Nationwide transit ridership in April 2018 was 2.3 percent lower than the same month in 2017, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter-rail ridership grew by 3.5 percent, but light-rail, heavy-rail, hybrid rail, streetcar, and bus ridership all declined. The biggest decline was light rail at 5.5 percent.
April’s drop was smaller than the 5.9 percent year-over-year decline experienced in March because April 2018 had one more work day (21 vs. 20) than April 2017, while March 2018 had one less work day. As a result, 16 of the fifty largest urban areas saw transit ridership grow in April 2018, compared with just four in March. Considering that most transit ridership takes place on work days, anything less than a 5 percent growth is not something to be proud of. Only Pittsburgh, Providence, Nashville, and Raleigh saw ridership grow by more than 5 percent.
The most catastrophic losses were in Boston (24.4%), Cleveland (14.4%), and Milwaukee (10.8%). Ridership fell by more than 5 percent in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Atlanta, Tampa-St. Petersburg, St. Louis, Orlando, Charlotte, and Richmond. These losses follow steady declines since 2014 and, in some urban areas, as far back as 2009.
As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced data file that includes all the raw, month-to-month data in columns A through GW and rows 1 through 2116. The enhancements include summing the monthly data into annual data in columns GX through HN, then comparisons of percentage changes from 2017 to 2018 for January-April and April alone in columns HR and HS. The enhanced spreadsheet also has totals by major modes in rows 2118 through 2124; by transit agency in rows 2131-3129; and by the 200 largest urbanized areas in rows 3131 through 3330. All these summaries are done on both the transit ridership (UPT) worksheet and the vehicle revenue miles (VRM) worksheet.
In attempting to explain away recent declines, some transit advocates claimed it was just buses that were losing riders — the implication being that more cities should built rail transit. That wasn’t true when they made that claim and it isn’t true today.
More recently, transit advocates have claimed that the reason ridership is falling is because transit agencies have been offering less service. A study from the urban planners at McGill University concluded that a reduction in bus miles “likely explains the reduction in ridership observed in recent years in many North American cities.” Again, the implication is that agencies need to spend more money.
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In fact, the Antiplanner has been saying for years that reduced service is an important factor in declining ridership. But what the transit advocates haven’t admitted is that this is mainly a problem in cities with expensive rail transit: the cost of building and maintaining rail systems often forces agencies to cut back on bus service. Significantly, the McGill study only looked at 22 urban areas in the United States, all of which have rail transit. They left out, for example, San Antonio, which increased revenues miles of bus service by 2.7 percent in the first four months of 2018 yet saw a 3.1 percent decline in ridership.
The real problem with transit finances is not that agencies don’t have enough money but that they have too much money and spend it the wrong way, namely on fixed infrastructure improvements such as light rail or dedicated bus lanes that look good politically but do little or nothing for transit riders. For example, the CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit likes to brag that Dallas has “the longest light-rail system in North America.” But building a rail empire didn’t prevent — and probably accelerated — the decline in transit’s regional share of commuting from 2.8 percent (according to the 1990 Census) before they build light rail to 1.7 percent in 2016 (according to the American Community Survey).
At least some of the decline in transit ridership has different causes in different cities. Deteriorating service in regions with older rail systems — New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco-Oakland — has cost those systems many ridership. Decisions to cut bus service in order to build rail in Los Angeles and many other urban areas has cost riders in those areas.
The one thing almost all urban areas have in common, however, is the growth of ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft since 2012. If, as surveys suggest, a third of ride-hailing users would have otherwise used transit, then these services account for well over half the losses in transit ridership. Those ride-hailing services aren’t going to go away; in fact, their advantage over transit will be multiplied many times as they substitute driverless cars for human-driven cars.
More money won’t save transit, and the last thing a dying industry needs to do is go more heavily into debt to try to save itself. In the short run, agencies can experiment with low-cost improvements in bus service so that their systems better serve the needs of transit riders. In the long run, however, they need to back out of transit services that fewer and fewer people are using without leaving a legacy of debt and unfunded pension and health-care obligations; in short, to die with dignity.
Mass transit is a paradigm for the industrial age with mass production factories. It’s a paradigm dependent on a world long gone it’s time to move forward and stop holding onto the past.
Worse, it is a paradigm for the industrial age with factories located downtown. Transit began to decline when factories moved to the suburbs because moving assembly lines required more land than could be found downtown.
I mostly agree with your points here. But I’m going to go way outside the scope of this post to address what I consider to be a meta-concern: our development patterns, which necessarily render transit less and less effective, and how energy-suboptimal they are, which we experience as high expenses (whether direct private expenses, or indirect public ones). So, my argument will be that transit is not obsolete; we’re simply making it useless in the U.S. because we’re growing in a stupid way.
If all of our growth simply goes outward in low-density sprawl, then of course transit becomes vanishingly effective, forcing almost all new residents (and an increasing share of old residents) into personal cars; transit only works, and is only useful, when it connects dense areas to each other. But with sprawling outward growth, where transit is more or less useless, car traffic increases more than 1:1 with population; because not only does each new resident (and an increasing number of existing residents) add another car to the road, but everyone’s trips are now on average longer as the metro continues to expand geographically.
Why might this be suboptimal? Well, for one, it increases congestion and thus the amount of time people spend traveling to, rather than being at, where they need/want to be. But I’m going to focus instead on two closely related things: energy efficiency and costs.
