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Transit Industry Demands $32 Billion More

By | | Transportation
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The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) wants Congress to have the federal government “invest” — meaning pour down a rathole give away — another $32 billion to keep transit systems running. This is after Congress had already given transit systems $25 billion in March.

Taken together, $57 billion is more than all federal, state, and local transit subsidies in 2018, which were $54 billion. “Fare revenues are down 90 percent and our state and local funders face a financial crisis of their own,” says Paul Weidefield, the CEO of Washington Metro. “How are we going to provide the essential service” if they don’t get more subsidies?

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It’s Essential to Say “Transit Is Essential”

By | | Transportation
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The coronavirus has made it essential that every transit supporter use the word “essential” in their discussions, as in how essential it is that transit carry essential workers to their essential jobs. Ridership may be down by more than 80 percent, but the remaining 19 percent of riders are really essential, so that makes it essential that we keep giving more subsidies to essential transit agencies.

Transit Is Essential is, in fact, the name of a new paper from the California Transit Association. The paper skips over the whole messy part about why transit is so essential and instead goes immediately to demanding more subsidies. “Another round of emergency funding is critical to preventing significant and permanent reductions in transit services.” In other words, subsidies aren’t just essential, they are critical.

According to the New York-based TransitCenter, “an estimated 2.8 million American workers in essential industries commute[d] to work on transit” in 2018. That doesn’t say how they are commuting to work now, in the midst of the pandemic. But let’s say it is still 2.8 million: for less than the cost of the annual subsidy to transit in a normal year ($54 billion in 2018), we could give every one of those people a brand-new car, which the CDC says is safer than transit during the pandemic. So, tell me again, why is transit so essential? Continue reading →

We Have No Customers So Give Us Money

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies are stepping up their campaigns for more subsidies to make up for their lack of riders during the coronavirus pandemic. The New York Times reports that, unless Congress forks over billions more than it has already given the agencies, transit systems could experience a death spiral.

Technically, a death spiral takes place if cuts in service cause a loss of customers leading to more cuts in service. But if they don’t have any customers, they can’t spiral much further downward.

Out in California, Caltrain, which operates commuter trains between San Francisco and San Jose, has lost 95 percent of its customers. Before the pandemic, Caltrain riders earned an average of $120,000 per year, which means most of them are probably now working from home and many will probably never return to commuting. The logical thing for Caltrain to do would be to reduce service for the duration and start up again when riders return. Continue reading →

Stupid Responses to Collapsed Ridership

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Francisco Bay Area transit agencies are “struggling” as a result of the coronavirus, says one reporter. “Flailing about” would be a more accurate term. As noted yesterday, Bay Area transit agencies carried 86 percent fewer riders in May 2020 than May 2019. They basically have no idea how to cope with this other than to demand more subsidies from taxpayers and concessions from cities.

CalTrain, which offers commuter trains from San Francisco to San Jose, says it is carrying twice as many riders per day as at the low point of the pandemic. That means weekday ridership is up from 1,500 to 3,000. That’s still less than 5 percent of the usual number, which in 2018 was 64,000.

AC Transit, which serves Alameda and Contra Costa counties, warns that it may have to cut dozens of bus routes and reduce service on many more. But that’s an appropriate response when no one is riding transit. Continue reading →

May Transit Ridership Down 81 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit systems carried 81 percent fewer riders in May, 2020 than in May, 2019, according to data posted yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This drop is almost as great as the 84 percent decline reported for April.

Rail was hardest hit, with an 89 percent fall in ridership, while buses lost 74 percent of riders. For the year to date, nationwide ridership is down 41 percent, with rail losing 44 percent and bus 38 percent.

The biggest declines were in urban areas that see the most transit ridership: New York lost 90 percent of its riders, Washington 89 percent, Philadelphia 88 percent, and Boston and San Francisco-Oakland 85 percent. Falldowns were smallest in urban areas such as San Antonio (-45%) and Las Vegas (-54%) where transit plays a relatively insignificant role in the region’s transportation. Continue reading →

COVID-19 and Public Transit

By | | Transportation
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Two more studies published by the National Bureau of Economic Research associate increased cases of coronavirus with public transit. “A striking and robust relationship is found between death rates and public transit use,” according to a study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. People who worked at home were safest, the study found, but deaths correlated with people who drove to work only at the largest scale; the correlations weren’t statistically significant at the city or state level.

