U.S. transit systems carried 73.9 percent as many riders in September 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is transit’s highest level, as a percent of 2019 numbers, since the pandemic began. This is particularly remarkable as September 2023 had one less business day than September 2019.
Highway data for September 2023 are not yet available. This chart and post will be updated when they are released.
Transit was aided by the fact that September ridership in the New York urban area, where 46 percent of all transit rides take place, reached 78.6 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Transit is also doing better than average in Los Angeles (79.3%), Miami (83.4%), Dallas (78.4%), and Houston (87.2%). Washington reached 73.8 percent, just slightly below the national average. Ridership continues to be below average in Chicago (63.1%), Philadelphia (59.4%), Atlanta (60.6%), Boston (64.0%), Phoenix (55.8%), and San Francisco-Oakland (64.4%), to name a few. Although transit ridership is slowly recovering, it is still well behind driving, which first reached 100 percent of pre-pandemic miles in June, 2021.
After reaching more than 100 percent of pre-pandemic passenger-miles for the first time in August, Amtrak passenger-miles fell to less than 90 percent in September, according to the state-owned company’s monthly performance report. September 30 is the end of Amtrak’s fiscal year, and the railroad carried 5.8 billion passenger-miles in F.Y. 23, down from 6.5 billion in 2019. The company’s record was 6.8 billion in 2013.
Airline passengers increased from nearly 103 percent of 2019 in August to nearly 104 percent in September, according to the Transportation Security Administration. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports airline passenger-miles, but is more than a month behind these other agencies. As of July, domestic air passenger-miles exceeded 100 percent of 2019 levels in every month of 2023 while international passenger-miles reached 93 percent in July.
To compare modes, I prefer to use passenger-miles as they are the best measure of how much transportation work is being done. The alternative measure, trips, is less useful because some trips are under a mile long and others are thousands of miles. Longer trips give people access to more jobs, resources, and other economic opportunities.
While we have passenger-miles for Amtrak and the airlines (albeit a couple of months later), the Federal Transit Administration only reports passenger-miles in its annual databases. In 2019, there were about 5.5 passenger-miles per trip, but this declined to 5.0 in 2022, probably because the transit riders who are most likely to be now working at home are those who once took long transit rides on, say, commuter trains or buses.
Highway passenger-miles are based on vehicle-miles times occupancy rates estimated from the semi-decennial National Household Travel Survey. The latest travel survey is from 2017; data from the 2022 survey should be released soon. Occupancy rates from 2017 were nearly identical to those from 2012, suggesting they may not change much in 2022. Historically, occupancy rates have been a function of family sizes; average auto occupancies roughly equaled to average family sizes minus 1. Since family sizes haven’t changed much in the last few years, occupancy rates will also probably remain stable.
As usual, I have posted an enhanced spreadsheet (19.4-MB) presenting detailed transit data. The FTA’s raw data are in cells A1 through JK2272. Annual totals are in columns JL through KG. Column KH compares September 2023 numbers with September 2019; column KI compares September 2023 with September 2020; and column KJ compares January-September 2023 with 2019. Mode totals are in rows 2276 through 2296; transit agency totals are in rows 2306 through 3304; and urban area totals are in rows 3307 through 3796. These enhancements are made on both the UPT (unlinked passenger trips) and VRM (vehicle-revenue-miles) worksheets.
Even if Transit recovers to 100% it’s pre-pandemic miles/usage.
It’s still not at the peak it enjoyed 2014 or maximums it had 1950s-60s before it was municipalized.
Yes Urban design (Suburbs) did play their role in transits demise. But real reason transit in US died, was PUBLIC IMAGE, because it became synonymous with Poverty, ghetto culture, criminality, low grade quality service and declining urban importance. In Europe and Japan, transit is synonymous with hum of economic engines and egalitarian sense of community usage. In US they’re indicitive of being too poor/incapable driving. So yeah there’s that.
Antiplanner mentions transits declining importance to urban economics, what he illustrates is declining importance of cities/urban areas to overall economics.
Jordan Peterson described how the US military determined that people with an IQ below 83 (1 in 10 people in the USA) could not be trained for anything at any level of the organization that was not counter-productive.
Point being, urban society’s importance to economic engines is slowly become irrelevant.
– The US has a super efficient freight rail system that can move trillions tons goods/commodities at extremely low labor cost. This puts us economic advantage in warehousing and goods distribution over EU and Asia.
– US has 15,000 Airports or runways, air distribution of packages and freight is ubiquitous on global level.
– Urban land prices, have made industries like steel making, car production and machine part fabrication insoluable, at this point, electric power has replaced coal/coke so American industry doesn’t really pollute much anymore, and is also quieter, so factories/industry in suburbs are not only tolerable, but transportation makes them convenient.
– Energy in USA is cheaper than Europe and Japan, which benefits Energy intensive industries like metal processing, concrete making. BMW’ largest factory…..is in South Carolina.
https://s3-prod.autonews.com/s3fs-public/OEM01_303079996_AR_-1_CJDTILHFPQMI.jpg
– Lastly, thing most people forget, USA has more entrepreneurs and self employed people than EU and Japan. They require on demand transportation, cars fulfill.
https://theconversation.com/why-trackless-trams-are-ready-to-replace-light-rail-103690?fbclid=IwAR0Ku6Nt-eUhbC6rY_MeAjZ3PryFIaaZxVq2y2nXvmlwJIlhIDiPhFYcEXk
Nice bus…..
BMW announced fifth generation EV motor.
GM stated it’s next switch to ev motors;
The permanent magnets in EV motor rotors are typically made from rare earth minerals like terbium, dysprosium, praseodymium, and neodymium, which are expensive and currently processed almost entirely overseas. Also, their mining and processing leave behind a heavy environmental footprint.
Minneapolis-based startup, Niron Magnetics.
Niron’s Clean Earth Magnets are claimed to be the world’s first and only rare-earth-free permanent magnets capable of automotive-grade power. The technology is based on iron nitride.
Since Iron is one most abundant elements in Earth’s crust and Nitrogen the most abundant in earth atmosphere.
This material can be manufactured without resource demand shortages.
Chinese cant consolidate it
and we don’t need african slave children to dig it out of the ground…..
but that still leaves two other aspects of electric vehicles.
COPPER for the wiring and charging infrastructure.
And what new batteries made of……….
All well and good, but that doesn’t solve other problems
– Charging infrastructure insatiable demand for COPPER
– Batteries insatiable demand Lithium/Nickel
– Power demands to convert auto fleet to electric need 500 Gigawatt sized power plants.
Motor is the least of the problem.
ALso in news.
San Francisco has totally extirpated ENTIRE homeless population. Gotten rid of the tent cities, taken trash out.
Steam cleaned streets and sidewalks.
All to make city clean for foreign dignitaries, namely Chinese president Winnie the Pooh for his visit with Biden. Festered by Shit in transit stations clogging up escalators. Needle strewn sidewalks, feces laden bags in the street corners, hookers and men literally shooting up drugs in public in most tourist friendly areas of town….
Cleaning up 4 years of depravity only Took 3 days, This proves they could have always fixed the issue or at least help fix it…they just DIDN’T WANT to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcSavryHo2A&lc=
Large cities, who don’t want to lose their tax base, the commercial real estate lobby, and the feds have been pushing work from office nonsense.