Search Results for: peak transit

How Transit Subsidies Harm Poor People

By | | Policy brief
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The nation’s transit agencies received nearly $56 billion in subsidies from taxpayers in 2019. One frequently used justification for these subsidies is that transit provides mobility to low-income people. Yet in reality transit subsidies do far more harm than good for low-income people.

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

Most of the taxes used to support transit are regressive, which means low-income people pay disproportionate shares of their incomes to keep transit going. Yet the goal of most transit capital spending has been to attract upper-income people to ride transit, a goal which apparently has been met as transit commuters have significantly higher median incomes than other workers. Meanwhile, the mobility that transit provides to people who don’t have cars is pathetic, as the typical urban resident can reach 30 times as many jobs in a 30-minute auto drive as a 30-minute transit ride and can actually reach more jobs on a bicycle ride of 40 minutes or less than a transit trip of similar length. Continue reading →

Will Transit Get Back Its Riders?

By | | Transportation
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Steve Polzin, a researcher with the Department of Transportation, estimates that transit will recover 90 percent of its prepandemic riders by 2023, but will never get much more than that. I think 90 percent is far too high, but he has access to more data than I have.

This chart is based on numbers on page 9 of Polzin’s presentation.

Polzin, who has been mentioned here many times before, made his projection in a presentation last week to the Transportation Research Forum. The presentation covered far more than just transit, and made good points about air travel, freight, and other modes as well. Continue reading →

Some Transit Riders Never Coming Back

By | | Transportation
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At least 20 percent of former Long Island Railroad commuter-train riders are “lost forever,” predicts Gerald Bringmann, the chair of the transit agency’s commuter council. This raises the question of whether capital improvements to the railroad that “sounded great” before the pandemic make any sense today.

“The longer people work remotely, the more businesses are finding, ‘You know what? This is working,'” says MTA board member Kevin Law, who is also the president of a Long Island business group. People like working at home, Law added, and don’t like spending hours trying to get to work on someone else’s timetable.

The decline in commuter-train ridership had “been a trend, but COVID-19 accelerated it at a massive rate,” notes the chief editor of Railway Age magazine. Commuter railroads “are going to have to adjust, if they can, to these new commuting patterns.” Continue reading →

High-Capacity Transit Deceptions

By | | Policy brief
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Transit advocates routinely make deceptive claims about the advantages of transit over cars or rail transit over buses. Often those claims deal with the capacity of different modes of transportation to move people. This policy brief will scrutinize some of these claims.

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

Deception #1: Buses vs. Cars

Transit advocates often use a particular photo set that purports to show the “space required to transport 60 people by car, bicycle, and bus.” The photo on the right shows a conventional 40-foot bus, which has about 40 seats in it and room for about 20 people standing. Next to the bus are the 60 passengers. Continue reading →

Public Transit’s Last Stand

By | | Transportation
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As transit agencies run out of money running nearly empty buses and trains, the rhetoric for another Congressional bailout of transit has gotten even more shrill. Yet it is all just hot air.

“Without public transit, there will be no economic recovery,” says transit advocate Nick Sifuentes. In case Mr. Sifuentes hasn’t noticed, the economy is already recovering, thanks in part to driving recovering to 89 percent of pre-pandemic levels but no thanks to transit, whose ridership remains nearly 65 percent below last year’s.

“America faces a mobility crisis that will have ‘profound’ implications — especially for those on low incomes and people of color — if Congress does not step in to fill the nation’s $32bn public transport funding gap,” says the ever-Left Guardian. How serious can a mobility crisis be when only 5 percent of low-income workers rely on transit to get to work? Continue reading →

Should We Replace Rapid Transit with Buses?

By | | Policy brief
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Metro. Rapid transit. Subway. Elevated. Underground. U-bahn. All of these types of transit are included in what the Federal Transit Administration calls heavy rail. Unfortunately, none of these terms are very accurate.

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Heavy-rail train cars weigh less than light-rail cars. Even the best metros can’t get you everywhere in a metropolitan area. Rapid transit isn’t very rapid, averaging around 20 miles per hour not counting the time it takes to get to or from a station or to wait for trains. Subways aren’t always under the ground and elevateds aren’t always above the ground. Continue reading →

The Transit-Industrial Complex

By | | Policy brief
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Everybody knows that transit saves energy and protects us from climate change. Everybody knows that transit helps the poor. Everybody knows that transit generates economic development. None of these things are true, but many people believe them because public transit is backed up by a powerful lobby.

Wikipedia has an entry on the highway lobby, but no entry on a transit lobby. In fact, the transit lobby is much bigger than the highway lobby even though highways move a hundred times as many passenger miles as transit, not to mention far more freight. The transit lobby is nonetheless bigger for good reason: most federal and state highway funds come from user fees, so the only thing the highway lobby has to do is protect those user fees from being diverted to other uses, whereas less than a quarter of transit costs come from user fees, so the industry has to scramble for every last transit dollar it can get. Continue reading →

May Transit Ridership Down 81 Percent

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The nation’s transit systems carried 81 percent fewer riders in May, 2020 than in May, 2019, according to data posted yesterday by the Federal Transit Administration. This drop is almost as great as the 84 percent decline reported for April.

Rail was hardest hit, with an 89 percent fall in ridership, while buses lost 74 percent of riders. For the year to date, nationwide ridership is down 41 percent, with rail losing 44 percent and bus 38 percent.

The biggest declines were in urban areas that see the most transit ridership: New York lost 90 percent of its riders, Washington 89 percent, Philadelphia 88 percent, and Boston and San Francisco-Oakland 85 percent. Falldowns were smallest in urban areas such as San Antonio (-45%) and Las Vegas (-54%) where transit plays a relatively insignificant role in the region’s transportation. Continue reading →

44. Fighting Obsolete Transit

By | | Iconoclast
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In 1991, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. It should have been called the Obsolete Transportation Inefficiency Act, as among other things it created a multi-billion-dollar annual slush fund to give to cities to build new rail transit projects. This fund, informally called New Starts and more formally called Transit Capital Investment Grants, had no limit on the amount of money any city could take out of it, which gave cities incentives to propose the most expensive projects they could so they could get the most “free” federal money.

This law was actually a continuation of a 1973 law that allowed cities to cancel planned interstate freeways within their borders and spend the federal dollars that would have gone towards building those freeways on transit capital improvements instead. The 1973 law was instigated by then-Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, who wanted to cancel some freeways in Boston but didn’t want to be accused of “losing” federal transportation dollars. Boston, of course, has lots of rail transit and could easily absorb the federal dollars from a cancelled freeway by buying new railcars, installing new signals, replacing track, and so forth.

Sargent’s law gave hope to Portland Mayor (and infamous pedo) Neil Goldschmidt, who wanted to cancel an interstate freeway in east Portland. But Portland’s transit agency, TriMet, only operated buses, and if it used all of the freeway funds to buy new buses, it wouldn’t have enough money to operate all of those buses. Continue reading →

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Policy brief
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Thanks to a late-year surge in New York subway ridership, nationwide transit ridership in December 2019 was 3.0 percent greater than December 2018, and ridership for 2019 as a whole was 0.1 percent greater than in 2018, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. Take away the New York City subways and nationwide ridership fell by 1.5 percent in December and 1.2 percent for the 2019 as a whole.

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

New York City subway ridership (not including PATH trains) grew by a phenomenal 14.7 percent in December and 3.6 percent for the year as a whole. While subway ridership peaked in 2014, it rose in 2019 to the second highest in its history. Its post-World War II peak was only about 2.0 billion trips a year compared with 2.7 billion in 2019. Continue reading →