Tag Archives: transit

“We are not asking, we are demanding that Governor Newsom allocate $5 billion to public transit,” said Brett Vertocci, a protestor who was blocking rush-hour traffic in San Francisco. “We need the state to step up so that we don’t have to cancel bus lines, so we don’t lose BART weekend service,” Vertocci continued. “Also so we don’t create huge traffic jams in these intersections,” he ominously added.

“Gavin Newsom is killing transit”? No, but maybe the lack of ridership is killing it. But in that case, why not let it die?

How is maintaining BART weekend service going to prevent huge rush-hour traffic jams? Apparently because unless the state forks over $5 billion, people like Vertocci will continue to block rush-hour traffic. In other words, they are blackmailing the state. Continue reading →

America’s transit systems carried 65.0 percent as many riders in April 2023 as the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. This is down from 70 percent in March.

TSA data indicate that the airlines carried 99.7 percent as many passengers in April 2023 as April 2019. Data for Amtrak and highway travel have not yet been released but I’ll post an update here when they are.

The reason for the variation is simple: March had two more business days in 2023 than in 2019, while April had two fewer. February has the same number of business days each year, so transit’s February performance of 68.5 percent is probably a realistic estimate for the future. The transit industry’s record for the year to date is 67.9 percent of the first four months in 2019, which is pretty close to 68.5 percent. Continue reading →

California transit agency warnings about a fiscal cliff may be falling on deaf ears in Sacramento. Although transit activists are becoming increasingly shrill, the state legislature has good reasons to ignore them.

Not much point in bailing out a transit agency that is running empty trains. Photo by Wally Gobetz.

One reason is that the state has its own funding problems. Earlier this year, it was projecting a $10 billion budget deficit, but that has recently increased to more than $32 billion. Continue reading →

This is Daquan Rogers. He is a 27-year-old Minneapolis light-rail rider who has a history of transit crimes including being arrested last month for brawling aboard a light-rail train. Following the arrest he was released pending his court case.

On May 20, while standing on a light-rail platform, he got into an argument with 41-year-old Eugene Snelling. A horrific video shows Rogers pushing Snelling on to the tracks between two light-rail cars. Snelling died and Rogers was arrested in what was considered to be a homocide case. Continue reading →

Politico has just discovered that transit systems are still carrying “less than 70 percent of their pre-pandemic traffic.” As a result, “Public transit is facing a financial rut that’s spurred their CEOs to press city and state governments for new funding streams and taxes.”

Why subsidize empty transit vehicles? Photo by Ashton Emanuel.

I am continually appalled, though not surprised, that so many reporters take it for granted that transit should continue operating at existing or even expanded levels no matter what the cost to taxpayers. They take it as a given that transit doesn’t exist to serve cities or their residents; instead, urban residents exist as a funding source to keep transit running. If you aren’t riding transit, you should still be forced to pay taxes to keep it operating. Continue reading →

Spending billions of dollars on on transit infrastructure, as proposed by a group called the Transit Alliance for Middle Tennessee, would be a complete waste. The group was formed to support the city’s 26-mile, $5-billion light-rail proposal that was rejected by voters five years ago. Now that the pandemic has proven that Nashville doesn’t need any transit infrastructure, the group is reemerging as an “advocate for action.”

The group wants “multimodal transportation,” which to them means bus-rapid transit on dedicated lanes, light rail, commuter rail, and maybe even heavy rail and monorail. For some reason, the group doesn’t mention cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, scooters, and local buses, all of which make Nashville’s existing transportation infrastructure pretty multimodal. Continue reading →

San Jose’s transit system is a mess, partly because the region decided to spend billions on light rail even though it is completely unsuited for such transportation. But in addition, the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) is simply poorly managed. For example, in 2021 the agency spent $249 per mile operating buses and $536 per vehicle-mile operating light rail, when the national averages are only $158 for buses and $389 for light rail.

In 2019, fares paid by VTA riders covered just 9.1 percent of the agency’s costs. As if that wasn’t pathetic enough, by 2021, this had fallen to 3.4 percent. At the same time, the share of Silicon Valley workers taking transit to work fell from 4.8 percent to 1.1 percent. More Silicon Valley residents who live in households without cars drive alone to work than all of the ones who take transit to work. Continue reading →

Transit advocates cheered when, in 2018, a census of downtown Portland found that 42 percent of the 102,000 people who worked downtown took transit to work. What they didn’t want to hear is that less than 10 percent of workers in the Portland area worked downtown, and transit only carried 3.4 percent of non-downtown employees to work. As demographer Wendell Cox says, “transit is about downtown.”

Long an icon of downtown Portland, Jackson Tower is facing hard times. Photo by Steve Morgan.

While I’ve reported on the impacts of telecommuting on transit, just as important is the decline of many downtowns due to the pandemic and the inability of many cities to solve problems of crime and homelessness. Portland’s downtown is doing so bad that the owners of Jackson Tower recently defaulted on their mortgage, which a representative of the owners blames on “the deterioration of downtown.” A court has appointed a receiver who may end up selling the graffiti-marked building at foreclosure. Continue reading →

“The public transportation market is forecasted to grow by $90.07 bn during 2022-2027,” says a new report from someone called Infiniti Research. That represents an annual growth rate of 5.84 percent per year.

For a mere $2,500 ($4,000 for the “enterprise” version), you can read this fairy tale about how the transit market is going to grow once we install multi-billion-dollar hyperloops in every city.

“The development of hyperloop transportation systems [is] one of the prime reasons driving the public transportation market growth during the next few years,” claims the report, putting it in the world of pure fantasy land. Actually, 5.84 percent annual growth seems pretty modest considering how diminished the transit industry is today: at that rate, it would take 8 years to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels. At the same time, unless most employers force employees to stop working at home, even 5.84 percent seems unlikely. Continue reading →