The Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) has seen ridership fall in every year since 2015. The district was originally created to bring office workers from the suburbs into downtown San Francisco, yet downtown is now a ghost town with some of the highest vacancy rates in its history and actual occupancy rates — that is, offices that are actually being used — are probably below 20 percent. BART’s latest ridership numbers themselves are less than 15 percent of 2019 levels. Many of San Francisco’s high-tech employers have already announced that they will allow many of their employees to continue to work from home after the pandemic.
What better time is there for BART to announce its proposal to significantly expand its service? Called Link 21, the heart of the proposal is to build a second tube under the bay connecting San Francisco with Oakland costing a mere $30 billion.
“The public supports long-range transportation projects, despite the short-term challenges posed by the pandemic,” claims BART. This is especially true because BART uses all the right buzzwords such equity, inclusion, environment, and efficiency.
It was aimed to help men with problems maintaining their erection. cialis without prescription A range of ED pills available at a platform When ordering the medicine via the internet, a man gets a great opportunity to approach a range of benefits: A world class drug at the cheapest prices Follows unique mechanism to produce an erection Available in many delicious forms and flavors It is easy to https://www.unica-web.com/watch/2016/time-thieves.html generic cialis get these medications. Serious dizziness, heart attack, upper body pain, seizure, rash, rashes, abnormal heartbeat, unpleasant penis link acquisition de viagra hard-on etc tend to be serious signs and symptoms. Though losing interest in sex is quite an embarrassment for any man. tadalafil tablets india https://www.unica-web.com/watch/2016/matador.html Never mind the fact that the median income of Bay Area transit riders was $66,000 a year in 2019, much higher than the median income of people who carpool to work ($49,000), higher than people who drive alone to work ($60,000), and even higher than people who work at home ($64,000). Never mind the fact that, even if BART builds lines into minority communities, most of them won’t use it because it won’t go to their job sites. Never mind the fact that most of the taxes that will be used to pay for new BART lines are regressive, which means low-income people who don’t ride transit will disproportionately pay for transit rides being taken by higher-income transit commuters.
Never mind these facts; just believe BART when it says that its plans will be equitable and inclusive.
BART plans to spend the next three years considering alternatives, then four more years on engineering, design, and writing environmental impact statements. Assuming construction begins in 2028, it expects to have the project completed in 2040! Most people don’t even know what they are going to be doing a week from now, but BART — ignoring all of the evidence that it is completely obsolete — thinks it knows the region’s transportation needs two decades from now and is willing to bet $30 billion of other people’s money that it is correct.
BART isn’t alone, of course. The Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) is proposing an $8 billion to $12 billion transit expansion plan to be paid for out of regressive sales and property taxes. Never mind that CATS ridership peaked back in 2013 and by 2019 had declined by nearly 15 percent. Never mind that the last light-rail expansion it opened resulted in zero new riders, as the agency lost more bus riders than it gained rail riders.
Back in the soviet era, the USSR claimed to have some of the strongest environmental laws on earth. Yet it generated twice as much pollution per unit of GNP as the United States. When state-owned factories were fined for producing that pollution, they simply requisitioned funds from the central government to cover the costs of those fines.
U.S. transit agencies today have the same mentality. Is ridership declining? Requisition more money. Are people using alternatives such as ride hailing and private automobiles? Tax them to cover transit’s lost revenues. Does transit not work any more because people no longer live and work in higher densities? Make transit agencies into land-use czars forcing more people to live in transit-oriented developments. Has ridership permanently dropped due to the pandemic? Demand more subsidies. Redesign the transit business model to adapt to modern lifestyles? Forget about it.
Even today. Before the USSR claimed to have some of the strongest environmental laws on earth, but they had the worst environmental disasters
– Chernobyl
– Aral Sea drainage
Economist Jeffrey Sachs noted at the time that the socialist nations had “some of the worst environmental problems in the entire globe.” Air and water pollution abounded. By one estimate, in the late 1980s, particulate air pollution was 13 times higher per unit of GDP in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Levels of gaseous air pollution were twice as high as this. Wastewater pollution was three times higher.
Today, planned economies are still environmental trainwrecks…….China has so much pollution stemming from the mineral demands of so called “Green technologies”
When the Iron Curtain lifted, socialism’s dirty environmental secret was exposed. When China goes thru the same disasters. And yes, I whole heartedly believe China will have a Fukushima or Chernobyl type event sooner or later. It’s not their technology, it’s their propensity for swift misunderstanding of how to safely utilize it……….China is a nation notorious for disasters when approached by mass adoption of technologies.
Antiplanner, what I love bout CATS is that if you look at that 10 year period before they extended their LRT line, they added enough housing for ~7,500 – ~10,000 people along that line.
In 10 years ridership on that line was flat. Even if 10% of those 10,000 were using it regularly you’d expect to see a couple thousand more trips per day. Nope. Flat. Nothing. Nada more.
I suspect when the line was built they shut down bus service that competed with it, forcing those bus riders to make-do with the rail-line (maybe a longer walk on both ends, but is now all they have). As time passed, those previous bus riders found better ways to get to work, car-pooling or driving or moved elsewhere. If this is significant, then that would explain how a growing population along the line results in no net increase in riders.
.
Sometimes this happens, usually with express bus service that parallels the proposed route. But a more frequent strategy is to reroute many bus routes to serve as feeders to rail stations.
This has the advantage of allowing the operator to double-count transfers induced by the rerouting of the network as extra “trips”. Most operators count unlinked boardings, rather than linked trips, as their measure of ridership. It’s easier to count, and most observers don’t know or care about the difference between boardings and trips.
What this means is that even if “ridership” is flat after the introduction of a new rail line, it is probably actually declining because the actual number of trips being taken on the system is being inflated by the counting method.
With this and almost anything a planner does the rule is simple: Facts don’t matter.