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Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
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Transit agencies that have been gobbling up billions of dollars of subsidies each year are now facing the prospect that hardly anyone wants to ride transit even with the subsidies. A Wall Street Journal story focuses on commuter-rail lines, which in January carried less than 35 percent of pre-pandemic riders. However, commuter-bus lines are even worse, carrying only 27 percent of pre-pandemic riders.

Loudoun County commuter buses carried less than 6 percent as many passengers to DC in January 2022 as they did in January 2020. Photo by Virginia Department of Transportation.

Individually, the worst-performing rail line is the Minneapolis North Star commuter train, which carried only 7 percent of pre-pandemic riders in January. Maryland and Virginia commuter trains serving DC, the Altamont and CalTrains commuter trains in the Bay Area, and commuter trains in Chicago and Seattle all carried less than 20 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while trains in Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Connecticut were just over 20 percent. Meanwhile, commuter-bus lines in Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Charlotte, Austin, and Sacramento all carried less than 10 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Continue reading →

Will the Infrastructure Bill Improve Transit?

By | | Transportation
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The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a hearing yesterday on how last year’s infrastructure law will “advance” transit. Three of the witnesses represented transit agencies or transit unions and all talked about how the law will fund new transit projects, but none talked about whether those projects would lead to more riders.

In contrast, testimony from the Antiplanner argued that taxpayers have spent well over $1.5 trillion in the last 50 years only to see transit ridership per urban resident decline. The new spending will enrich engineering and construction firms but not lead to more riders. My testimony begins at 55:30; here is my written testimony and here is my speaking text.

Except for ranking committee member Pat Toomey, the only senators in attendance were Democrats. They were less interested in my dire predictions than in hearing from the agency representatives about how excited they were to have more money to spend. Continue reading →

Transit Safety: A Matter of Design

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Light rail is safe to ride, but it is one of the most dangerous forms of travel in the United States. That’s because most of the people who are killed by light-rail trains aren’t riding them; they are people struck by the trains. According to Federal Transit Administration (FTA) data, 657 fatalities have been associated with light rail since 2002, but only 20 of them were passengers on board the trains.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Counting all fatalities, light rail was associated with 15.9 deaths for every billion passenger-miles that it carried. This is much higher than most other transit modes: buses were 4.9; heavy rail was 5.6; commuter rail was 7.6; and streetcars were 11.6. The only mode more dangerous than light rail was what the FTA calls hybrid rail, which is really light rail but powered by Diesels instead of electricity. It was associated with 20.6 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Continue reading →

Transit Crime Rates on the Rise

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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After a woman died when she was shoved in front of a subway train in January, New York Mayor Eric Adams announced a major action plan aimed at reducing transit crimes. The weekend following his announcement, at least six people were stabbed on the subway system. A few days after that, a woman was robbed and her skull fractured after being struck with a hammer in a New York subway station. A few hours later, a man was stabbed in the neck at a Brooklyn subway station and someone set fire to a shopping cart in a station in the Bronx.

Click image to download a five-page PDF of this policy brief.

New York is not the only transit system to be suffering from violent crimes. Last month, a man was shot to death on the San Francisco BART system. BART had seen violent crimes more than double in the years before the pandemic, and crime numbers remained high after the pandemic began. Continue reading →

BART Outlook Grim Because Managers Dim

By | | Transportation
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The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) says that its financial outlook is “grim” and it may have to ask voters for a tax increase to keep running. As of December, BART was still carrying just 25 percent as many passengers as it carried before the pandemic.

BART spent nearly $2 million apiece on 775 of these railcars, which first went into service in 2018. In December 2020, BART halted delivery on the new cars because they were so unreliable.

In a presentation to the agency’s board of directors, staff noted that Congress had given $1.3 billion in COVID relief funds. It has used just about half of that and is burning through the rest at a rate of $25 million a month. At that rate, it has enough to keep going for about two more years. Continue reading →

2021: The Year Transit Failed to Recover

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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Despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in support from Congress, the transit industry in 2021 failed to recover most of the riders it lost to the pandemic in 2020. Ridership in 2020 had fallen by 54 percent from 2019 due to the pandemic, and was only 3 percent greater, or 52 percent below 2019 numbers, in 2021, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week.

Click image to download a four-page PDF of this policy brief.

Ridership did improve over the pandemic months of 2020, but not by much. The year 2020 ended with ridership at 38 percent of pre-pandemic levels. It reached 50 percent for the first time in July 2021, slowly climbed to 55 percent in September, and hovered around 55 to 57 percent for the rest of the year. Continue reading →

December Transit Is 56.4% of Pre-COVID Ridership

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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When measured as a percent of pre-pandemic numbers, transit in December carried 56.4 percent of December 2019 riders, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration on Friday. This compared with 56.2 percent reported last month for November. These numbers are preliminary as some transit agencies may have been late in reporting ridership totals; the December report revised November ridership upwards by about a percent. This and other corrections are reflected in the chart below, so if December numbers are corrected by similar amounts, the final number may be closer to 58 percent.

Amtrak numbers from its Monthly Performance Report; airline numbers from the Transportation Security Administration. December highway numbers will be available in a week or so.

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St. Louis Plans More Transit Spending

By | | Transportation
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St. Louis, whose transit system carried fewer riders in 2019 than before it built its first light-rail line, is once again planning for a new transit line. The existing light-rail system is mainly oriented east and west, and city officials are talking about building a north-south light-rail or bus-rapid transit line.

The Shiloh-Scott extension added 3.5 miles to St. Louis’ light-rail system in 2003, yet St. Louis transit carried 4.5 percent fewer bus and rail riders in 2004 than it had carried in 2002. Photo by Matthew Black.

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Does the Transit Industry Still Need Rescuing?

By | | Transportation
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No matter how you may feel about vaccinations, the story of the COVID vaccine is pretty amazing. COVID was first publicly reported on December 31, 2019. Within two weeks, scientists had published the DNA sequence for the virus. Barely a month later, a vaccine had been designed and manufactured. After nine months of clinical trials, the vaccine was authorized by the Food & Drug Administration and millions of doses were made available.

MTA officials attempt to pass out masks to customers who appear totally disinterested in this great photo op. Photo by Marc Hermann, MTA.

Meanwhile, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, the third of three COVID relief bills. The plan included $30.5 billion for public transit, most of which was to be distributed using the same formulas that were used to distribute other federal transit funds. Continue reading →

Killed by the Pandemic: Virginia Railway Express

By | | Policy brief, Transportation
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Transit was hit hard by the pandemic, and one of the hardest-hit agencies was the Virginia Railway Express (VRE). Ridership in April and May 2020 was only 2.5 percent of what it had been the year before. By November 2021, ridership was still only 17.5 percent of pre-pandemic numbers.

Click image to download a three-page PDF of this policy brief.

VRE operates commuter trains from northern Virginia to Washington DC’s Union Station. It has two lines, one heading west to Manassas and the other heading south to Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania. It is a true commuter-rail operation, with trains heading into Washington in the morning and heading out in the afternoon but not providing on weekends or other times of the day. Continue reading →