Search Results for: polzin

Transit’s Zombie Future

By | | Policy brief, Transportation, Useful Data
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March transit ridership pushed up above 60 percent of pre-pandemic numbers for the first time since the pandemic began, according to data released by the Federal Transit Administration last week. Ridership was boosted by the fact that March 2022 had two more weekdays than March 2019. Since April 2022 has one fewer weekday than April 2019, ridership is likely to dip back down below 60 percent in April.

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

Transit is still lagging well behind other modes of travel. Amtrak carried 68 percent as many passenger-miles as in March 2019 while the airlines carried 88 percent. Domestic air travel was probably above 90 percent, but data sorting domestic from international travel won’t be available for a couple of months. Miles of driving in March will be available in about a week but are likely to be more than 100 percent of March 2019 miles.

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A New Take on Induced Demand

By | | Transportation
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Induced demand is not a phenomena to be feared but one to be welcomed, according to a recent Reason Foundation report by Steven Polzin. Demand for travel is always growing, and if new roads reduce the cost of travel, they will be used. Highway opponents say that’s why we shouldn’t build new roads, but Polzin points out there are many economic benefits from new road capacity and even from the demand “induced” by that new capacity.

Click image to download a 1.2-MB PDF of this 35-page report.

New road capacity, Polzin says, allows people who either weren’t traveling at all due to congestion or who were traveling at inconvenient times or routes to avoid congestion to travel at preferred times and routes. This makes it appear that new capacity has “induced” demand but all it has really done is released demand suppressed by congestion. To the extent that new capacity leads to new travel, says Polzin, that generates economic activity that is good for the region. 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 →

What’s the Point of Transit Subsidies?

By | | Transportation
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Rather than figure out how they can best serve the public in a post-COVID world, many transit agencies have not yet “grasped the significance of the challenges facing public transportation and many have focused attention on asking for federal resources to ‘carry them through’ the impacts of COVID-19,” writes transit expert Steven Polzin in a report released yesterday by the Reason Foundation. “Others are busy redefining the performance metrics and expectations of public transportation to justify unconditional federal funding,” he adds in the report, Public Transportation Must Change after COVID-19.

For example, he cites Bloomberg CityLab writer David Zipper, who says that since transit ridership is likely to remain low for years, “public transportation leaders should focus on a different metric for usefulness: transit access.” In other words, transit agencies should ask funders to accept the performance standards that make transit look good, not the standards that actually make sense.

Polzin is not as negative about transit as the Antiplanner. “The core goals of public transportation — providing mobility particularly for those without alternative means and capturing the economy of mass movement of people in markets where those conditions exist — remain important,” he argues. But do they? With transit costing five times as much, per passenger mile, as auto driving before the pandemic, it certainly hasn’t captured any economies of mass movement. Continue reading →

October Ridership Still Just 37% of 2019

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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Transit ridership in October 2020 was just 37.1 percent of October 2019 numbers, according to data posted Friday by the Federal Transit Administration. This is only a tiny improvement from September, when ridership was 36.9 percent of September 2019.

Despite the huge decline in ridership, transit agencies are still maintaining service at 75 percent of 2019 levels. Transit in the New York urban area, where ridership is down 62.4 percent, is running at 85 percent of 2019 levels. Agencies say they are doing this to allow for “social distancing,” but it is more likely that they are spending the money to keep union workers employed and to justify their parasitical existence.

Among major urban areas, the biggest change is in the San Francisco Bay Area, where ridership is just 23 percent of 2019 levels. At 25 percent, Washington is second followed by Boston, Sacramento, and San Jose, all of which are around 30 percent. 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 →

Confirmation

By | | Regional planning, Transportation
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The Antiplanner has focused on a few themes in recent years: density is expensive; buses can move more people than rails; transit systems are mismanaged; transit is losing rides to ride hailing. Recent research papers from a variety of sources have confirmed these ideas, at least in part.

First, Steve Polzin and Jodi Godfrey at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transit Research have examined transit ridership trends, noting that ridership in Florida is declining twice as fast as the rest of the nation. These declines aren’t due to decreasing service, as some have said; in fact, service in many Florida urban areas has increased and, if it decreased, did so only after ridership declined. Instead, they blame the decline on “the fact that more travelers now have additional options,” notably ride hailing, working at home, and increased auto ownership.

Transit systems in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area have been hit particularly hard by ridership declines. Broward County Transit (Ft. Lauderdale) has lost more than a quarter of its riders since 2014. To make matters worse, the agency is under investigation for falsifying overtime records for favored employees and, for some reason, hiding buses from Federal Transit Administration inspectors. Continue reading →

Transit’s Dim Future

By | | Transportation
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Despite a “growing population, a rebounding economy, growing total employment, and an aggressively argued hypothesis that the millennial generation is meaningfully different than their forefathers,” says transportation researcher Steven Polzin, “transit ridership has remained stubbornly modest.” That’s a generous view that takes into account slow ridership growth between 2012 and 2014 but ridership declines in 2015.

Polzin points to numerous factors that work against transit: lower fuel prices, increased auto sharing, increased cycling and walking, and diminishing returns on extensions of existing transit services. He also points out that, contrary to claims that Americans are substituting transit for driving in large numbers, recent data suggest that “the new normal for travel trends is looking more like the old normal.”

However, he misses a couple of key points. First, Polzin compares transit ridership over time with the population, concluding that per capita transit ridership “is a pretty straight horizontal line since about 1970.” In fact, he should have compared transit ridership with the urban population, as few rural residents are served by transit. Since the urban population is growing faster than the overall population, per capita urban transit ridership has declined by about 15 percent since 1970. This makes transit’s future appear even dimmer than Polzin suggests.

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The True Cost of Driving

By | | Transportation
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Some smart-growth advocates argue that, even though housing costs more in cities than in suburbs, transportation costs in cities are so much lower that the total cost of housing plus transportation is lower. The problem with these claims is that they are based on average transportation costs.

As Steve Polzin, a transportation researcher from the University of South Florida, points out, low-income people spend a lot less on transportation than high-income people. He estimates the people in the top 20 percent spend five or six times as much on driving as people in the bottom 20 percent.

While wealthier people do drive more than low-income people, they don’t drive five or six times as much. Instead, much of the difference in expenditures “lies in the very meaningful differences between new car ownership and the reality that much of America isn’t driving new cars with high depreciation levels.” In other words, only a few people actually buy cars new and then replace them as soon as they’ve paid them off (which is the assumption that AAA makes in its annual cost-of-driving survey).

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Transit Energy Efficiency

By | | Transportation
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A new report from Florida’s National Center for Transit Research looks at how transit can save energy. The report’s lead author, Steve Polzin, has been mentioned here before. Some of the findings are more surprising than others.

Transit uses about the same amount of energy as driving, the report finds, and transit in most places (including most Florida cities) uses much more. It has become more energy efficient in the past couple of years, but that is mainly because budget cuts have forced transit agencies to cut marginally productive routes. Expanding transit is not the key to saving energy, the report suggests; making better use of transit’s surplus capacity is.

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