The APTA Solution to Transit’s Decline

The American Public Transportation Association issued a press release last week announcing that transit ridership in the third quarter of 2018 had declined, something that will not be news to Antiplanner readers. But APTA held out some glimmerings of hope.

Among other success stories cited by APTA, Grand Rapids transit rejuvenated ridership on its least-used bus route, increasing boardings from 50 rides a day to 1,100. Riverside Transit in California increased its ridership by 2 percent. How did they accomplish this? Grand Rapids quadrupled service and cut fares to zero. Riverside cut fares to 25 cents. Other transit agencies, such as Seattle’s Sound Transit, saw modest ridership gains after boosting service.

In short, the key to transit’s recovery is to increase costs and decrease revenues. This must be the reasoning behind the streetcar movement: streetcars have much higher capital, operating, and maintenance costs than buses and most streetcars are so poorly utilized that many cities give away rides for free. APTA data doesn’t separate streetcars from light rail, but FTA third-quarter data show that streetcar ridership has grown 18 percent in the last five years, mainly because so many new streetcar lines have opened. However, ridership fell between 2017 and 2018, so the transit industry needs to keep opening new high-cost, low-revenue lines to keep up the momentum.

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The truth is that transit is already a high-cost, low-revenue form of transportation. In 2017, the industry spent more than $66 billion and collected less than $16 billion in fares. Ridership is declining despite these huge subsidies, and many transit agencies have seen ridership decline despite increasing service (and costs). For example, APTA points out that Charlotte saw a 55 percent increase in light-rail ridership after opening a new line, but didn’t admit that Charlotte lost so many bus riders that total transit ridership was down.

The only true salvation for transit will be to cut costs, not increase them, while increasing revenues, not reducing them. Reducing costs means more privatization of services; increasing revenues means running transit services where people want them rather than where people need to be bribed to use them; and overall focusing on customers rather than contractors.