San Jose light-rail ridership is declining, so the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) wants to speed up light-rail trains to make them more attractive to riders. To do this, the agency wants to give light rail the priority over cars, bicycles, and pedestrians at all intersections.
Having to “slow down to avoid hitting somebody that may be crossing the tracks,” says a VTA board member, “slows [the light-rail trains] down quite a bit.” Light-rail trains in downtown San Jose are “possibly some of the slowest in the country,” says a news report. “People are beating transit on their e-scooters,” frets San Jose’s mayor, who also happens to chair VTA’s board. “We’ve got to speed up the light rail trains, so that way, folks will be motivated to use them.”
San Jose light rail is far from the slowest in the country. According to the National Transit Database, it averaged 15.9 miles per hour in 2016, slightly better than the national average of 15.3. While they (along with all other light-rail lines) are slower in downtown, it’s the average speed that counts for attracting riders.
Moreover, speed won’t immunize light rail from ridership declines. At 20.7 mph, Los Angeles has some of the fastest light-rail lines in the country, but its ridership has only grown because it opened new lines: between 2014 and 2017, it added 32 percent more rail miles but gained only 26 percent more riders. Baltimore’s light rail averages 19.7 mph, yet ridership declined 23 percent in the first four months of 2018.
VTA’s light-rail cars may not be the slowest, but they are some of the emptiest in the country. On average, they carry 15.7 riders compared with a national average of 22.9. Light-rail lines do better in all but four other cities. This is hardly new: San Jose used to run the nation’s emptiest trains, but the opening of lines in Houston and Norfolk, plus declines in Buffalo and Pittsburgh ridership, bumped it up to fifth-emptiest. No matter what the ranking, nearly empty light-rail cars on downtown streets cause far more congestion than they takes autos off the road.
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San Jose’s real problem is that it picked an expensive, obsolete technology that simply doesn’t work anymore and certainly isn’t compatible with pedestrians and cyclists. According to the 2016 American Community Survey, more people in the San Jose urban area walk to work than take rail transit, and almost as many people bicycle to work. So why should pedestrians and cyclists be inconvenienced by behemoth light-rail vehicles that never should have been put in the same right of way as smaller vehicles in the first place?
Unfortunately, Census Bureau data aren’t clear on which kind of rail transit people use. People filling out the questionnaires have a choice of “streetcar or trolley car” (which is supposed to include light rail), “subway or elevated” (which in the San Francisco Bay Area means BART), and “railroad” (which means commuter trains). The 2016 data show 1,275 San Jose urban area commuters taking streetcar or trolley car, 2,084 taking subway or elevated, and 15,039 taking railroad. It may be that some people were confused and checked the wrong box. On the other hand, Bay Area commuter trains carried more than 67,000 weekday riders in 2016, compared with just 33,000 on San Jose light rail, and since a higher share of commuter-rail riders are actual commuters than light-rail riders, the census number may not be too far off.
In any case, despite VTA’s delusions of transit superiority, light rail is pretty unimportant in San Jose. Silicon Valley workers who commute by auto outnumber rail commuters by 40 to one, and — if the census numbers are to be believed — outnumber light-rail commuters by 580 to one. So rail shouldn’t be given priority over automobiles either.
The best thing VTA can do for Silicon Valley transportation is to give up light rail as a bad job, tear up the tracks, and replace the trains with buses. The federal government requires transit agencies to refund any grants if the projects are shut down before they are fully amortized, but since San Jose’s oldest light-rail lines (which include the ones through downtown) are more than 30 years old, this shouldn’t be a problem. Replacing light rail with buses should improve transit as well as relieve congestion as buses are faster (VTA has commuters buses that average nearly 35 mph), cheaper, and less likely to kill cyclists or pedestrians if they run into them.
Goodhart’s law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Just like Moore’s Law for computers and Murphy’s law for systemic failure…transportation operates under 3 basic laws.
1: UC professor Charles Lave insisted on observing the “Law of Large Proportions.” Investing $1 Billion on the option A used by 95+% of the people (Roads for Driving Alone, Carpool, vanpool, bus, shuttle) will produce far more benefits than investing the same $1 Billion on the option B used by less than 2.0% of the people (Rail). Especially when Option B costs more to build/operate per capita.
2: “In an area that already has transportation infrastructure, any transportation technology that requires new infrastructure to be built is doomed to fail because it will be unable to compete against technologies using existing infrastructure”.
3: Transporation efficiency isn’t always a matter of speed, convenience is also important and based on destination…. Station-to-Station transportation technology is no match for transportation tech that can offer door to door service.
As I have noted before, but is worth repeating:
In 1999 I took a day off work to go on a tour of “affordable housing” in Silicon Valley hosted by the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Association. The Chair of the Silicon Valley Manufacturers Association was the prominent spokesperson and we were given day passes to ride the light rail between housing places along the line. At some point I got into a heated discussion with the Chair over whether the light rail was worthwhile. He had all sorts of bogus statistics such as “those living within a half mile of light rail are three times more likely to take transit than for the county as a whole” to which I would reply “which is a negligible 0.2% of those who would have driven.” Finally getting increasingly frustrated he said “but you cannot build high density smart growth housing unless it is next to light rail!”
I therefore assume that the reason to build light rail was not for transport, but to get areas along light rail’s route zoned for high density housing, which I suppose they considered to be “smart growth.” Never mind that most of the inhabitants of the housing next to light rail still drive everywhere.
So building light rail may have nothing to do with transit and everything to do with getting areas zoned for higher densities.
For those who like to spew the (empty) rhetoric that the kids like cities and companies want transit to attract those young employees, just look at Silicon Valley. Sure there are things like Google running it’s own express buses to San Fran but that’s not mass transit. FB, Apple, Google, Oracle and others didn’t make a point of building new campuses on major mass transit routes, if any.
Speaking HQs and Silicon Valley, when is Chevron moving to Houston?
A lot of central cities are adding population, but it’s unclear whether the young singles and childless couples who account for a lot of this growth will stay once they get married and consider having children. The most recent evidence seems to suggest that many are moving out in search of more living space to accommodate the needs of their present (or future planned) family.
In principle, this additional population could represent a larger market for transit, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of radically different preferences for travel among this group. Moreover, as Randal has documented, transit seems to be losing part of this market to new competition from ridesharing services, e-scooters and other options.
I’m not sure that I’d say that Google’s buses are not “mass transit”. In the most basic sense, they are. And I think it’s instructive to look at what those services are providing that conventional public transit providers are not. Direct routes that serve their employer’s location without the need for transfers or circuitous routing. Clean, comfortable, private vehicles without a lot of noise or other distractions. Compare that to the options that organizations like VTA are providing, and there really is no surprise why Google’s employees prefer it. Making VTA’s trains marginally faster, albeit at the expense of drivers, carpoolers, bicyclists, and yes, even its own bus riders, seems unlikely to reverse this outcome. They are just refusing to ignore sunk costs.