– It’s a bit ludicrous to have everyone, for almost every trip they make, moving around a steel box that weighs thousands of pounds and moreover needs to be highly energy inefficient in order to move freely across irregular surfaces. If we reapportion some growth to densifying infill, at the very least more people can walk or bike (or scooter or whatever) more of the time – all modes of transportation that are insanely more efficient than driving
– Building and operating a personal automobile are very expensive because of this energy inefficiency. And even if you don’t own your own car (e.g. if you use a sharing marketplace), those costs will still get passed to you. In a world where we develop more densely, allowing people to walk etc. more often, we’re making it cheaper to live, precisely because people are moving more energy-efficiently
– Not only does relying so heavily on personal automobiles have high direct costs to consumers, it also has very high indirect costs (paid through taxes, fees, etc.). I need to re-verify this, but I believe the latest figure I saw was that currently 10s of billions of $s are siphoned out of U.S. general funds every year to build and maintain highways – and this didn’t include local roads. So, roads are expensive. And if we only build outward, we’re simply increasing these costs linearly with population, rather than taking advantage of existing infrastructure to more efficiently accommodate growth
So, I think the way we’re building our cities is insane. And we have so many different entities artificially restricting so many markets in so many ways that I don’t think there’s a good argument that sprawl is simply what people are demanding, or what makes the most sense. I’ve laid out some of the more salient reasons why I think the predominance of these development patterns is irrational and lead to suboptimal outcomes.
If you agree that it’s at least a plausible argument that denser development patterns would be better, then I’ll make one more claim following from this: if some substantial share of growth were to be reapportioned to densifying infill rather than outward sprawl, then transit would increasingly be an important and effective part of our cities’ transportation systems. The denser a place becomes, the more space efficiency matters, and thus the less possible it is to have everyone making trips by space-consuming personal automobile; and the more effective and indeed necessary it becomes to have space-efficient, long-distance transportation options, i.e. fixed-route transit.
One note on my extremely length comment: while 10s of billions of $s are taken from general funds to pay for highways each year, note that the total amount spent on highways each year is about $150 billion (as of 2007, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/22003). It’s a bit hard to find definitions in the source provided, but I *think* that figure is only for highways as we think of them, and not local roads.
Why People Don’t Use Mass Transit
Since I have never, in the 30 years since, seen any article by advocates of mass transit – not one – that bothered to ask why people don’t take mass transit despite all its supposed advantages, I thought it might be useful to explain why people prefer to drive instead of take the bus. Most advocates of mass transit dismiss drivers as selfish, short-sighted and unconcerned about the environment instead of asking whether mass transit itself is to blame for its own problems.
There are plenty of good reasons to encourage mass transit, but arguments about the hidden costs of the automobile fall on deaf ears because people, unconsciously or not, factor time and convenience into their decision making. The average driver knows perfectly well why she drives.
more…
http://stevedutch.blogspot.com/2017/12/why-people-dont-use-mass-transit.html
rws,
We can make cars that are more energy efficient easier than we can get people out of their cars and onto transit. Even if we could get more people onto transit, transit uses as much or more energy per passenger mile anyway so doesn’t save energy.
We can also build single-family homes that are more energy efficient easier than we can get people to live in cramped little apartments. Multifamily housing uses more energy per square foot than single family so only saves energy if people are willing to sacrifice living space. And if they are willing to sacrifice living space, we can save more energy building smaller single-family homes than dense housing.
All of these assertions have been documented in past Antiplanner posts.
rws,
The best source of information on highway finance is highway statistics. The $150 billion you cite includes all highways roads and streets. Table HF-10 for 2015, the last year for which data are available, says that $58.7 billion of highway costs were paid for out of general funds rather than highway user fees. At the same time, $26.3 billion of highway user fees were diverted to transit and other non-highway things. So the net subsidy was $32.4 billion.
Americans drove more than 3 trillion miles in 2015, so the subsidy per vehicle mile was about a penny. For comparison, transit subsidies averaged about 86 cents per passenger mile.
I’m in favor of ending subsidies to both transit and driving. How about you?
“I need to re-verify this, but I believe the latest figure I saw was that currently 10s of billions of $s are siphoned out of U.S. general funds every year to build and maintain highways…
From here…
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gas-tax-money-20180426-story.html
State officials announced Thursday that $2.4 billion from increases in the gas tax and vehicle fees will be spent on dozens of transit projects, including work to prepare Southern California for the 2028 Summer Olympics.
The money is part of the $5.4 billion expected to be raised annually for road and bridge repairs and mass transit improvements through increases in the gas tax and vehicle fees approved last year by the Legislature and Brown.
Maybe less would be needed from general funds if gas taxes weren’t siphoned off to pay for mass transit?
So, I think the way we’re building our cities is insane…
Good for you.
If you agree that it’s at least a plausible argument that denser development patterns would be better…
Ten of millions of people who are fleeing the city for the suburbs and exurbs must not think that you have a plausible argument.
US population disperses to suburbs, exurbs, rural areas, and “middle of the country” metros
William H. Frey | Brookings | March 26, 2018
The new numbers leave little doubt that suburbanization is on the rise, after a decided lull in the first part of the decade. Migration patterns and city-suburb shifts already hinted at this trend in the last year. But the trends through 2016 and 2017 put an exclamation point on it.
”
we’re simply making it useless in the U.S. because we’re growing in a stupid way.
” ~rws
HOw much or how little energy “should” be used is a matter of opinion. Your ideology, your religion decrees something is wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Anymore than someone else’s religion decreeing that dancing is wrong means it’s wrong. It’s Footloose all over again, only now I have to dance while composting. If I don’t, I’m a sinner.