After creeping up above 75 percent of pre-pandemic ridership for the first time in May, transit ridership fell back down to 74.9 percent in June, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Tuesday. Meanwhile, air travel continued soaring at 7.4 percent above pre-pandemic numbers, according to TSA counts.
Data are not yet available for Amtrak and driving but will be posted here as soon as they are.
Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas. Before the pandemic, almost half of all transit commuters in the nation’s 50 largest urban areas worked downtown, and almost half of downtown workers commuted by transit whereas less than 6 percent of non-downtown workers used transit to get to work. Although less than 10 percent of urban employees worked downtown, transit didn’t work for most of the other 90 percent.
Since the pandemic, downtown workers are among those most likely to work at home. A business that depended on user revenues to survive would re-orient itself to serve people who don’t work downtown. But transit gets most of its funds from taxpayers, so the most imaginative response of transit agencies to these numbers is to find new ways to tax people more even though it is accomplishing less.
As usual, I’ve made an enhanced version (21.1-MB Excel file) of the Federal Transit Administration’s spreadsheet available for download. The FTA raw data are in cells A1 through JT2291, annual totals in columns columns JT through KQ, national and mode totals are in rows 2300 through 2319, transit agency totals in rows 2330 through 3329, and urban area totals in rows 3331 through 3821. Column KR compares June 2024 with June 2019 while column KS compares 2024 to date with the same months in 2019.
Why double down on subsidies for transportation systems to move a population whose already subsidized to reside in the city they can’t afford to live in? To subsidize a system they cant afford to maintain to transport people. It’s like buying porterhouse steak then they just shredding it for hamburger meat.
Why so few ride public transit…the answer is the public.
Public transit, public pools, public parks, public accessible shopping are a television set advertizing for grandiose social experiment demographic replacement of a high IQ high trust society with modest, or low IQ one.
Meanwhile let’s check in on Public spaces… where the right blames “fatherlessness” and the left attributes to oppression. But reality is genetics and culture.
https://x.com/Orwellsghost28/status/1820899866593390876
Sad news from Oregon, AP’s own state, which will punish innocent drivers desperately searching for parking:
“The Oregon Supreme Court just turned down an appeal of the state’s 2022 parking reform, which all but eliminated urban & suburban parking mandates statewide.”
https://twitter.com/andersem/status/1821625345847783796
What solutions do you all have?
Building more useless 6-8 lane arterial collector routes that fail to function as a street or highway?
Rely on congestion pricing which may go beyond $20?
At least if focus more on car sharing services such as Getaround, demand for parking will fall
Who is building 6-8 lane arterial highways that are useless? And what does “useless” even mean in this context? Underutilized?
Look at everywhere planned after the 1940s
Elderly drivers not as dangerous as anti-car advocates claim – only 8 fatalities per 100 million miles:
https://x.com/Boenau/status/1821872302575022256
It’s amazing that people think they can just walk around their neighborhood without consequences. Hopefully this person learned a lesson to stay inside their house or their car.
https://x.com/FOX2News/status/1822600135890637168