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More Reasons Not to Ride Transit

By | | Transportation
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Ridership on New York City subways may be down by 66 percent, but two things that haven’t declined on the subways are violent crime and vandalism. Homocides, rapes, and burglaries have all increased since the pandemic began, reports the New York Times.

Just last week alone, a woman was shoved onto the tracks in front of an on-coming subway trains; a man was also pushed onto the tracks; a Broadway actor was beaten severely enough to require surgery; and two men beat a woman for telling them to wear masks. And those were only the most horrific attacks of the week. Continue reading →

Don’t Blame Congress for Transit Cuts

By | | Transportation
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“D.C. Metro faces service cuts due to Congress,” says a recent headline. The Metro board decided yesterday to cut both bus and rail service, but said it wouldn’t have needed to make those cuts if Congress had passed another bailout bill.

But don’t blame Congress for not spending money the federal government doesn’t have to rescue transit agencies that have already had a $25 billion bailout and more than six months to adjust to the new reality of much lower ridership. Instead, blame the fact that most DC transit riders are able to work at home, with the result that ridership is down 81 percent as of September. Blame the fact that, instead of cutting service in parallel with the drop of ridership and revenues, Metro cut service by only 42 percent as of September.

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Watching the Sausage Get Made

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak ridership is down by 87 percent, so Amtrak needs a $2.9 billion rescue from Congress, the company’s executive vice president, Stephen Gardner, told a congressional subcommittee yesterday. Transit ridership is down 70 to 90 percent, added American Public Transportation Association president Paul Skoutelas, so the transit industry wants a $32 billion bailout from Congress.

Those are just their short-term demands, as was made clear in the hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials. Both Amtrak and New York commuter railroads want $20 billion for the Gateway Project, which would replace bridges and tunnels between Newark and New York City. Transit agencies want $106 billion to restore their backlog of poorly maintained rail systems. And even that is only the beginning. Continue reading →

Vote No, They’ll Build It Anyway

By | | Transportation
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In 1998, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. So TriMet, the region’s transit agency, built it anyway.

In the recent election, Portland-area voters rejected plans to build a new light-rail line. Now TriMet is salivating at the possibility that the next Congress will pass an economic stimulus bill that will allow it to build it anyway, perhaps by requiring only 20 percent local matching funds instead of the current 50 percent.

Portland’s first light-rail line, which opened in 1986, cost about $30 million a mile in today’s dollars to go east from downtown Portland to Gresham, Portland’s largest suburb. The second line, which opened in 1997, cost about $75 million a mile in today’s dollars to go west from downtown Portland to Beaverton and Hillsboro. Continue reading →

Taxing Success to Subsidize Failure

By | | Transportation
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Driving has bounced back. Transit has not, leaving many transit agencies in financial straits. The obvious solution it to tax drivers to keep transit systems running, or even to keep them not running.

Actually, that’s not obvious to me, but it is obvious to some transit executives who are willing to take advantage of the fact that people have been conditioned to believe that cars are evil and transit is good so drivers should be taxed to support transit bureaucracies.

Take, for example, Golden Gate Transit, which started as a way of relieving congestion on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bridge tolls were used to subsidize buses between Marin County and San Francisco, and the people who paid the tolls were supposed to be happy that their commutes were less congested. Continue reading →

Biden Appoints Congestifiers

By | | Transportation
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Phillip Washington, the transit executive who thinks Los Angeles isn’t congested enough, has been named the leader of Biden’s transition team in charge of the Department of Transportation and Amtrak. Washington is the CEO of Los Angeles Metro, the main transit agency in Los Angeles County.

A year ago, as Los Angeles bus ridership was collapsing due to LA Metro’s insistence on building expensive light rail, Washington blamed the loss of bus riders instead on Los Angeles’ famously uncongested freeways. “It’s too easy to drive in this city,” he told the Wall Street Journal. To restore bus ridership, the city has to “make driving harder.”

