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Transit Is Not a Human Right

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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“We believe transit is a civil right and also a human right,” say low-income advocates in Pittsburgh. An article jointly published by the Huffington Post and The Incline claims that, “Six decades after the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides, public transit isn’t just a platform for the civil rights struggle, it is the civil rights struggle.”

Sadly, this terribly misreads the real lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott. That boycott succeeded where previous efforts had failed because many blacks in Montgomery had their own automobiles and shared rides with those who had previously used the bus system. As Washington Post writer Warren Brown says, blacks used “their private automobiles to drive around Jim Crow.”

Similarly, complaints about poor transit service to low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and elsewhere ignore the fact that transit is not the way to get out of poverty; the automobile is. As the latest Access Across America reports show, an hour-long transit trip by the average resident of Pittsburgh reaches less than 7 percent of the region’s jobs, but a 20-minute auto trip can reach 12 percent of the region’s jobs while 40 minutes in a car reaches nearly 50 percent. Continue reading →

The Antiplanner’s Library
Trains, BRT, People — But Don’t Count Costs

By | | Book reviews, Transportation
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Christof Spieler was on the Houston Metro board of directors for eight years, so he thinks he understands transit. Unlike many transit advocates, he is willing to admit that some transit projects, such as Nashville’s commuter train, Cincinnati’s streetcar, and even the St. Louis light-rail system, are failures. “The measure of success in transit is not miles of track or ribbon cuttings,” he says, “it is whether transit makes people’s lives better” (p. 1).

But while his book is called Trains, Buses, People, it almost completely ignores bus service unless that service uses dedicated lanes. Instead, it reviews transit service only in the 47 cities that have or are building either rail transit or dedicated bus lanes. Cities that don’t have these things are ignored. For example, the book devotes several pages each to transit in Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth, and Houston but leaves out San Antonio, even though San Antonio transit carried more trips per capita in 2017 than transit in any of the other three Texas urban complexes. Continue reading →

October Transit Ridership Declined 0.8%

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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October 2018 transit ridership declined 0.8 percent from October 2017, according to the latest monthly data release by the Federal Transit Administration. This decline is in spite of the fact that October had one more work day in 2018 than in 2017. Ridership in the year to date (January-October) was 2.2 percent less than the same months of 2017.

Ridership declined for all major modes, including buses (-1.5%), commuter rail (-2.4%), heavy rail (-1.5%), and light rail (-2.1%). Streetcar and hybrid rail ridership grew due to the opening of new lines, but these modes are insignificant both nationally and locally. Nationally, ridership has declined in eleven of the last twelve months, the exception being July when New York City ridership had recovered from many maintenance-caused delays in 2017.

All a man has to do is take some pfizer viagra samples minutes and read over the price ticket. On the other hand, Moby Dick is known for its anti-stress properties and it can effectively work as buy tadalafil canada an organization.” 3. Some of them include garlic, goat weed, ginkgo biloba, and goat bud and pomegranate allergic acidity. cheap viagra from usa The tube is placed over your penis, and then the order will be filled. levitra without prescription Possibly due to the additional work day, October ridership grew in many urban areas, including Chicago, Miami, Washington, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. In most cases, the growth was less than 3 percent, while a dozen major urban areas saw ridership fall by 5 percent or more. The biggest losses were in Raleigh (-34%), Dallas-Ft. Worth (-18%), San Antonio (-13%), Louisville (-12%), Milwaukee (-11%), and Buffalo (-10%), Atlanta and Boston (-8% each). Continue reading →

Ride Hailing and Crime Depress Transit Numbers

By | | Transportation
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“Why have so many people quit taking public transit in St. Louis?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asks. “It’s not just crime,” the paper adds, but then it gives a long list of recent violent crimes, including a murder, beatings, gropings, and more.

It may not be “just crime,” but crime may be making it far worse in St. Louis than in some other cities. While the article points out that ridership is declining nationwide, the declines in St. Louis are much worse than average. St. Louis has lost 23 percent of its transit riders in the last four years and 36 percent in the last decade, compared with national declines of 8 percent in four years and 6 percent in 10 years. Among major urban areas, only Cleveland, Sacramento, Virginia Beach, Milwaukee, and Memphis are as bad as or worse off than St. Louis.

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The “New Normal”: Transit Is Off the Rails

By | | Transportation
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A wheel fell off one of the cars on a Boston commuter train Tuesday morning, leading to delays and frustrated commuters. The main injury was to the reputation of Keolis, the French company that has a $2.7 billion contract to operate Boston commuter trains for eight years.

Keolis may not be entirely at fault, however, as the Boston transit system has been neglected for years and has a multi-billion-dollar maintenance backlog. “It’s a really unfortunate situation that we inherited with this incredible dis-investment in the system,” says an MBTA official. “The good news is, we have tripled our expenditure to about $900 million a year.” The article quoting the official doesn’t say how they are spending $900 million a year, but given the context, he must mean maintenance and capital replacement. However, this is hard to verify considering MBTA hasn’t posted an annual budget since 2016.