A second study by University of Virginia researcher John McLaren found that blacks and Native Americans were disproportionately likely to die from the virus. This was true even after controlling for income and education; the main factor that seemed to cause increased deaths in these groups was “the use of public transit.”
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My friend MSetty will remind us that there are places in the world that have lots of transit ridership but don’t seem to suffer high COVID-19 death rates, apparently because people in those countries are much more likely to wear masks. That may be true, but all things being equal, people are more likely to get sick if they use mass transportation than if they drive in their private automobiles. This will continue to be true after the current pandemic is over, so people who want to ride transit then will have a choice of continuing to wear masks or risk catching the flu or whatever is the disease of the week.

Five Reasons to Raise Subway Fares

By | | Transportation
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Some people at UC Berkeley published an article this week giving “five arguments for making subways free.” Yet it is more realistic to think that fares should be raised, not reduced.

The five arguments in the Berkeley article are:

  1. Marginal costs are low because capital costs have already been spent;
  2. Externalities are low especially if the subways get cars off the road;
  3. No more waiting in lines to pay;
  4. Subways help poor people and stimulate the economy;
  5. There are increasing returns to having more riders.

Some of these depend on the system, yet the Berkeley article makes no distinction between such extremes as the New York City subway, which is the heaviest-used transit system in the country, and the Baltimore subway, which is a joke. Other arguments are simply wrong. Continue reading →

2018 Transport Subsidies and Costs

By | | Transportation
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Last year, I published a policy brief that calculated 2017 transportation subsidies and costs for airlines, Amtrak, highways, and transit. When 2018 data for Amtrak, highways, and transit became available, I included an updated chart in a policy brief on transportation after the pandemic. But that wasn’t exactly prominent — I had a hard time finding it when someone asked me about it recently — and it didn’t have many details so I’m going to expand on it here.

The above chart is useful because it shows the disparities. Amtrak spends almost four times as much to move someone a passenger mile as the airlines. Transit agencies spend almost five times as much to move someone a passenger mile as personal automobiles. Continue reading →

Traffic Congestion After the Pandemic

By | | Transportation
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Some researchers from Vanderbilt University (and one from Cornell) asked what will happen to traffic congestion after the pandemic. If people reduced the use of transit for commuting, they concluded, congestion will get a lot worse, which is “detrimental to everyone’s commute.” Though they never say so explicitly, the implication is that we need to spend a lot of money supporting transit agencies to prevent that congestion.

Yet their paper is greatly oversimplified and ignores many things. Most importantly, people working at home are going to make a bigger difference to congestion than transit riders. Before the pandemic, more people worked at home than rode transit to work. If after the pandemic the number of people working at home on any given day is double what it was before the pandemic, then there would be less traffic even if no one rode transit.

In fact, the number of people working home is likely to much more than double. More than 40 percent of workers are working at home due to the pandemic, and at least a quarter of those say they expect to continue working at home after than pandemic. That would triple what it was before the pandemic. Moreover, half of those who expect to continue working at home say they will move to a different location, generally a suburb or smaller city. Continue reading →

Kill the Purple Line

By | | Transportation
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Anyone who carefully read the environmental impact statement for Maryland’s Purple Line would know that the proposed light-rail trains would be slow, would make congestion in the region worse, and that buses could move as many riders for a lot less money. It wouldn’t have taken much more research to learn that Maryland had a history of badly overestimating ridership and underestimating costs of its rail transit lines and that the ridership projections for this line had been particularly overinflated in order to make it eligible for federal funding.

Of course, most people didn’t read those documents or do the research, and many chose instead to believe the hype. So Maryland gave a $5.8 billion contract to a consortium of companies to build and operate the line. When, predictably, the line ran into delays and cost overruns, the companies withdrew from the project.

This naturally led opponents to urge Maryland to take this opportunity to cancel the project. Even if you believed the unrealistically high ridership estimates made before the contract was signed, the pandemic has probably decimated the market for transit. Continue reading →