“Sometimes you have to tell people what’s good for them,” Washington also told the Journal. He will clearly fit right in to Biden’s top-down view of how the world should work. Washington’s support for obsolete light-rail transit will go hand-in-hand with Biden’s support for obsolete intercity passenger trains. Continue reading →

Transit’s Diminishing Returns in 2019

By | | Policy brief, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit industry carried 19 million more trips in 2019 than in 2018, representing a 0.2 percent increase in ridership, according to the 2019 National Transit Database that was posted by the Federal Transit Administration last week. To get that increase, transit agencies had to spend 5 percent more on operating costs and increased capital spending by more than 10 percent.

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

While even a 0.2 percent increase would have been welcome to a transit industry that had seen declines in each of the previous four years, the reality is that ridership declined in the vast majority of urban areas, and it took a 92-million trip increase in the New York urban area to overcome all of those declines. New York ridership had been depressed in 2018 due to delays caused by work being done on the city’s subway system, so the growth in 2019 was due more to the end of such work rather than any real recovery in transit ridership. Continue reading →

September Transit Ridership Down 62 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Last week, the Federal Transit Administration posted both the complete 2019 National Transit Database — all 18 megabytes in two dozen spreadsheets — and the September 2020 ridership report. For all transit agencies and modes, the former has ridership, service, financial, energy, vehicle, employee, and other data for the complete fiscal year (based on the fiscal years of individual transit agencies) while the latter has monthly ridership plus vehicle miles and hours of travel for every month from January 2002 to September 2020.

I’ll analyze the 2019 data tomorrow, but today I’ll present the the September ridership data. Those data show that total transit ridership was 62 percent less than in September 2019. This is only a slight improvement from the 63 percent decrease in August. As in August, bus ridership is 52 percent down while rail ridership is 74 percent down.
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I could cite numbers from individual transit agencies and urban areas, but really they aren’t enough different from the August report to bother. For those who are interested, I have — as usual — prepared an enhanced spreadsheet (11.7-MB Excel file). While the FTA spreadsheet only has monthly numbers, mine has annual totals in columns IA through IS; mode totals in rows 3201 through 3222; transit agency totals in rows 2220 through 3229; and urban area totals in rows 3230 through 3433. Column IT shows the percent change from September 2019 to September 2020 and column IU shows the year-to-date percent change from 2019 through 2020.

Some Transit Riders Never Coming Back

By | | Transportation
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At least 20 percent of former Long Island Railroad commuter-train riders are “lost forever,” predicts Gerald Bringmann, the chair of the transit agency’s commuter council. This raises the question of whether capital improvements to the railroad that “sounded great” before the pandemic make any sense today.

“The longer people work remotely, the more businesses are finding, ‘You know what? This is working,'” says MTA board member Kevin Law, who is also the president of a Long Island business group. People like working at home, Law added, and don’t like spending hours trying to get to work on someone else’s timetable.

The decline in commuter-train ridership had “been a trend, but COVID-19 accelerated it at a massive rate,” notes the chief editor of Railway Age magazine. Commuter railroads “are going to have to adjust, if they can, to these new commuting patterns.” Continue reading →

August Transit Ridership Down 63 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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August transit ridership was 63.2 percent lower than in August, 2019, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is not much of an improvement over July, when ridership was 64.9 percent below July 2019.

As in previous months, rail ridership was down by more than bus ridership: 74.2 percent vs. 51.8 percent, reflecting the fact that rail riders tend to have higher incomes and are more likely to be able to work at home than bus riders. Similarly, the worst-performing transit systems tended to be in urban areas with large numbers of people who can work at home: San Francisco-Oakland ridership was down 79.4 percent while Washington DC-area ridership was down 79.1 percent. In contrast, ridership in San Antonio, which has no rail transit and whose riders are mainly working class, was down by 49.2 percent.

Despite staggering losses in ridership, many transit agencies have made only modest reductions in service thanks to the credulity of Congress and other funders. Congress gave the transit industry a $25 billion bailout as a part of the CARES Act, and while most transit agencies will soon have burned through those funds, they are counting on another bailout before they run out. Continue reading →