to have a 100 percent market share. Transit also has a 62.5 percent share in Hanford, CA, which is one of the urban areas for which I had to use 2013 data. Neither of these results are credible.
Otherwise, in most cases, the number calculated as transit’s share provides a good first approximation of transit’s relative importance to each urban area.
“…the number calculated as transit’s share provides a good first approximation of transit’s relative importance to each urban area.”
The numbers show that with a few exceptions—the top two being islands and the third a peninsula—transit is used by an extremely small minority.
But, what happens when they make these “self-driving”
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Personal_aircraft_aiming_to_take_off_from_your_home_999.html
I know, there’s always someone with a personal flying car “almost ready” for production.
“The numbers show that with a few exceptions—the top two being islands and the third a peninsula—transit is used by an extremely small minority.”
I think a better question would be how many people benefit by people taking transit. For example someone in NYC, Philly, or D.C. might not take transit to work but they benefit from other people taking transit since there are less cars on the roads.
“I think a better question would be how many people benefit by people taking transit.”
When only 3.5% of motorized travel is by transit, not many. The better question still is: Is the high cost of transit worth the benefit of a ~3.5% reduction in traffic?
Your assuming the only benefit of transit is reduction in traffic which is false. There are also economic benefits (along with environmental which I’m not even going to address) as well as efficiency, take for example the DC metro shutdown, besides the fact that a number of people just didn’t go to work, kids at schools had excuses absences if they couldn’t get to school, and a number of people also teleworked the day the metro shutdown, there were traffic jams all over the region which had a ripple effect on commerce throughout the region which means less taxes and economic output. Can you imagine if the NYC , Chicago, or San Fran subways all of a sudden cease to exist the economic efficiency of those metropolitan regions along with the reduction in tax revenue would not only be detrimental to the cities but also to the country knowing how much tax revenues those regions produce.
I think a better question would be how many people benefit by people taking transit. For example someone in NYC, Philly, or D.C. might not take transit to work but they benefit from other people taking transit since there are less cars on the roads.
How do you reconcile this with the fact that NYC consistently has the longest commute times of any metro area in the US, and that DC and Philadelphia both have some of the worst congestion in the country, as measured by data sources like Inrix?
I reconcile this by experiencing what happens for a day (in D.C.) when a transit subways systems stops running and seeing how much worse commute times are and understanding that if NYC, Philly, or D.C.’s transit systems stopped running that commute times would be longer then they already are.
There are also economic benefits (along with environmental which I’m not even going to address) as well as efficiency,
Still waiting for those environmental benefits to show up. Most transit systems in the US are too empty on average to offer any environmental benefit. As for efficiency, it’s hard to imagine cities’ economies being compromised by the malfunction of a mode of transportation that accounts for 3-4% of a region’s travel. As the DC example shows, even in cities with relatively high (by US standards) transit use are able to cope quite well with the shutdown of a subway system, even on fairly short notice.
Other transit modes are able to shoulder some of the load, many travelers simply drove instead, and others exercised the flexibility in their work arrangements to avoid peak-period commutes. The bottom line is that if these cities have not already been crippled by the severe traffic congestion they experience on a daily basis, which affects far more commuters, they aren’t going to be brought to a grinding halt by a mode that handles a small fraction of the population.
Does the data break out miles traveled by walking and bike? I imagine the miles traveled by either must be miniscule, and yet a typical city will subsidize thousands of acres of space to both, dedicating scarce resources to obsolete modes of travel, both of which, incidentally, end up slowing down and obstructing automobile traffic. The space that sidewalks and bike lanes consume could better be used by automobiles, reducing congestion and pollution.
Does the data break out miles traveled by walking and bike?
No, these aren’t reported in either the highway statistics or the transit data. They would increase the denominator slightly, but not much. Especially if you’re measuring VMT, since bike/walk trips tend to be shorter.
@ MJ
If you look at the survey you will see that over half the people who took it either didn’t work or worked from home and most employees don’t have the ability to do that everyday during the work week( Federal government allowed employees to work from home which they usually do not allow) , so I’m not sure saying DC commuting traffic would emulate that if the transit system ceased to exist would be an accurate statement.
Some benefits that you may not be aware of from people taking transit are less smog and a reduction in run-off from paved surfaces that degrade the water supply.
“Some benefits that you may not be aware of from people taking transit are less smog and a reduction in run-off from paved surfaces that degrade the water supply.”
Not big enough effects (which you haven’t even supported; you’ve only asserted) to justify the cost.
Autonomous cars will do far more to reduce environmental impacts than transit, especially rail, ever will.
MJ, thanks for clarifying on the reporting of walking and biking! The conclusion is clear – sidewalks have little or no place in cities (even less of a place in the suburbs). The reason why planners love sidewalks is easy to see – it’s to force people into behavior patterns, like walking, that make it easier for governments to control and monitor their citizens. If you look at cities in the former Soviet Union, nearly every city has sidewalks on almost every street. In New Urbanist fantasy-lands like Portland, you cannot drive without constantly being stopped to allow pedestrians to cross from one sidewalk to another, likely on their way from a cute coffee shop to a brew pub that was built where working-class people used to live.
@nada
I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with local governments providing sidewalks, especially on local roads that are under their authority. I do think it’s bizarre for regional bodies, states, and especially the federal government to involve themselves in this issue.
Nada sounds like a sock-puppet for gilfoil.
Yep. Sock puppetry returns to The Antiplanner.
You can point out how few miles people walk in the United States, but cities keep wasting money on sidewalk boondoggles. I bet if you came to a city council meeting with carefully researched statistics showing clearly how few miles people walked, they’d laugh at you and call you an obsessive ignoramus who knew nothing about how cities work.
@MJ
“I don’t think there’s really anything wrong with local governments providing sidewalks, especially on local roads that are under their authority.”
You don’t see anything wrong with government confiscating wealth from their citizens at gunpoint to subsidize modes of travel with negligible miles-per-traveller? Ok…well, good to know that about you, I guess.