Tag Archives: transit

As the economy begins to open up, are any bars offering free beer to get you back as a customer? How about restaurants offering free food? Is the NFL giving away tickets to the next Super Bowl to insure it will have a live audience?

The answers to all of these questions are probably “no” because demand for these things actually exists. But transit agencies across the nation are offering discounted or even free fares to try to get riders back.

Unlike bars and restaurants, which were economically devastated by the lock-downs associated with the pandemic, transit is flush with cash thanks to a Congress that has been generous with other peoples’ money. That means it can afford to give such discounts, which translates to even greater subsidies to a transportation system that, before the pandemic, covered 78 percent of its expenses with taxpayer funds. Continue reading →

The pro-transit TransitCenter has discovered something that the Antiplanner has been saying for years: transit policies are effectively racist. Many urban areas have “two-tiered transit systems,” says the TransitCenter’s Mary Buchanan, where an expensive form of transit, such as light or heavy rail, whisks high-income people, who are often white, to work while a cheaper, slower form of transit, such as local buses, trundles low-income people, who are often minorities, to their jobs.

Black households have significantly lower auto ownership rates than whites. Source: American Community Survey table B25044. When broken down by race, the Census Bureau only has five-year data for 2011-2015; some auto ownership rates have probably improved since then. Census Bureau data also don’t breakdown Hispanic vs. non-Hispanic ownership rates; most Hispanics are included with whites.

Buchanan and her colleagues evaluated transit in major urban areas such as New York and Chicago and found that low-income people would be much better off owning a car than relying on transit to get to work, which is another thing the Antiplanner has been saying for years. Of course, the TransitCenter sees this as one more reason to increase transit subsidies, while I see it as a reason to encourage more car ownership. Continue reading →

A recent report published by the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) concluded that transit reduces greenhouse gas emissions. How can this be when (as the Antiplanner has shown) data published by the Departments of Transportation and Energy show that transit emits as much or more greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car?

Easy! The authors of the TCRP paper, using the same data I used, found that transit emitted as much or more greenhouse gases per passenger mile as the average car. They also admitted that without transit, only “33 percent of transit passenger miles would otherwise be replaced by personal vehicle miles,” which means transit is three times worse than driving.

However, they then introduce two magic numbers that, when combined with transit’s real emissions, allow them to make it appear that transit is saving huge amounts of total emissions. The first magic number is called the land use efficiency multiplier. It assumes spending money on transit would lead to land-use changes that would in turn lead people to drive less, including people who don’t ride transit. The second magic number is called the transit efficiency multiplier, and it assumes that people who ride transit, say, 100 miles a week avoid several hundred miles of weekly driving. Continue reading →

After last week’s shooting, restoring light-rail service to Silicon Valley will take “weeks or months, not days,” says a representative of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA). In place of light rail, the agency was providing “bus bridges” to serve light-rail routes.

On Monday, however, VTA announced that it would discontinue such bus bridges. Instead, it “is directing all resources to the regular bus network that serves the majority of our riders who rely on public transit the most.” In other words, light rail serves mainly high-income workers who aren’t riding anyway because they are working at home. So those who were still riding light rail before last Wednesday must hustle to find alternate transportation such as riding buses that don’t necessarily parallel the light-rail lines.

If these light-rail lines were so important to the region that they had to be built, it seems like they would be important enough to keep running buses serving their customers while the rail system is out of commission. VTA is tacitly admitting that it was a mistake to build them in the first place. Continue reading →

Everybody knows that the purpose of living in cities is to keep public transit systems operating. Thus, says Bloomberg News, people who work at home are “threatening” transit for everyone else (meaning all of the 1 percenters who ride transit).

Not to worry. Someone named Kristin Schwab, over at Marketplace, has a plan to “lure riders back” to transit. (Is that like luring little kids with candy?) Transit is safe from COVID, she claims, but to overcome public perceptions that it is not, transit agencies should still require people to wear masks and regularly clean transit vehicles. Okay, that’s not so much a plan as it is wishful thinking.

Back at Bloomberg, San Francisco writers Tiffany Chu and Daniel Ramot say that we should fix transit by (1) giving it dedicated funding, meaning funding that transit agencies are sure to get no matter how poorly they perform; and (2) tie funding to outcomes, meaning transit agencies only get money if they produce results. These contradictory suggestions are made worse by the “outcomes” Chu and Ramot suggest, including “expanding access to jobs, improving cost efficiency, driving equity and reducing carbon emissions.” Continue reading →

“Transit is resilient,” claims transit industry consultant Paul Comfort, who is also executive director of the North American Transit Alliance, an association of private companies that earn money providing service to transit agencies. Comfort made this claim after visiting several transit agencies to see how they were spending the billions of dollars Congress gave them to compensate for the loss of ridership during the pandemic.

I don’t think that word means what Comfort wants us to think it means. The dictionary defines “resilient” as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The panicky press releases sent out a year ago by transit agencies and advocates do not suggest that an industry that adjusts easily to change. Comfort’s examples of agency “resilience” are mostly about how they are spending the money Congress gave them on masks, sanitizers, and, for some reason, complete streets. He says nothing about actual ridership or other real performance measures. Here are a few tests that can be used to tell if an industry or institution is resilient.

1. Does the industry need a big bailout every time there is a downturn in the economy? Continue reading →