The Antiplanner is back from Wheeler County where I happened to meet some Portland transportation consultants who were cycling through the area. If you are reading this, I hope you had a good trip with no more mechanical problems.

I promised I would take a closer look at the transit data that the FTA released last week. The data continue to show that rail transit is lagging behind bus ridership, with rail at 57 percent and bus at 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels. Yet worst off is commuter bus, at a mere 36 percent of July 2019 numbers. Rapid bus is 64 percent, and hybrid rail is at 82 percent — though that’s because a new line opened in North San Diego County since the pandemic began. Continue reading →

Colorado transit agencies convinced the state legislature to subsidize free transit for the month of August based on the flimsy claim that doing so would reduce air pollution. At the end of the money, the Colorado Association of Transit Agencies claimed the program was a great success, with many agencies seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with August, 2021.

Transit buses in Pueblo saw a 59 percent increase in ridership in August, but Pueblo’s transit system normally carries less than 0.75 percent of all transit riders in the state, so this increase wasn’t very important. Photo from Pueblo Transit.

The problem with this claim is that Colorado transit agencies were already seeing 30 to 50 percent increases in ridership compared with 2021 before they offered free transit. Colorado transit ridership in the first half of 2022 was 37 percent greater than the first half of 2021. Most of the increase in August was due to the recovery from the pandemic, not to free transit. Continue reading →

A recent article in the San Jose Mercury-News reports that transit ridership in “car crazy” Los Angeles has exceeded ridership in the “transit mecca” of the San Francisco Bay Area, a “reversal that could remake California’s mass transit landscape.” This would be a lot more interesting if the writer hadn’t done the arithmetic wrong.

Contrary to the implications of the Mercury-News story, Los Angeles has always been one of the biggest transit markets in the country and certainly bigger than that of the Bay Area. Photo by Downtowngal.

The story compares ridership carried by the major agencies in six San Francisco Bay Area counties with ridership carried by the main agencies in Los Angeles county. But Los Angeles County is not all of the Los Angeles urban area any more than San Francisco County is all of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Los Angeles urban area includes all of urban Los Angeles County and all of urban Orange County, while the Greater Los Angeles area also include three more counties. Continue reading →

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is crashing and burning, sometimes literally. An Orange line train caught fire a few weeks ago. A Red Line train ran away out of control. The Orange line and parts of the Green line are in such bad shape that they have been shut down at least until September.

The Orange line in 1978, when it was in a lot better condition than it is today. Photo by Henry Petermann.

The situation is so bad that various think tanks have proposed putting the agency in receivership, which would mean taking control from its highly politicized board of directors. At least one member of Congress from Massachusetts agrees, saying that the federal government should take control. But it’s not clear that federal oversight of DC’s Metro system did much to solve that system’s safety problems a few years ago. Continue reading →