Warped Logic Spins Transit Measure

Students graduating college used to look for jobs and then moved to the cities where the job were located. Now they move to cities they like and then look for jobs. Therefore, any city that wants to attract recent college graduates had better spend more money on transit.

That’s the logic used by John Robert Smith, who chairs Transportation for America (aka Reconnecting America), to support a proposed tax increase for Spokane Transit. There are so many flaws in this reasoning that it is hard to know where to begin, but let’s just start with the presumption that transit is at all important to the lives of more than a tiny fraction of people in Spokane.

As the Antiplanner noted Tuesday, transit moves less than 2 percent of passenger travel in all but about eighteen urban areas. In Spokane, it’s 1.4 percent. The American Community Survey says that 3.0 percent of Spokane-area commuters–that’s a bit more than 5,000 people–usually took transit to work in 2014.

The American Community Survey also found that just 4,500 workers (2.6 percent) in the Spokane urban area lived in households without cars in 2014. Yet almost half of those carless workers got to work by automobile, mostly by driving alone (possibly in a vehicle supplied by their employer). Another quarter walked while less than a quarter took transit to work, making Spokane one more city where transit isn’t even relevant to most people who don’t have cars.
These types of offer you will get from the other names. on line levitra purchase at shop Core strengthening exercises can be completed in tadalafil discount as little as five minutes a day and may include exercises as simple as controlled breathing techniques and stretching exercises. Unhealthy eating habits Unhealthy eating habits cause many health problems like stress, depression, heart disease, hypertension, kidney diseases, strain etc. cialis free consultation And Kamagra is definitely capable of tr eating these buy cialis online https://pdxcommercial.com/property/615-8th-street-oregon-city-oregon-97045/plat-map/ both condition and the best medicine which works by relaxing the penile muscle tissues to regulate and also sustain the blood flow to this region that helps impotent men to achieve erection in the presence of sexual excitement.
Millennials, the group Smith thinks Spokane needs to attract, are supposedly different from ordinary people. There’s a lot of evidence that isn’t true, so it is worth asking where the myth began that Millennials are attracted to transit-oriented cities. The answer, at least in part, is that cities like Portland built light rail and now are attracting lots of hip young creative people.

Portland opened its first light-rail line in 1986. As it happens, in 1985, the Oregon legislature made Oregon the second state to legalize microbrew pubs. Today, the Portland area has more than 90 microbrew pubs, while the percentage of Portland-area commuters to take transit to work has declined from 10 percent in 1980 to 8 percent today. Which do you think did the most to give Portland its hip reputation: light rail or microbrew pubs?

Let’s say you still believe that Millennials look to live in cities with glitzy transit options. Smith uses Eugene’s bus-rapid transit line as a good example for Spokane. That line used a specially painted bus to connect Springfield with Eugene. The bus was only 4 percent faster than its predecessor, but it attracted a lot of riders, mainly because the transit agency also reduced the fare to zero, at least for the first year.

The lesson for Spokane and other cities receiving Transportation for America’s propaganda is that spending a lot of money on transit is an expensive and ineffective way to attract creative workers and spur urban growth. Instead, at most, all such cities really need are a few cans of paint.