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Transit Carried 74.9% of 2019 Riders in June

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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After creeping up above 75 percent of pre-pandemic ridership for the first time in May, transit ridership fell back down to 74.9 percent in June, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Tuesday. Meanwhile, air travel continued soaring at 7.4 percent above pre-pandemic numbers, according to TSA counts.

Data are not yet available for Amtrak and driving but will be posted here as soon as they are.

Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas. Before the pandemic, almost half of all transit commuters in the nation’s 50 largest urban areas worked downtown, and almost half of downtown workers commuted by transit whereas less than 6 percent of non-downtown workers used transit to get to work. Although less than 10 percent of urban employees worked downtown, transit didn’t work for most of the other 90 percent. Continue reading →

Driving, Air Travel Surge Above Pre-COVID Levels

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Americans took 7.7 percent more airline trips in May 2024 than the same month in 2019, according to TSA passenger counts. While the release of airline passenger-mile data lags other data by a couple of months, March data indicate that domestic flying passenger-miles were 5.5 percent greater than in 2019 while international passenger-miles were 1.5 percent short of 2019. The number of international trips was 4.3 percent greater than in 2019, indicating that people who are traveling internationally are going to closer destinations.

Americans also drove 2.6 percent more miles in May 2024 than May 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Highway Administration. Rural miles of driving were 8.8 percent greater than before the pandemic while urban miles were just 0.2 percent short of May 2019. Continue reading →

April 2024 Transit Ridership 74.6% of 2019

By | | Transportation
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Transit systems carried less than 75 percent as many riders in April 2024 as in the same month before the pandemic, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Transit ridership tends to be significantly greater on weekdays than weekends and holidays, but April had the same number of business days in both years. Ridership has been hovering between 73 to 76 percent for the last eight months and since March 2020 has never actually reached 76 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Of the major modes, bus-rapid transit is doing best with 111 percent of 2019 riders, but that’s mainly because cities such as Houston, San Francisco, and Tampa opened BRT routes between 2019 and 2024. Conventional buses carried 80 percent of 2019 riders, light rail 74 percent, and heavy rail under 70 percent. Commuter trains carried 67 percent but commuter buses carried only 49 percent. Continue reading →

Transit $60 Million in the Hole? Build a Monorail!

By | | Transportation
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In case anyone believes that transit advocates haven’t completely lost their grip on reality, take a look at Memphis. The new CEO of the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) has “discovered” a $60 million deficit in the agency’s budget that “prior leadership was unaware of.”

Memphis’s transit agency can’t afford to keep its streetcars running and has a $60 million deficit, so naturally people want to build a monorail or light-rail system. Photo by Charles Phillips.

How can you not be aware of a $60 million deficit? According to the new CEO, before she took the job, “MATA’s executive leaders did not have access to the company’s detailed financials.” Why not? How could anyone claim to be a leader and not demand access to financial information for the entity they were supposedly leading? Continue reading →

Transit Carried 75.6% of 2019 Ridership in March

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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My trip through the Owyhee River Canyon went very well, thank you, except for a flat tire on my return home. The transit industry seems to be suffering from a perpetual flat tire, as it carried only 75.6 percent as many riders in March of 2024 as it did in the same month in 2019, according to data posted last week by the Federal Transit Administration. That’s down slightly from 76.0 percent of daily riders in February (adjusting for leap day and correcting for data missing in February’s report). March had the same number of business days in 2024 as in 2019 so no adjustment is necessary there.

The Federal Highway Administration has not yet posted March highway data, but I’ll post an update here as soon as it does.

A handful of major urban areas — Kansas City, Richmond, Oklahoma City, and Tucson — have seen ridership recover to 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels, but this is often because they have eliminated transit fares. From an economic viewpoint, you can’t say there is a significant demand for your service if you have to give it away for large numbers of people to use it. Continue reading →

A Look at the Wacky Transit Industry

By | | Transportation
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Today is Earth Day, a day in which we are supposed to celebrate environmentally friendly ideas such as public transit, high-density development, and electric vehicles. My report published last week revealed that the transit lobby has hijacked affordable housing funds so that, in many cities, most of those funds are spent on expensive high-density transit-oriented developments rather than on more affordable low-rise housing.

The Federal Transit Administration has recommended that Congress fund the Inglewood Transit Connector, a $2.0 billion people mover that will be just 1.6 miles long.

Last month, the Federal Transit Administration released its 2025 funding recommendations for transit capital improvements. This allows us to see some of the wacky ideas that the transit industry has come up with in recent years. Continue reading →

Is It Safe to Ride Transit?

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Less than half of New York City residents feel safe riding the subway today, down from 82 percent before the pandemic. Subway crime is so bad that New York’s governor called out the national guard to patrol subway stations. Crime is up on San Francisco BART trains despite the agency putting more police on trains. A few days ago, a mentally ill person stabbed someone to death on a Portland light-rail train.

Will putting more police in subway stations solve the crime problem? Probably not if BART’s experience is any guide. Photo by Elvert Barnes.

Some people say transit crime is dropping so it’s safe to ride transit. Others say it is getting worse. Who’s right? We can get some answers from the Federal Transit Administration’s Major Safety Events Database, which was recently updated with data through the end of 2023. Continue reading →

Transit Daily Riders Down 24.2% from 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit carried 78.5 percent as many riders in February 2024 as the same month of 2019. However, 2024 being a leap year February had one more day than in 2019. Adjusting for the extra day, transit’s daily ridership was only 75.8 percent of 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This means it continues to lag about 25 percent against all other major modes.

Meanwhile, Amtrak carried 3.2 percent more daily riders in 2024 than February of 2019, according to its monthly performance report. Transportation Security Administration passenger counts say that daily air travel was up by 7.2 percent above 2019. Highway data will be posted here soon, but will also be around 100 percent of 2019 driving.. Continue reading →

Why Do Democrats Support Transit?

By | | Transportation
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“What drives Republican opposition to transit?” asks Governing magazine. I’ve often wondered the reverse of this question: Why do Democrats support transit?

Every rider gained by new light-rail lines in Los Angeles correspond to five or more lost bus riders. Photo by SounderBruce.

Governing‘s implicit assumption is that transit is a good thing and anyone opposed must have some warped reason to question it. The magazine’s answer is that opposition to transit reflects an urban-rural divide and since Republicans are more likely to represent rural areas that get less or no transit service than urban areas, they have little reason to support it. This belief may be why the Federal Transit Administration is so eager to support rural transit as it is a way to co-opt more political support for transit in general. Continue reading →

Reforming Canadian Transit

By | | Transportation
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As in the U.S., many Canadian transit agencies are fixated on building 19th-century transit systems that make no sense today, says a new report from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Instead of focusing on downtowns, as these transit agencies are doing, the report urges cities to develop polycentric transit systems that serve other economic centers as well as they now serve downtowns.

Click image to download a copy of this report.

The report scrutinizes transit systems in eight urban areas that have built or are planning to build rail transit lines. After adjusting for inflation, the costs of these lines has dramatically increased in recent years: Calgary light-rail construction costs quintupled from $53 million to $275 million per kilometer; Toronto subway costs have grown from $76 million to more than $1 billion per kilometer; and Edmonton, Vancouver, and other cities have seen similar increases. Continue reading →