Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced ridership in many transit systems by as much as 90 percent, it almost seems nostalgic to look back to a time when transit ridership was only dropping because of low gas prices, ride hailing, and inept transit agency management. Among those ineptitudes documented in recent Antiplanner policy briefs were Los Angeles Metro’s insistence on building light rail despite its proven track record of losing five bus riders for every rail rider gained and Portland’s insistence on sticking with light rail despite the fact that doing so reduced the capacity of the transit system to move people through downtown Portland.

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This raises the question of whether light rail has worked anywhere in the country. Transit agencies in seventeen urban areas that had no rail transit in 1980 have built light rail lines since then. This paper will look at each of these systems to see whether they have contributed to or detracted from their regions’ transit systems. I’ll also include Cleveland and Pittsburgh, both of which upgraded older streetcar lines to light-rail standards after 1980. Continue reading →

Nearly fifty years ago, a friend of mine named Ron Buel (who at the time was the chief of staff to Portland city commissioner Neil Goldschmidt) wrote a book titled Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transportation. Buel argued that cars harmed cities and the people living in them, and at the time he and other critics of the automobile seemed to make a lot of sense.

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After all, in 1965, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed had shown that cars were death traps, killing almost as many Americans each year as ten years of the Viet Nam war. A look out a Portland window on a sunny day showed that cars were pollutomobiles, putting a grey layer of unhealthy smog over the city that was so thick people couldn’t see Mt. Hood, 50 miles away. In 1973, the OPEC oil embargo would make Americans painfully aware that their automobiles were also gas hogs. Continue reading →

State and local subsidies to highway users averaged 1.9¢ per vehicle mile in 2018, according to data recently released by the Federal Highway Administration. The average vehicle on the road has about 1.67 occupants, so subsidies per passenger mile average 1.2 cents.

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By far the majority of these subsidies were at the local level. While exact calculations are not possible, I estimate state subsidies averaged 0.3 cents per vehicle mile while local subsidies averaged 4.4 cents per vehicle mile. Continue reading →

Transit is often touted as a way to save energy. But since 2009 transit has used more energy, per passenger mile, than the average car. Since 2016, transit has used more than the average of cars and light trucks together.

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Automobiles and planes are becoming more energy efficient each year. But the annual reports of the National Transit Database reveals that urban transit is moving in the opposite direction, requiring more energy to move a person one mile in each of the last four years. Continue reading →

Reeling from five years of ridership declines, the transit industry is stumbling around looking for a new mission, or at least new strategies to restore some of its revenues. New research and on-the-ground experience suggests the task will be difficult and may be hopeless.

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The opening pages of the American Public Transportation Association’s (APTA) recently released 2019 Transit Fact Book present a cheery picture of transit’s success by comparing 2018 transit numbers with numbers from the 1990s, which saw historic lows in transit ridership. Yes, ridership grew from 1995 to 2014, but bus ridership peaked in 2008 and rail in 2014 and both have been declining since then, a reality APTA hopes people will overlook. This is typical of the kind of cherry-picking of data that transit advocates so often use to promote their agendas. Continue reading →

June 2019 transit ridership was 2.9 percent lower than in June 2018, according to the Federal Transit Administration’s most recent data release. Ridership dropped in all major modes, including bus, commuter rail, heavy rail, and light rail. Ridership also dropped in 41 of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, declining even in Seattle, which had previously appeared immune to the decline that is afflicting most of the nation’s transit industry.

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June had 20 workdays in 2019 compared with 21 in 2018. The National Household Transportation Survey estimates that about 40 percent of transit ridership is work-related, so one fewer day accounts for about 1.9 percent of the decline in ridership. So at least a third of the decline must be due to other factors. Continue reading →

Los Angeles is “hemorrhaging bus riders,” worries the Los Angeles Times. This is supposedly “worsening traffic and hurting climate goals.”

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L.A. Metro buses “have lost nearly 95 million trips over a decade,” the paper notes. This “25% drop is the steepest among the busiest transit systems in the United States.” Actually, Sacramento’s Regional Transit District has lost 43 percent of its bus riders in the last decade, but the Times probably doesn’t count it “among the busiest transit systems.” Continue reading →