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Transit Ridership Down? Blame Uber

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New York City subways are becoming less reliable, with delays growing from 28,000 per month in 2012 to 70,000 in 2016. To fix the problems, MTA did a lot of maintenance work in 2016, mainly at night or on the weekends.

Ridership data for 2016 are now in, and they show that weekday ridership grew slightly but weekend ridership fell by 3 percent. So who do they blame? Uber. Isn’t it more likely that the decline was due to all the maintenance work done over the weekends?

Perhaps so, but it is still possible that Uber is having an impact. In 2015, New York subways carried an average of around 4.4 million trips on a typical weekend day, so a 3 percent decline is about 133,000. Based on an analysis by Todd Schneider, Uber and Lyft carried about 141,000 trips on January 9, 2016 and 270,000 trips on January 7, 2017 (both of which are Saturdays), an increase of about 129,000. Taxi ridership declined by about 32,000 in that time period, so it appears possible that Uber and Lyft may have captured up to 97,000 riders away from the subway, or about 73 percent of the subway’s weekend decline. We don’t know that all of those 97,000 people would have taken the subway, so the actual capture is probably less.
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Metro GM: “In 2018, the Game’s Over”

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The Antiplanner has been writing about Washington Metro’s downward spiral for nearly two years, but the end may be in sight. According to Metro’s general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, after 2018, “the game’s over.” Or, as Metro board chair Jack Evans says, if the problems aren’t solved by then, “the only option I see is to cut back on service enormously.”

That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. Census data indicate that, in 1970 before any Metro lines were built, 17.61 percent of DC-area commuters took transit to work–virtually all on buses. In 2015, between buses, Metro rail, and Maryland and Virginia commuter rail lines, transit’s share was 17.58 percent. In the years since 1970 in which the census has surveyed people (every decennial census and every year since 2005), the highest it has ever been was 17.70 percent in 2005. So going back to buses wouldn’t need to reduce transit ridership. Since bus riders don’t have to worry about broken rails or smoke in the tunnels, replacing trains with buses might even increase ridership.

All of the delays suffered by passengers so Metro can do maintenance hasn’t seemed to improve reliability. Just a few days ago, trains on three lines were delayed so much that one rider tweeted, “An hour and 45 min into my @wmata commute, I’m finally BACK WHERE I STARTED! Gave up and went home.”

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DC Metro’s Downward Spiral Continues

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Third-quarter 2016 ridership on the DC Metro rail system was 13.5 percent less than in 2015, according to the American Public Transportation Association’s recently released ridership report. Of course, the Metro had frequent delays due to the “surge” maintenance work, but many of the riders lost may never come back.

More immediately, lower ridership means lower revenues, and that means Metro is forced to consider cuts to both rail and bus service. To fill in the gaps, Metro’s general manager, Paul Wiedefeld, has proposed to apply some of the federal dollars that are supposed to be dedicated to capital improvements to operating costs instead.

Worse, the agency’s inability to fix its poor safety record has led the Federal Transit Administration to punish it by reducing federal support by 5 percent. Five percent doesn’t sound like much, but when you are in a deep financial hole with a $6.7 billion maintenance backlog, every dollar counts.

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The $4.5 Billion New Year’s Party

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New York City celebrated the new year by opening the insanely expensive Second Avenue Subway. Just two miles and three stations long, this subway line cost nearly $4.5 billion, or more than $35,000 per inch, making it the most expensive subway in the world.

Of course, not all of that money went for digging tunnels and laying track, which cost “only” $734 million (which is still more than $5,000 per inch). The three stations cost $800 million each. But that’s not all: to complete the Second Avenue subway, the city also spend $500 million on engineering and $800 million for “management, real estate, station artwork, fare-collection systems and other sundry items.” If the entire New York City subway system cost that much, it would have cost more than $500 billion, or roughly the cost of the entire 47,856-mile Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.

Of course, the city didn’t pay for it alone. The federal government chipped in at least $1.3 billion. The state of New York put in some money, but much of the money probably came from bridge tolls paid by auto drivers. Actual riders of the Second Avenue subway will pay very little of the cost and what they do pay will be paid indirectly.

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DC Metro Spirals Into Chaos, Taking the Purple Line With It

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Judge Richard Leon apparently invalidated Maryland’s Purple Line project just in time to prevent the Federal Transit Administration from giving the Maryland Transit Authority nearly a billion dollars for construction. Naturally, rail supporters are outraged by his decision.

The Washingtonian, for example, calls the decision “ridiculous” because it was based on declining Metro rail ridership and “the Purple Line will not be part of Metro.” But the article admits that 27 percent of the projected Purple Line riders will be transfers to or from Metro, so if Metro ridership declines, the Purple Line’s will as well.

