Transit’s Market Share Shrinks a Little More

Now that the U.S. DOT has published 2005 data for transit (1.9 mb download) and Highway Statistics, we can expect to soon hear APTA crowing about how transit is capturing market share from the automobile. This, however, is just another lie your transit lobbyist is telling you.

According to the numbers, total transit trips grew by 2.7 percent over 2004 (NDTB, table 19), while total miles of driving grew by just 0.8 percent (Highway Statistics, table VM-1). But this is a false comparison, because Urban transit serves only urban areas, so it should be compared not with total driving but urban driving — and urban driving is growing much faster than total driving.

According to table VM-1, urban driving increased by 2.9 percent in 2005. The transit database also says that passenger miles of transit use — a better indicator than trips — increased by only 1.2 percent. So urban driving grew more than twice as fast as transit passenger miles, even though the end of 2005 saw some of the highest gas prices in the past fifty years (though not quite as high, after adjusting for inflation, as 1980-81).

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Even if transit were growing faster than urban driving (as it has done in just nine of the last thirty years), it would take decades for transit to be a significant factor in urban areas (other than New York). If transit grew by an average of 2 percent per year and driving by just 1 percent, it would take more than 100 years for transit to reach 10 percent of urban passenger travel.

As shown in the above chart, transit is getting less and less significant all the time. Yet this does not stop planners in Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco-Oakland, and many other regions from proposing to spend 50 to 80 percent of their regions’ transportation capital budgets on transit (as shown in the regional transportation plans for those urban areas).