Tag Archives: transit

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is buying new vehicles to replace 130 light-rail cars. Normally, my suggestion when rail systems wear out is to replace them with buses, but in this case it’s worth a close look.

One of SEPTA’s 40-year-old light-rail cars. Photo by jpmueller99.

The 130 cars are expected to cost $800 million, or a little over $6.1 million apiece. That’s a lot more than a bus, which typically costs under $500,000 if Diesel-powered and under $1 million if electric. But buses have an expected lifespan of only about 15 years, while SEPTA’s light-rail cars are 40 years old. The railcars are also a little larger than buses, having 50 seats compared with an average of 40 seats on SEPTA buses. Still, the railcars cost more than $3,000 per seat-year, while even million-dollar buses cost only $1,666 per seat-year. Continue reading →

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (Metro) next general manager and CEO, Randy Clarke, brings an interesting resume to the job. The troubled agency is suffering from serious safety issues, including frequent derailments and the failure of hundreds of train operators to renew their certification, not to mention transit ridership lagging behind the rest of the industry and serious financial woes. The problems are so bad that the agency’s current CEO, Paul Wiedefeld, just resigned early.

Washington Metro’s 7000-series of rail cars, which makes up 60 percent of its fleet, have all been taken out of service due to frequent derailments, a problem that won’t be fixed for at least several more months. Photo by Ben Schumin.

At first glance, Clarke is the perfect person to replace Wiedefeld. From 2010 to 2016, he worked on safety and operations at Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The American Public Transportation Association apparently thought he did such a good job that it hired him as its vice president in charge of safety, operations, and technical services, a post he held for two years. Then he became CEO of Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency. Continue reading →

Although 60 percent of transit riders are people of color, says New York’s TransitCenter, 66 percent of transit agency leaders and managers are white. The organization sees this “gulf between ‘who decides’ and ‘who rides'” as a major problem.

Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this report.

The TransitCenter is a well-intentioned organization whose thorough reports on transit issues are generally skewed by the fact that the group is located in the one American city that heavily relies on transit. In keeping with social justice rhetoric, this particular report views transit as a racial issue, whereas I view it as a class issue, namely a gulf between the middle class (people with college educations) and working class. Continue reading →

Someone named Chris Wilson has asked me to plug a “thorough and in-depth article about the 5 main reasons why public transportation in the US is so bad.” He and his associates at Electric Ride Lab–which promotes personal electric transportation such as e-bikes, e-scooters, and e-skateboards–“took the time to thoroughly research and include a ton of information” in the article.

If you have an electric bike or scooter, why do you need transit anyway? Photo by Ian Sane.

They should have done a little more research as just about everything they say about transit is wrong. Here are Wilson’s five wrong reasons why public transit is so bad in the United States. Continue reading →

To commemorate Earth Day, Memphis television meteorologist John Bryant decided to try riding the bus to work. Normally, his home-to-work journey takes about 15 to 20 minutes. His effort to protect the environment ended up taking 2-1/2 hours. Part of the problem was his unfamiliarity with the bus system, but the fastest he might have been able to make it was at least 90 minutes, partly because he had to walk a half mile from his home to the nearest bus stop and another mile to work from the nearest bus stop to his office. The few other passengers riding the bus with him were mostly too poor to own an automobile.

Despite this, he concluded more people should ride the bus. “These are the kind of sacrifices right now that we need to think about doing, even if you only do it one time,” he said, both for “reducing our carbon footprint” and for “connecting on an emotional level with citizens [who couldn’t afford cars] in the city I grew up in.” Continue reading →

Bloomberg reports that, when Utah Transit (UTA) eliminated transit fares on a trial basis in February, weekday ridership grew by 16 percent. Overall, the latest data show, average daily ridership was only 18 percent greater than it had been in January. That compares with 25 percent for the nation’s transit systems as a whole, suggesting that free transit may not have been the reason why ridership increased.

Utah Transit buses have an average of 36 seats but carried an average of just 5 passengers (that is, they carried 5.0 passenger-miles per vehicle mile) in 2019 and just 3.6 in 2020. Photo by Paul Kimo McGregor.

Considering that passenger fares brought more than $48 million into UTA’s budget in 2019, such a small boost in ridership hardly seems worth the loss of that revenue. Transit agencies, however, desperately need reasons to justify their heavily-subsidized existence. Offering free fares may boost ridership, if only by a small amount, but more important it insulates agencies from ridership fluctuations. If the agencies are solely dependent on taxpayers to keep their buses and trains running, then all they have to do is convince taxpayers or appropriators that transit is somehow vital to cities even if hardly anyone uses it. Continue reading →

A comparison of transit usage and COVID cases early in the pandemic in 52 urban areas found that heavy transit use was strongly correlated with greater numbers of COVID infections. “Increasing weekly bus transit usage in metropolitan statistical areas by one scaled unit was associated with a 1.38 times increase in incidence rate of COVID-19; a one scaled unit increase in weekly train transit usage was associated with an increase in incidence rate of 1.54,” said the researchers.

Plan to wear a mask for the rest of your life. Photo by Jacques Paquier.

The correlation was strong even if New York City was eliminated from the dataset. As I’ve often noted, New York is such a big transit market that it often biases any analysis of transportation across American cities. Continue reading →

Seattle-area residents have got themselves into a real fix. They voted to impose numerous taxes on themselves to spend tens of billions of dollars building new light-rail lines to downtown Seattle. Now, cost have increased, Seattle transit ridership is down by 54 percent, and Amazon is moving workers out of downtown Seattle.

Now a group called SkyLink has proposed a solution: replace light rail with aerial gondolas. These would supposedly be higher in capacity, less expensive, and would require less displacement of homes and businesses. Continue reading →