The National Environmental Policy Act is supposed to be a procedural law, the Washingtonian complains, so why is Judge Leon allowing substantive issues such as ridership influence his decision? The author of this piece is obviously not an attorney and probably didn’t even read Judge Leon’s decision, or he would understand that getting the numbers right, as the judge demands, is procedural. He might also be able to read between the lines of the decision and see that Leon realizes this project is a turkey, and is using ridership as just the most obvious reason to overturn the decision to build the low-capacity rail line.

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New York Subway: Success or Failure?

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New York City subways have been in the news lately. A passenger thought they heard a gun, which lead to a stampede of people trying to get out of the Central Park North station in a case of what authorities called “mass hysteria.” Second, the Wall Street Journal reports that the number of reported gropings, public lewdness, and similar sexual offenses has gone up 50 percent in the last year. City police attribute this to more victims reporting crimes more than an actual increase in the crimes, but the Antiplanner is dubious about that.


Are New York subways really overcrowded? MTA claims that some subway lines are running at capacity.

These problems result, at least in part, from overcrowding. As the Antiplanner has noted before, transit ridership is declining in most cities, but continues to grow in New York due to increased jobs. This ridership growth, however, doesn’t come without cost, including more than a doubling of the number of delayed trains. Even if trains aren’t delayed, they might be so crowded that passengers have to wait for two or more full trains to go by before one arrives that has room for them to board.

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DC Rail Still Unsafe

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Washington Metro is shutting down parts of its rail system in succession so it can do maintenance work on them. Commuters appear to be adjusting to Metro’s slowdowns and shutdowns, but Metro employees haven’t.

Metro calls its maintenance program “SafeTrack,” but it appears to be anything but safe. In the course of one five-hour period yesterday, a Metro maintenance railcar derailed; a train carrying passengers collided with the mirror on the derailed railcar; and an empty train collided with a stationary train in a rail yard.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, but why was a revenue train allowed to use a track right next to the derailed railcar? Why did the railcar–whose job it was to secure rails to the ties–derail in the first place? Did the operator of the train in the rail yard fall asleep? All these events suggest that, while Metro may be spending money on maintenance, it still does not have the safety culture it needs to operate a public transportation system.

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Baltimore Rats

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Add the Baltimore subway to the list of rail transit lines that have deferred maintenance. The local transit union is complaining that the Maryland Transit Administration is neglecting the system and that it is now infested with rats. “It is a death trap down there,” said the union’s president.


The Baltimore Metro Subway in a Flickr photo by BeyondDC.

This is right on schedule, as the subway opened in 1984, just over thirty years ago. Baltimore’s first light-rail line opened in 1992. In 1982, before either of them were operating, Baltimore buses carried 122 million riders. In 2014, with a 15-mile subway and 30 miles of light rail, rail plus buses together barely carried 102 million riders. Maryland fills about 20 percent of the seats on both the subway and light rail, meaning it runs the emptiest heavy-rail trains and fourth-emptiest light-rail trains in the country.

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DC Metro Rail: Is More Money the Answer?

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Remember how the Washington Metro Rail system shut down for an entire weekday on March 16 so the agency could inspect all of the rail insulators, and replace any that were worn out? This was supposed to be needed to prevent fires such as the one whose smoke killed a passenger in 2015.

It didn’t work. On May 5, passengers at the Federal Center Southwest station were treated to a huge fireball of sparks when another insulator caught fire. Moreover, says the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), Metro officials responded poorly to the fire, continuing to run trains on that track until a second fire started several hours later.

On May 6–coincidentally, the day after the latest fire–Metro announced its maintenance plan that calls for shutting down some segments for as long as seven days and single-tracking many more lines for weeks at a time, which will slow service on those routes. That’s not good enough for the FTA, which ordered the agency to rearrange the schedule to work on lines that the feds think are at the highest risk sooner than Metro planned.

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Washington Metro Promises to Disrupt Commutes for Months

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On the heels of a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report that found that Washington Metro “has failed to learn safety lessons” from previous accidents, Metro general manager Paul Wiedefeld will announce a plan today that promises to disrupt service for months in an effort to get the lines safely running again. While ordinary maintenance can take place during the few hours the system isn’t running every night, Wiedefeld says that past officials have let the system decline so much that individual rail lines will have to be taken off line for days or weeks at a time to get them back into shape.

The Washington Post blames the problems on “generations of executives and government-appointed Metro board members, along with Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending.” That’s partially true, but there are really two problems with Metro, and different parties are to blame for each.

First is the problem with deferred maintenance. The Metro board recognized that maintenance costs would have to increase as long ago as 2002, when they developed a plan to spend $10 billion to $12 billion rehabilitating the system. This plan was ignored by the “Washington-area politicians who ultimately dictated Metro’s spending” and who decided to fund the Silver and Purple lines instead of repairing what they already had.

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