CityLab‘s article, How America Killed Transit, concludes that “service drives demand.” What the writer, an urban planner named Jonathan English, means is that more frequent service results in more riders, and he bemoans the fact that cities like Washington, Atlanta, Portland, and Dallas that built expensive rail systems failed to support those systems with frequent feeder buses.
Yet English (whose twitter handle is @englishrail) fails to realize that the reason why service is often poor is that rail construction is so expensive that transit agencies didn’t have enough money left over to provide decent bus service. That’s why transit’s share of commuting was growing in Houston and Phoenix before they built rail and declined afterwards, and why it grew in Las Vegas, which didn’t build rail, even as it declined in Denver and Salt Lake City, which did.
Yet English’s larger premise, that “America killed transit,” is simply wrong-headed. America didn’t kill transit; new technologies did. When he claims we didn’t provide enough service, what he really means is we didn’t provide enough subsidies. But at some point there are diminishing returns to subsidies, and when you are already paying a dollar or more per passenger mile, you are beyond that point.
As the Antiplanner has previously noted, between 2014 and 2018, many urban areas saw ridership declines despite increased transit service: Washington DC-area service grew by 11% yet ridership fell 16%; Atlanta service grew 16% yet ridership fell 5%; Phoenix service grew 28% yet ridership fell 8%; San Francisco-Oakland service grew 12% yet ridership fell 1%. Others made massive increases in transit service in order to get smaller increases in ridership: Las Vegas service grew 15% to get 8% more riders; Raleigh service grew 111% to get 40% more riders; Columbia SC service grew 96% to get 67% more riders. These can hardly be considered success stories. (These numbers are all from the Antiplanner’s enhanced version of the Federal Transit Administration’s June ridership report.)
The problem is that English and other CityLab writers make a presumption that Transit Deserves to Exist, and if it isn’t doing well, It Must Be Our Fault. After all, transit “works” in other countries whose cities are much denser than ours, whose fuel taxes are much higher, and whose people are often poorer and certainly much less mobile than Americans. The transit advocates promise that, with a little effort (okay, maybe a lot of effort), we too can be as dense, as taxed, as poor, and as immobile as Europe and Asia!
What if we come at it another way and say that transit, like any technological system, only deserves to exist if it produces benefits that are greater than its costs? As the Antiplanner has argued frequently, transit’s benefits don’t come close to its costs. Fares only cover about 25 percent of its costs, and the social, environmental, and economic benefits of transit have either disappeared or were imaginary in the first place.
- Almost everyone has cars today, and transit has become more of a heavily subsidized option for the wealthy than source of needed mobility for the poor;
- The 2016 National Transit Database revealed that transit systems in almost all urban areas other than New York, San Francisco-Oakland, Portland, and Honolulu used more energy and emitted more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than the average car;
- Transit doesn’t promote urban growth — at best, it merely redistributes it from one part of an urban area to another while at worst the tax burden required to support transit slows growth.
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This means that the real question is not “how did America kill transit” but “why is America keeping transit on life support?”
The chief demographic transit was originally meant for
– the Poor, particularly non-white poor in various urban communities
– the Handicapped
– the elderly
– Children
What happened was that over time the transit industry expanded it’s premise from trying to reshape transits image into something more civil. Attempts to revitalize transit in the 70’s and 80’s with high tech solutions like light rail and monorails and maglevs, futuristic utopian ideas…that panned basic common sense. The automobile grew to provide services to those mentioned above….So transit and their politically appointed lackey’s changed their strategy. It doesn’t take a genius to realize government work is rather cushy. Back then it used to be “You go work for the government, the pay sucks but you get benefits, plenty of time off, federal holidays and you can never get fired”. Now when you include salary and pension obligations they make 2-3 times the nations median income. And they are VERY entrenched to keep those personal benefits. To do that, Transit not only became a hot topic of political handshaking but it got it’s most potent weapon. GRASSROOTS organizations. People talk about the big lobbyists, Aerospace, Defense contractors, big agriculture, big pharmaceutical….But they’re out numbered 20 to 1, by the advocates of “very small” very specific spending programs and grassroots groups. Transit is one of those groups. And screaming locals on the news demanding services is a very potent tool to encourage people to run for office to facilitate that expenditure.
So the question..Why is America Keeping Transit Alive…it’s simple, because it’s been turned into a political issue as any attempt to curtail or get rid of it is perceived as classist, racist, ageist, anti-child…..etc.
Never the less the transit industry needed a new customer base beyond the poor teaming masses….When they did that, they shifted their focus from helping the ones mentioned above that actually needed transit to the people they thought they could squeeze money out of..middle and upper income people…by offering the splendor of them not having to commute anymore. So transit agencies expanded geographically into broad regional agencies to offer transportation solutions out to the neighboring suburbs…..to attract wealthier people out of their cars. Of course that required construction of transit infrastructure into neighboring suburbs….with a population density so low the systems fell into dis-repair and the few people that use it…..use the same emotional arguments to Win public opinion.
Only government can somehow manage to take a problem, promise to fix it, create a program aimed at helping to alleviate the problem, exacerbate the problem, promise to fix the exacerbated problem while ignoring the fact they worsened it; expand the program to compensate for their own incompetence trying to fix the problem in the first place that really wasn’t that big a problem but thanks to them is an even bigger problem. Then create new problems when the entitled complain about the problem…and even if they fix the problem they retain the program that’s no longer necessary cause the problem went away and that creates a problem. There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government program.
“(W)hy is America keeping transit on life support?”
Indeed! What stranglehold does the transit industry have on America’s politicians that allows them to continually milk taxpayers for money it literally wastes on boondoggles? It’s not just a rhetorical question. It demands an answer.
I look forward to the Antiplanner’s answer to his question in tomorrow’s blog.
Henry Porter,
For the complete answer to the question, please see my next book, Romance of the Rails, which will be released on October 10.
Antiplanner
As usual, a trainload of bullshit.
The real question is what is the rest of the developed world doing right in terms of transit and rail passenger service, compared to what the U.S. is doing wrong. To spin an old hoary saying, “there is the right way, the wrong way, and the American way.”
”
The real question is what is the rest of the developed world doing right in terms of transit and rail passenger service, compared to what the U.S. is doing wrong.
”
The US is struggling to have some modicum of sanity – some care for practically – when it comes to this. So sure, if you don’t value honest sanity, then yes, “the rest of the world” is doing something right.
The real question is what is the rest of the developed world doing right in terms of transit and rail passenger service, compared to what the U.S. is doing wrong.
High Speed Trains are Killing the European Railway Network
msetty,
if you keep smelling bullshit, maybe you should pull your head out of your own ass.
Funny how teahadi’s aren’t against socialism when it comes to roads :$