The transit industry is terrible at accurately predicting future costs and ridership. It is terrible at cost-effectively moving people. But it is very good at one thing: spin.
When the pandemic dropped ridership by more than 80 percent, did the industry say, “I guess we aren’t needed right now; you can cut our subsidies”? No! It said, “We are carrying essential workers to their jobs, therefore you must increase our subsidies.”
Now that ridership is slowly recovering, is the industry saying, “we are now carrying only 42 percent of pre-pandemic levels, so you can cut our subsidies”? No! Instead it is saying, “Ridership of some agencies has increased by as much as 80 percent, so you must increase our subsidies!”
The low point in April 2020 has become the new baseline. Forget about the fact that transit ridership had been dropping since 2014 (and in some cities since 2008). The important point is that ridership is growing now! Forget about the fact that driving has almost completely recovered to pre-pandemic levels while as of May 2021 transit was still more than 55 percent below those levels. Ridership is growing!
When ridership was genuinely growing after reaching a low point in 1995, the transit industry used that growth as an argument for more subsidies. When it was shrinking after 2014, the transit industry used that decline as an argument for more subsidies. When April 2020 ridership on the Long Island Railroad dropped 97 percent of April 2019 levels, the industry used the fact that it still carried 3 percent as an argument for more subsidies.
There’s a good reason why the industry is so good at spin: spin provides most of the agency’s revenues. The industry has convinced people that transit is more virtuous than driving, so it deserves huge subsidies.
After all, transit carries poor people to work so the rest of us don’t have to share the roads with people we wouldn’t normally associate with. Transit consumes far more energy and spews out as much or more carbon as driving a car, but we tell ourselves that it would protect the environment if only other people would ride it. Transit buses and light-rail vehicles clog up the roads, but the government tells us they relieve congestion so we vote to give transit more money. After all, if you can’t trust budget-maximizing bureaucrats, who can you trust?
If transit ridership is declining because automobiles are more convenient, then in addition to more subsidies the solution is to take lanes away from cars and dedicate them to buses. As described in a recent Washington Post article, cities are doing this as well as giving buses priority over cars at traffic signals. This makes sense if transit is more virtuous than driving, but if it isn’t, these are stupid policies.
If we are going to take transit seriously — and we should take seriously any industry that takes $58 billion a year or more from taxpayers — then we have to ask whether it actually accomplishes anything it claims. The baseline for future transit ridership is not April, 2020, but 2019 or even 2014.
In 2014, the American Public Transportation Association bragged that transit was carrying more riders than any year since 1956. By 2019, it was carrying fewer riders than any year since 2005.
In 2020, it carried fewer than any year since at least 1902, and it certainly wasn’t energy efficient or climate friendly in doing so. Ridership is probably not going to recover to more than about 75 percent of pre-pandemic levels, less than any year since 1976. Whatever it recovers, we need to judge transit by what it does and not by what we wish it would do.
“The industry has convinced people that transit is more virtuous than driving….”
Not so, as evidenced by the fact that “people”, by and large, are still not flocking to transit.
What the Antiplanner meant to say is “The industry has convinced gullible politicians that transit is more virtuous than driving….”
To further refine the quote, “The industry has convinced gullible politicians and the gullible people who vote for them that transit is more virtuous than driving … “
Rovigbroker, you missed my point. People are not falling for the industry propaganda. They’re all still driving. Politicians are falling for it. They don’t seem to have noticed that the masses are still driving, 100 to 1, over transit.
As the Antiplanner has pointed out, the government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of OUR money on transit trying to coax us out of OUR cars and transit’s share of personal travel has decreased, instead.
Nevertheless, the government keeps throwing good money after bad.
Let’s be frank, Europe didn’t heavily adopt bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and build transit because they care for the environment; that’s side circumstance. They did it because of energy crisis. Even After World War II Europe went thru multiple energy crisis and Still is Today!
Europe is an energy intensive region heavily reliant on imports; already today, it imports 50% of its energy needs, projected to increase to 70% within two decades. US solved it’s energy crisis with Fracking; Europe wont/cant do that. Europe has had energy shortages since before WWII; so stringent energy efficiency requirements and rationing were common in Europe.
Of course the ultimate energy efficiency in transportation is to not need machines for transportation. US is spoiled, we haven’t had an “Energy Crisis” since the 70’s. Today we whine about the price of energy/electricity, But compared to Europe we pay considerably less.
Average Gas price US: 3.00 dollars/gallon
Average UK Price: 7! a gallon
Average EU price: 6 a gallon.
Average US Electricity rate: $0.12 per kilowatt hour
UK price: USD equivalent of 26 cents per kWh
Germany: 36 cents
Calling the politicians who back transit “gullible” is completely wrong.
Between the transit industry and the transit unions, politicians rake in huge amounts of cash while claiming how virtuous they are in saving the environment.
If the industry and unions stopped funneling our tax dollars to the politicians, the industry would quickly wither away and die, and take down all those very highly paid transit jobs with it.
I think there are some elements of both gullibility and corruption involved. To say that either is “completely wrong” is, well, completely wrong.
I personally know elected representatives to our “citizen legislature” who have been completely convinced by slick lobbyists that diesel trains are (always) cleaner than gas driven cars because they have the capacity to carry large volumes of passengers or even simple because that are transit and “transit is more efficient than cars on highways”.
Only the truly gullible believe that diesel trains are a solution to climate change. Some politicians really believe it because they’re gullible; Corrupt politicians tell voters that because they know voters are, by and large, gullible.