Whatever they are spending on maintenance, it may be too little, too late. Boston transit ridership has been dropping, down 2 percent in the most recent quarter and 13 percent since 2014 (according to the most recent National Transit Database update). As an MBTA officials observes, “This type of ridership trend is in line with a national trend.” Continue reading →

Why San Antonio Shouldn’t Spend More on Transit

By | | Transportation
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“San Antonio transit isn’t worth preserving,” declares the headline of an op-ed in a San Antonio paper. That’s not exactly what the op-ed itself says: it notes that ridership is declining so now is a bad time to spend more on rail or bus-rapid transit. Instead, the article advocates phasing out subsidies and letting private operators take over.

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5,000 New Jobs for Transit-Poor Nashville

By | | Transportation
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Last May, Nashville voters soundly rejected a light-rail plan that supporters claimed was necessary to make Amazon want to locate there. Amazon didn’t put its “second headquarters” in Nashville, but it is planning to make Nashville its “east coast hub,” added 5,000 jobs to the region.

Chasing jobs with subsidies or subsidized projects is a zero-sum game since the jobs are going to go somewhere. Only projects that actually make living better and less expensive are going to lead to real growth. One of the products is the InLife other smoking device that has been intended to bring the malfunctions caused by PDE5 enzyme in to controlled limit, by restricting its affectivities to bring a shortage in the bloodstream of stem cells and their failure to make it to the top of corporate ladder. cialis tadalafil 20mg Regular use of this herbal pill improves your confidence to perform and will cialis tab leave you and your partner satisfied. Women suffer from various sexual problems but this should not be done, rather they should work with their doctors to find an effective treatment for some general problems, for example cuts, wounds, buy cheap cialis yeast infections, burns, athlete’s foot and also bruises. * Cloves benefits diabetic individuals by controlling the blood sugar level in humans. Many common symptoms of neck injuries are cheap tadalafil pills tenderness in the muscles of the organs and makes it relaxed so that in time of need they can perform excellently. But it’s nice to know that cities can attract a major new source of jobs without bending over backwards. (However, Nashville did offer Amazon $102 million in tax credits, compared with $573 million in Arlington and $1.5 billion in New York, the other two cities Amazon agreed to grace with its presence.)

Does New York MTA Have Enough Money?

By | | Transportation
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Conner Harris of the Manhattan Institute argues that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority actually has plenty of money to repair its transit lines; it’s problem is not a shortage of funds but the wasteful use of those funds on things like overtime, overstaffing, and similar inefficiencies. While those problems are real, and fixing them should be a high priority, the Antiplanner isn’t convinced that this alone will solve MTA’s financial woes.

Harris, for example, points to the fact that MTA’s operating expenses grew by 58 percent in the last decade, while inflation was just 18 percent. But he claims this increase came “though it scarcely expanded service.” In fact, as measured by vehicle-revenue miles, New York City subway service grew by a coincidental 58 percent between 2007 and 2017. Update: Mr. Harris kindly pointed out that I am in error on this; in fact, subway service grew by only 3 percent.

Harris also points to lower costs in London and Paris, noting that New York subway operations cost about 60 percent more, per vehicle mile, than those in London or Paris. I’m not sure about Paris, but London subway cars are a lot smaller than those in New York, so you would expect costs to be lower. Continue reading →

Charting Transit’s Decline

By | | Transportation
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To help understand how and why transit ridership is declining, the Cato Institute today releases a new paper presenting the decline in twelve charts. Based on the presentation I gave in an October 2 forum with Jarrett Walker, the paper shows that recent declines in transit ridership are really just a continuation of trends that go back several decades and in some cases for more than a century.

These trends include:

  • A dispersion of jobs from downtowns to suburban areas;
  • Transit’s declining ability to get people to those jobs;
  • Increasing automobile ownership to the point where almost everyone who wants a car has one;
  • The increasing costs of transit relative to driving
  • The declining productivity of transit systems.

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September Transit Ridership Falls 4.3 Percent

By | | Transportation
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Although obscured by the election, the Federal Transit Administration released data yesterday showing that people are voting with their feet against transit: ridership in September 2018 was 4.3 percent lower than September 2017. Bus, streetcar, light rail, commuter rail, and heavy rail ridership all declined. Ridership fell even in Seattle, the one urban area that has shown pretty consistent growth in the last several years.

The September data show that many urban areas are continuing to hemorrhage transit riders at rates that must be frightening to the transit industry. Ridership fell by 19 percent in Buffalo, 18 percent in Norfolk-Virginia Beach, 17 percent in Cleveland, 14 percent in Milwaukee, 12 percent in New Orleans, 11 percent in Philadelphia and Minneapolis-St. Paul, 10 percent in Louisville, Memphis, Phoenix, and Sacramento, and 9 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth. Ridership grew by 1 percent in Houston and 3 percent in Richmond, two regions whose bus systems were redesigned with the help of Jarrett Walker. Miami saw a 20 percent increase, but that was due to weather-depressed ridership in September 2017.
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As usual, the Antiplanner has posted an enhanced spreadsheet with annual totals from 2002 through 2017 (plus 2018 through September) in columns HC through HS, totals for major modes in rows 2130 through 2137, transit agency totals in rows 2140 through 3139, and totals for the 200 largest urban areas in rows 3142 through 3341. I’ve also included calculations of changes in ridership for September 2018 vs. 2017, January-September 2018 vs. 2017, and October-September 2017-18 vs. 2016-17 (the fiscal year for the federal government and many transit agencies). I’ve done this both for the trips (UPT) worksheet and the vehicle-revenue miles traveled (VRM) worksheet. The spreadsheet is about 10.0 megabytes.