Tag Archives: transit

Nationwide transit ridership in March 2019 was 1.6 percent below March 2018, according to data released yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. For what it’s worth, March 2019 had one fewer work day than March 2018. However, ridership for the first three months of 2019 was down 2.6 percent, so this year is not looking good for the transit industry.

March ridership grew in just eleven of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas, and first quarter ridership grew in fifteen. The biggest losers for the quarter were Milwaukee (-12.7%), Detroit (-11.9%), and Louisville (-11.0%). The biggest winners were Richmond (+16.5%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (+8.1%), and Tampa (+5.7%). Houston grew but by only 1.4 percent. Ridership in Seattle declined by 2.2 percent for the month of March and 2.4 percent for the first quarter.
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The Antiplanner will have a more detailed analysis of these data in next Tuesday’s policy brief. In the meantime, my enhanced version of the FTA’s spreadsheet can be downloaded by anyone wanting to look up their favorite transit agencies or urban areas. For information on how to use the spreadsheet, see the explanation with last month’s post, keeping in mind that the columns with the annual totals have been moved one to the right to make room for March, 2019 data.

Bucking the national trend, Washington has managed to increase transit ridership by 90 percent in the first quarter of 2019 compared with the same quarter of 2018. It accomplished this by the simple expedient of offering the rides for free. Did I mention that this is Washington, Indiana?

Still, 90 percent sounds huge — but don’t get excited. For Washington, Indiana, increasing ridership by 90 percent meant going from 37 riders per day to 70. The city of Washington had about 12,000 residents in 2017 and Washington transit carried 10,353 rides — less than one per resident. Increasing ridership by 90 percent won’t even bring it up to two.

By offering free rides, “The city may be losing 75 cents per ride [which was the previous transit fare], but people will spend even more than that at area businesses,” claimed transit consultant Chuck Martindale. “It is something that is beneficial to the entire community.” Martindale offered no evidence that people getting free rides were spending more at area businesses before they got free rides, and he neglected to mention that, before offering free rides, Washington was losing nearly $10 per ride anyway. Continue reading →

Here’s a puzzle: between 2014 and 2017, the number of people who said they took transit to work in the San Jose urban area grew by 25 percent. Yet actual San Jose transit ridership fell by 15 percent. What accounts for this apparent discrepancy?

Similar but smaller discrepancies exist in a few other large urban areas. New York transit commuting is up 4% but ridership down 3%; Chicago commuting up 6% but ridership down 7%; Atlanta commuting up 12% but ridership down 8%. In some smaller urban areas, the discrepancies can be much larger: Cape Coral, Florida transit commuting is up 77% but ridership down 20%; Wichita commuting up 79% but ridership down 37%. In a few urban areas, the trends are reversed: Houston transit commuting is down 8% but ridership is up 4%; Greenville, SC commuting down 35% but ridership up 152%.

Of course, not all transit riders are commuters, so commuting can increase even as ridership drops if transit ridership for other purposes declines by more than the increase in commuting. This seems a likely explanation in many cases as most ride-hailing trips that substitute for transit are not commuter trips. Continue reading →

The American Public Transportation Association released its fourth quarter 2018 ridership report showing what Antiplanner readers already know: transit lost 2 percent of its riders last year. While admitting the decline, the accompanying press release focused on the few places where ridership grew, such as Columbus, the Long Island Railroad, and West Covina, California. You know they’re desperate when they have to go to West Covina — population 108,000 — to find good news.

Although APTA did issue a press release, it isn’t visible on the lobby group’s home page. Instead, the top “news update” is a March 18 press release demanding that taxpayers pony up $232 billion for transit infrastructure. As previously noted here, this is just a wish-list of transit project, most of which are new and don’t fix the $100 billion maintenance backlog with existing infrastructure.

The ridership press release barely hints at the really bad news, such as the 24 percent decline in Baltimore heavy-rail riders, the 20 percent decline in Boston light-rail riders, or the 12 percent decline in Atlanta bus riders. Unlike the few positive results APTA reported, these aren’t rare exceptions; more likely they are bellwethers of things to come for the few transit agencies that have seen ridership gains. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner has often called San Jose’s Valley Transit Authority (VTA) the nation’s worst transit agency (with some competition from DC Metro). It would be nice, however, to confirm that with hard data. The question is what are the best ways to measure agency performance?

A previous comparison of transit agencies used 23 different measures of performance. Some of these were outputs, such as trips per capita and farebox recovery. Most, however, were inputs, such as revenue miles, expenses per capita, and vehicle miles between failures. But inputs are not a sound measure of performance; an agency can spend a lot of money but carry few riders; it can run a lot of vehicle miles, but if they don’t go where people want to go, they are not serving the public well; it can have lots of breakdowns, but if people are still riding it, it must be doing something good.

So I want to focus on outputs, and I’ve tentatively identified four: Continue reading →