August Transit Ridership Drops 1.7%

Nationwide transit ridership in August 2018 was 1.7 percent below the same month in 2017. Heavy rail dropped by 1.5 percent; light rail by 2.3 percent; buses by 1.9 percent; and streetcars by 11.2 percent, according to monthly data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. Commuter rail gained 0.5 percent and hybrid rail gained 34.1 percent, mainly due to the opening of a new line of that type in Oakland.

Transit ridership had grown slightly in July, mainly because of depressed 2017 ridership due to New York City’s “summer of Hell” (meaning the partial closure of New York City’s Penn Station) and Washington DC’s “SafeTrack” program, both of which caused many transit delays. Although the Penn Station closures continued through August, 2017, the improved conditions in August 2018 weren’t enough to prevent New York urban area August ridership from declining by 0.5 percent.

August ridership declined in 36 of the nation’s top 50 urban areas. Ridership grew 27 percent in Houston, mainly because it had been depressed in August 2017 by Hurricane Harvey, which pretty much shut down the city for the last week of the month. It grew by a paltry 0.4 percent in Washington due to being depressed by the SafeTrack program in 2017.

Other urban areas that saw August ridership growth included Detroit (2.4%), Seattle (0.9%), the Twin Cities (0.6%), Las Vegas (3.3%), San Antonio (4.8%), Indianapolis (4.9%), Austin (9.2%), Charlotte (0.5%), Providence (0.7%), Jacksonville (0.8%), Nashville (1.5%), and Richmond (5.4%). The gain in Richmond must be gratifying to Jarrett Walker, who helped that city implement a completely redesigned transit network in July, 2018.

Countering this positive news, Atlanta saw ridership fall 10.4 percent, Cleveland 11.7 percent, Sacramento 13.1 percent, Milwaukee 13.8 percent, and Raleigh 31.4 percent. Numerically, New York lost nearly 1.9 million riders from August 2017; Los Angeles 2.0 million riders; Chicago 1.4 million; Philadelphia 1.2 million; Atlanta 1.2 million; and Boston 1.6 million. Miami, San Francisco-Oakland, and Baltimore each lost over half a million riders. These nine urban areas are responsible for more than 80 percent of the 13.6-million drop in transit riders nationwide.

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I’ve made the same enhancements to the vehicle-revenue miles worksheet so you can see how changes in service may have influence ridership. For example, to get its 0.9 percent increase in ridership, Seattle increased service by 2.0 percent. Indianapolis increased service by 11.8 percent to get a 4.9 percent increase in riders; Austin increased service 11.0 percent to get 9.2 percent more riders; and so forth.

You know you have a hot product if a 10 percent increase in service yields a 20 percent increase in customers. But when it takes a 12 percent increase in service to get a 5 percent increase in customers, you are in the realm of diminishing returns, especially if you were losing money on each customer even before the service increase.

A few of the vehicle-revenue mile numbers must be used with caution: I doubt Pittsburgh really reduced transit service by 90 percent or that Cleveland did so by 76 percent. These low numbers probably result from the FTA not getting complete data from the transit agencies and should be rectified next month.

Overall, August’s ridership numbers should offer little encouragement to any transit agency. Seattle and a few other cities show that massive and expensive increases in transit service can yield modest increases in ridership. Richmond shows that a redesigned route system can increase ridership, but I suspect this is a one-time-only increase. We can expect ridership to continue to decline nationally and locally for the foreseeable future.