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Colorado Transit Lies about Free Transit

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Pandemic Reversal?

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Triumph of the Exurb

By | | Transportation
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The amount of money spent on business travel in 2021 was less than half of 2019, according to the Global Business Travel Association. Moreover, it is likely never to fully recover.

Forty percent of Americans who once frequently traveled for business say they never expect to do so again. Photo by Business Travel Panama.

According to a recent survey of Americans who once traveled for business at least three times a year, 40 percent say they never expect to travel for business again and 12 percent say they don’t expect to travel for at least the next year. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the share who say they never expect to travel for business again is 50 percent or more. “Business travel will never return to a pre-pandemic normal,” concludes the survey. Continue reading →

MBTA Crashes and Burns

By | | Transportation
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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 →

Free Transit Means More Violent Crime

By | | Transportation
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Assaults on bus drivers have significantly increased in Albuquerque, as documented by the news story below. Not coincidentally, Albuquerque began offering free buses on January 1, 2022.

Free transit is supposed to promote transportation equity by making it easier for low-income workers to get to their jobs and other economic opportunities. But it is more likely to permanently drive those people away from transit if they don’t feel safe on board buses. Continue reading →

Collapse or Evolution?

By | | City planning
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An article in Salon by anti-capitalist Chris Hedges argues that our civilization is on the verge of collapse. As evidence, he points to the 65 percent decline of the population of St. Louis since 1950.

The city of St. Louis is losing population but the St. Louis metropolitan area is thriving. Photo by David Schwen.

This decline, however, only applies to the city of St. Louis, which is a political entity. The St. Louis metropolitan area, which is an economic unit, has grown by 68 percent in the same time period. Continue reading →

Interstates Add Billions to Economy

By | | Transportation
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According to Wikipedia, constructing the Interstate Highway System cost $535 billion in 2020 dollars. Now, three economists from the University of Colorado and Florida State University have calculated the amount of benefits the highway add to our economy.

Interstate highways carry a quarter of all vehicle travel and probably more than a quarter of all heavy truck travel. Photo by Rupert Ganzer.

Their answer was $601.6 billion. Per year. In 2012 dollars, meaning $760 billion in today’s dollars using the GDP deflator. And that’s for freight only; the value of passenger travel is probably at least equal to that. Continue reading →

June 2022 Driving Up 0.9% from June 2019

By | | Transportation
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Despite record fuel prices, Americans drove almost 1 percent more miles in June 2022 than they did in June 2019, according to data released on Saturday by the Federal Highway Administration. Driving declined on urban interstate freeways, but it increased on other urban roads as well as all types of rural roads.

See the previous post for sources of Amtrak data and the post before that for sources of data for transit and air travel.

The nationwide average price of regular gasoline climbed from $4.58 a gallon on June 1 to a record $5.02 on June 14. Supposed experts claimed that prices would “stay high for a long time,” but instead they have fallen every day since the 14th, reaching $4.80 at the end of June and $3.90 as of yesterday.

On a miles-per-day basis, Americans drove 1.1 more miles in June than in May and 5.1 percent more in June than in April, when gas prices were 60 to 80 cents a gallon less than in June. This suggests that people are less deterred by high fuel prices than auto opponents would hope.

As noted a few days ago, transit ridership made a leap in June, with average daily ridership being 4.5 percent greater than in May. But since Americans travel almost 100 times as many passenger-miles per year by automobile as by urban transit, a large increase in transit ridership translates to a small decline in driving. That increase in transit ridership may have compensated for the decline in urban interstate driving, but lower fuel prices in July and August will probably lead to an increase in urban driving and a compensatory drop in transit travel.

When compared with June 2019, driving grew the most in Indiana (18%), Florida (16.5%), Connecticut (12.9%), Georgia (11.6%), Louisiana and Texas (each 11.7%). It fell the most short of 2019 miles in the District of Columbia (-19.2%), Delaware (-16.1%), Montana (-11.5%), Oregon (-8.7%), and Washington (-8.5%).

Amtrak Carried 84% of Pre-Pandemic PMs

By | | Transportation
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Amtrak carried 83.6 percent as many passenger-miles in June 2022 as it did in June 2019, according to the monthly performance report it posted yesterday. That’s an increase from 78.5 percent in May.

See yesterday’s Antiplanner for sources of transit and airline data.

Relative to its pre-pandemic numbers, Amtrak passenger-miles have been rising at about 5.5 percent per month. In terms of actual passenger-miles, they have been rising at 20 percent per month. However, much of Amtrak ridership is seasonal and it is normal for June ridership to be much higher than February’s. In 2019, for example, June’s passenger-miles were 125 percent greater than February’s compared with only 107 percent in 2022. Continue reading →

Gas Prices Push Transit Ridership Up to 65%

By | | Transportation
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America’s transit systems carried 65.0 percent as many transit riders in June 2022 as in June 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. This is the first time ridership has exceeded 61 percent of pre-pandemic levels since the pandemic began.

Data are not yet available for Amtrak or driving.

Much of this surge in ridership was due to fuel prices, which reached record levels in mid-June. Now the question is whether transit will be able to keep those riders, as prices have fallen every day since June 16. As of yesterday, average prices are lower than they have been since early March. Continue reading →