Tag Archives: transit

To commemorate Earth Day, Memphis television meteorologist John Bryant decided to try riding the bus to work. Normally, his home-to-work journey takes about 15 to 20 minutes. His effort to protect the environment ended up taking 2-1/2 hours. Part of the problem was his unfamiliarity with the bus system, but the fastest he might have been able to make it was at least 90 minutes, partly because he had to walk a half mile from his home to the nearest bus stop and another mile to work from the nearest bus stop to his office. The few other passengers riding the bus with him were mostly too poor to own an automobile.

Despite this, he concluded more people should ride the bus. “These are the kind of sacrifices right now that we need to think about doing, even if you only do it one time,” he said, both for “reducing our carbon footprint” and for “connecting on an emotional level with citizens [who couldn’t afford cars] in the city I grew up in.” Continue reading →

Bloomberg reports that, when Utah Transit (UTA) eliminated transit fares on a trial basis in February, weekday ridership grew by 16 percent. Overall, the latest data show, average daily ridership was only 18 percent greater than it had been in January. That compares with 25 percent for the nation’s transit systems as a whole, suggesting that free transit may not have been the reason why ridership increased.

Utah Transit buses have an average of 36 seats but carried an average of just 5 passengers (that is, they carried 5.0 passenger-miles per vehicle mile) in 2019 and just 3.6 in 2020. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Considering that passenger fares brought more than $48 million into UTA’s budget in 2019, such a small boost in ridership hardly seems worth the loss of that revenue. Transit agencies, however, desperately need reasons to justify their heavily-subsidized existence. Offering free fares may boost ridership, if only by a small amount, but more important it insulates agencies from ridership fluctuations. If the agencies are solely dependent on taxpayers to keep their buses and trains running, then all they have to do is convince taxpayers or appropriators that transit is somehow vital to cities even if hardly anyone uses it. Continue reading →

A comparison of transit usage and COVID cases early in the pandemic in 52 urban areas found that heavy transit use was strongly correlated with greater numbers of COVID infections. “Increasing weekly bus transit usage in metropolitan statistical areas by one scaled unit was associated with a 1.38 times increase in incidence rate of COVID-19; a one scaled unit increase in weekly train transit usage was associated with an increase in incidence rate of 1.54,” said the researchers.

Plan to wear a mask for the rest of your life. Photo by Jacques Paquier.

The correlation was strong even if New York City was eliminated from the dataset. As I’ve often noted, New York is such a big transit market that it often biases any analysis of transportation across American cities. Continue reading →

Seattle-area residents have got themselves into a real fix. They voted to impose numerous taxes on themselves to spend tens of billions of dollars building new light-rail lines to downtown Seattle. Now, cost have increased, Seattle transit ridership is down by 54 percent, and Amazon is moving workers out of downtown Seattle.

Now a group called SkyLink has proposed a solution: replace light rail with aerial gondolas. These would supposedly be higher in capacity, less expensive, and would require less displacement of homes and businesses. Continue reading →

“The fight for free transit is about connecting people to opportunity,” proclaims Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. More realistically, the fight for free transit is about keeping poor people oppressed.

The Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Photo by Roderick Eime.

At one time, blacks in the South were expected to ride in the back of transit buses and to yield their seats to whites on demand. Whites at the time probably thought themselves generous that they allowed blacks to ride the buses at all. Today, well-off people such as Wu think they are generous in wishing to use other people’s money to give blacks and other poor people free transit rides. Continue reading →

Transit agencies that have been gobbling up billions of dollars of subsidies each year are now facing the prospect that hardly anyone wants to ride transit even with the subsidies. A Wall Street Journal story focuses on commuter-rail lines, which in January carried less than 35 percent of pre-pandemic riders. However, commuter-bus lines are even worse, carrying only 27 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Loudoun County commuter buses carried less than 6 percent as many passengers to DC in January 2022 as they did in January 2020. Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Individually, the worst-performing rail line is the Minneapolis North Star commuter train, which carried only 7 percent of pre-pandemic riders in January. Maryland and Virginia commuter trains serving DC, the Altamont and CalTrains commuter trains in the Bay Area, and commuter trains in Chicago and Seattle all carried less than 20 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while trains in Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were just over 20 percent. Meanwhile, commuter-bus lines in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Charlotte, Austin, and Sacramento all carried less than 10 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a hearing yesterday on how last year’s infrastructure law will “advance” transit. Three of the witnesses represented transit agencies or transit unions and all talked about how the law will fund new transit projects, but none talked about whether those projects would lead to more riders.

In contrast, testimony from the Antiplanner argued that taxpayers have spent well over $1.5 trillion in the last 50 years only to see transit ridership per urban resident decline. The new spending will enrich engineering and construction firms but not lead to more riders. My testimony begins at 55:30; here is my written testimony and here is my speaking text.

Except for ranking committee member Pat Toomey, the only senators in attendance were Democrats. They were less interested in my dire predictions than in hearing from the agency representatives about how excited they were to have more money to spend. Continue reading →