One of the conclusions of the Antiplanner’s recent paper on rapid buses was that regions that had fewer than 40,000 downtown jobs didn’t need rapid buses, much less light rail. Austin has about 72,000 downtown jobs, but rapid bus isn’t working well there either.

One reason can be found in census numbers, specifically table B08141 of the American Community Survey. For 2012, this table reports that just 2.2 percent of Austin workers live in households that lack access to an automobile, yet 28 percent of them drive alone to work and 12 percent carpool, while only 25 percent take transit to work. In other words, as I’ve noted for other urban areas, transit is just not relevant to most people.

In March of this year, Austin’s MetroRapid bus attracted nearly 6,500 trips per day. This declined to 5,900 in April and 5,300 in April, rising slightly to just under 5,500 in June.

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The Cato Institute has published a critique of the city of Austin’s proposal to build a 9.5-mile light-rail line that would cost nearly $1.4 billion (which was briefly discussed here). “Austinites make more than six million person trips per day, of which the light-rail line would carry less than a third of a percent,” says the critique. “Yet constructing the light-rail line would consume 5 percent of the region’s transportation budget for the next 25 years, and operations and maintenance would increase the cost still further.”

The proposed line is only one of several that the city wants to build. Yet projected ridership for the first line is expected to be less than 20,000 people per day and no more than 2,500 people per hour at its peak. As an associated op ed in the Austin American Statesman points out, since ordinary buses can move far more people than that, there is no reason to build rail. (A similar op ed looks at a light-rail proposal for St. Petersburg, Florida; a more generic op ed is here.)

Not surprisingly, “Project Connect” (the planning agency representing the city and Capital Metro) claims that light rail has a higher capacity than buses. To reach this conclusion, it made the absurd assumption that an exclusive bus lane can support no more than one bus every three minutes, allowing buses to carry no more than about 1,300 people per hour. In fact, ordinary city streets, much less exclusive bus lanes, can support far more than one bus every three minutes. Planners are clearly biased in favor of the expensive rail option, as based on this one fact alone they concluded that rail was the appropriate solution for Austin.

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