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Transit’s Fiscal Cliff

By | | Transportation
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Transit officials in the San Francisco Bay Area say that transit there faces a “fiscal cliff” because ridership is so slow to recover from the pandemic. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District is in particular distress, say officials, because pre-pandemic fares covered a much higher percentage–the article says two-thirds but in 2019 it was actually 72 percent–of its operating costs than most transit agencies, so a loss of patronage means a greater loss of revenues as a share of its budget.

Some transit riders wear masks, but many more aren’t riding transit. Photo by OC Transpo.

Of course, those officials don’t mention that, unlike bus agencies, BART spends more money on capital replacement each year than it does on operations. Since capital replacement is essential to keep the trains running, fares actually covered only 36 percent of its costs. Continue reading →

New York MTA Spends $1.1 Billion on Overtime

By | | Transportation
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New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is proud to say that it has reduced the amount of overtime it pays its employees from nearly $1.4 billion in 2018 to a little more than $1.1 billion in 2020. That’s still way too much.

MTA spent $24 million installing finger-print ID time clocks such as this one to reduce overtime abuse, but many employees aren’t using them. Image from UKG.

Overtime is a big issue for transit agencies. Many transit employees, from bus drivers to train conductors to maintenance workers, significantly boost their incomes by working overtime. Agencies could save money by hiring more employees, but unions have successfully gone on strike to prevent agencies from doing so. Continue reading →

Transit 2020: The First Year of the Pandemic

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Transit agencies in 2020 carried 40 percent fewer riders than in 2019, according to data released last Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. To do so, they provided 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle miles or hours) at 97 percent of the cost.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

According to the database, transit carried 5.9 billion trips in 2020. We know from the FTA’s monthly reports that transit carried 4.5 billion trips in calendar year 2020. The difference is that data in the annual database are based on transit agency fiscal years, not the calendar year. Continue reading →

September Transit 53.6% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Nationwide transit ridership in September was 53.6 percent of September 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the first time since the pandemic began that ridership exceeded half of pre-pandemic numbers.

Airline passenger numbers are from the Transportation Security Administration; Amtrak numbers are from its September performance report.

This compares with 76.3 percent for air travel and 67.1 percent for Amtrak. The number of miles of driving in September will not be related for another week or so. Transit’s low ridership numbers are in spite of transit agencies providing more than 86 percent as much service (measured in vehicle-revenue miles) as in September 2019. Continue reading →

A Data-Driven Approach to Transportation Safety

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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About 20,160 people died in traffic accidents in the first half of 2021, according to an early estimate released last week by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). This puts this year on track to being the first since 2007 to have more than 40,000 annual fatalities.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Historically, fatality rates peaked at more than 450 per billon vehicle miles in 1909, and then declined fairly steadily to 10.1 in 2014. The 2021 rate of 13.4 represents a 33 percent increase over 2014 levels. This increase is partly due to changes in driving behavior during the pandemic, but rates had increased even before the pandemic, reaching 11.4 fatalities per billion miles in 2016. Although the evidence isn’t clear, many experts believe much of the increase, both before and during the pandemic, was due to people being distracted by smart phones. Continue reading →

August Transit <50% of Pre-Pandemic Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit’s recovery falters as ridership in August was just 49.97 percent of August, 2019 numbers, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only slightly above July’s 49.13 percent of July 2019.

I’ll post Amtrak and driving data when they become available.

August data are not yet available for Amtrak or driving, but both were well above transit levels in July. August flying fell slightly from July, probably because of worries about a new wave of COVID and associated health mandates. These factors may have also depressed transit ridership for the month. Continue reading →

Pre-Pandemic Ridership Declines

By | | Transportation
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Ride hailing was the primary cause of transit ridership declines in the years before the pandemic, according to a paper recently published by the National Academy of Sciences. Nationwide ridership had fallen by 14 to 15 percent between 2012 and 2018, and the report blamed about half of this decline on ride hailing, with 4 percent due to lower gas prices, 0 to 4 percent due to increased transit fares, and 2 percent due to higher incomes and increased auto ownership.

I’m not entirely convinced. The estimates are based on a statistical model, not on actual rider surveys or other on-the-ground information. The estimates don’t agree with other transit data I’ve seen.

Ride hailing is expensive compared with transit fares. Yet in the years 2012 to 2018, the number of workers earning less than $25,000 a year who commuted by transit fell by 475,000, a 16 percent decline. Meanwhile, the number earning more than $75,000 grew by 738,000 (a 55 percent increase) while the number earning $25,000 to $75,000 grew by 298,000 (an 11 percent increase). Continue reading →

Optimistic Road & Transit Forecasts

By | | Transportation
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“Billions Spent on Roads and Transit Projects Are Often Based on Optimistic Forecasts,” headlines the Wall Street Journal last week. “Researchers have found that transportation planners frequently expect more people to use their road and transit projects than ultimately do so,” said the article. “Yet those optimistic forecasts become part of the justification for spending millions or billions of dollars on such projects,” which, the article goes on to say, is “wasting resources.”

Toll road under construction in Texas. Photo by Larry D. Moore.

Recent FTA studies found that transit projects overestimate ridership by an average of 21 percent, which the article claims “was an improvement over previous years.” As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the “improvement” came about because the FTA changed its frame of reference. While older studies looked at ridership projections made when local transit agencies decided to build the project, the newer studies looked at the projections made when the FTA itself began to subsidize the project. These two steps may be separated by several years. Continue reading →

Automobiles: Low Cost and Socially Just

By | | Transportation
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An anti-auto, pro-cycling group called the Institute for Transportation Development Policy (ITDP) claims that Americans spend too much on transportation, and if only they lived more like Europeans they would save a lot of money. However, there are some fundamental flaws in their analysis.

According to the article, Americans spend 13 percent of their household expenditures on transportation while Europeans spend only 11 percent. The first problem with their claim is the source of their data: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). BLS compiles data based on surveys. While BLS data might be useful comparing cities and states within the United States, the surveys are not completely reliable.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), however, collects all the data about where money goes in the national economy. According to the BEA, only 9.2 percent of “personal consumption expenditures” went for transportation in 2019. This includes motor vehicles, transit, airlines, and other forms of mass transportation. These data are more comparable to the European data cited by ITDP. Continue reading →

National Obsolete Transportation Month

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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From San Francisco to North Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be “Transit Month.” “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,” says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”

Click image to download a PDF of this four-page policy brief.

From a transportation viewpoint, agencies don’t have much to celebrate this year. Cities have proven they can get along quite well without transit. With more than half of all American employees working at home at the beginning of this year, roads are less congested so people who continue to work outside of their homes can more easily drive to work. While driving recovered to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels by June 2021, transit remained stuck at 50 percent in June and July. Continue reading →