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Low Fares Beat Steel Wheels

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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Last week, the Antiplanner highlighted an LA Times story showing that Los Angeles transit ridership was dropping despite billions being spent on transit improvements. A blogger named Ethan Elkind wrote a response arguing that a graph in the Times story was unfair because it showed that Los Angeles transit ridership peaked in 1985.

That high point was reached, says Elkind, because L.A. County had kept bus fares at 50 cents for three years in the early 1980s. After the region started building rail, it raised fares and ridership declined. “So choosing 1985 as your baseline is like climate change deniers choosing an unusually warm year in the 1990s to show that global warming hasn’t really been happening since then,” says Elkind. (A better analogy would be transit advocates’ habit of using 1995–a low transit year nationwide–as a starting point to show increasing transit ridership.)

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$10 Billion for a Bus Terminal

By | | Transportation
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As if it isn’t bad enough that New York City is spending $2.2 billion a mile building a new subway, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey says that replacing the Port Authority Bus Terminal will cost $8 billion to $10 billion. That estimate is up from a mere $800 million a year ago.


Some have called the Port Authority Bus Terminal one of the ten ugliest buildings in the world. Wikipedia photo by Roger Rowlett.

Port Authority officials “hope” that the federal government will pay for most of it, just as the feds paid three-fourth of the cost of the World Trade Center transit hub, which came in at $2.8 billion. Much of the current terminal is used for parking, shops, advertising, and other income-producing activities, yet it still manages to lose $100 million on operations.

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Winners Ride the Bus

By | | Transportation
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One of the arguments for building expensive rail transit lines is that some people have a perception that only losers ride buses. Instead of lamenting that it does’t operate more rail lines, a transit agency in Denmark, Midttrafik, has a couple of advertisements presenting the bus as a superior mode of transportation.

The first ad is a couple of years old, having come out in September, 2012. It starts out with someone’s ear to the pavement–listening for the bus the way people purportedly listened to rails for the coming of a train. As people board the bus, rails are fleetingly visible in the foreground. The bus is shown doing “cool” things such as doughnuts in a parking lot.

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The Stigma of Buses

By | | Transportation
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Margaret Thatcher was once quoted as saying, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.” In fact, according to Wikiquotes, “There is no solid evidence that Margaret Thatcher ever quoted this statement with approval, or indeed shared the sentiment.” Nevertheless, people still insist that buses carry a “stigma” not shared by trains.

Portland transit expert Jarrett Walker argues that “we should stop talking about ‘bus stigma.'” In fact, he says, transit systems are designed by elites who rarely use transit at all, but who might be able to see themselves on a train. So they design expensive rail systems for themselves rather than planning transit systems for their real market, which is mostly people who want to travel as cost-effectively as possible and don’t really care whether they are on a bus or train.

This view is reinforced by the Los Angeles Bus Riders’ Union, and particularly by a report it published written by planner Ryan Snyder. Ryan calls L.A.’s rail system “one of the greatest wastes of taxpayer money in Los Angeles County history,” while he shows that regional transit ridership has grown “only when we have kept fares low and improved bus service,” two things that proved to be incompatible with rail construction.

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Should Buses Use Alternative Fuels?

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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Fred Jandt’s rethinking rail article on the Mass Transit web site (discussed here on Monday) offhandedly mentioned “what Foothill Transit did this week” with buses. That was a reference to the introduction of some of the first all-electric buses in the U.S. A mere 10-minute recharge of the batteries on these “ecoliners” is supposed to be enough to allow them to run for 30 miles.

Foothill Transit’s new electric bus.

All over the country, transit agencies are purchasing hybrid-electric buses, natural-gas-powered buses, and other alternatives to Diesels, which have a well-deserved reputation for being dirty. While transit is popularly believed to be environmentally friendly, the truth is that it is not, and this is especially true for buses, which typically use more energy and produce more pollution (at least more of the kinds of pollution that are of greatest concern today, namely CO2, NOx, and particulates), per passenger mile, than autos and even SUVs.

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