Good News for the Transit Industry

“The public transportation market is forecasted to grow by $90.07 bn during 2022-2027,” says a new report from someone called Infiniti Research. That represents an annual growth rate of 5.84 percent per year.

For a mere $2,500 ($4,000 for the “enterprise” version), you can read this fairy tale about how the transit market is going to grow once we install multi-billion-dollar hyperloops in every city.

“The development of hyperloop transportation systems [is] one of the prime reasons driving the public transportation market growth during the next few years,” claims the report, putting it in the world of pure fantasy land. Actually, 5.84 percent annual growth seems pretty modest considering how diminished the transit industry is today: at that rate, it would take 8 years to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, unless most employers force employees to stop working at home, even 5.84 percent seems unlikely.

What makes this good news for the transit industry is not that 5.84 percent per year is going to happen but that transit agencies can point to this prediction when demanding more subsidies to rescue them from the “fiscal cliff.” Since the prediction is that it will take eight more years for transit ridership to recover to pre-COVID numbers, transit agencies can continue to use this song-and-dance for most of those eight years. Meanwhile, agencies will discretely ignore the fact that no one is going to build a functioning hyperloop urban transit system, upon which this growth prediction is predicated, in the next eight years.

The report is about the world transit industry, and it has separate chapters by continent, but its costs $2,500, so I’m not going to read it to find out what the prediction is for the U.S. But I wonder how many transit agencies that are publicly claiming they are about to go off a fiscal cliff will spend your tax dollars to buy the multi-user version of the report, which is a mere $4,000 or nearly $25 a page for the 162-page book of fairy tales.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

3 Responses to Good News for the Transit Industry

  1. LazyReader says:

    If I wanna get from point A to B I can get there quickly or cheaply….

    In this economy I pick cheaply…..
    April 2022, Musk announced he had secured $675 million in venture financing ….. why after buying g Twitter he’s not bereft funds to pay for experimental section if hyperloop and test it.

    Like building a colony on Mars [which Musk also wants to do], the biggest question might be one of willpower: How badly do we want it?…. answer not much.

    The city of Columbus spent a million dollars studying whether it wanted to be a station on a proposed Pittsburgh-to-Chicago underground vacuum tube, before opting out in April. Even thinking about hyperloops is damn expensive…..

    Masks hyperloop cost per mile projections dectupled,( 10x) thus slap of reality

  2. kx1781 says:

    “The development of hyperloop transportation systems [is] one of the prime reasons driving the public transportation market growth during the next few years,”

    Complete poppycock. Something that’s never been implemented before ain’t going to ( magically ) be implemented anytime soon. Definitely not the next few years.

  3. genomes says:

    “The public transportation market is forecasted to grow by $90.07 bn during 2022-2027”

    Won’t happen. US will be bankrupt by then and will have destroyed its currency.

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