Tag Archives: transit

Transit’s fiscal cliff is the responsibility of transit agencies, advises the Chicago Tribune, and transit riders, taxpayers, and legislators should not be panicked into giving the agencies huge amounts of money to make up for this supposed crisis. Noting that Metra (Chicago’s commuter-rail agency) is paying its lobbyist more than $4.6 million to get more funding from the state, the Tribune suggests that money would have been better spent operating trains.

The fiscal picture for Chicago transit service is dim, but whose fault is that? Photo by ????.

The Tribune refers readers to a McKinsey report released last December that points out that many transit agencies are wildly inefficient. Some agencies spend three times as much, per vehicle revenue hour, operating buses as others. McKinsey also found “little correlation” between the amount of money agencies spent on capital improvements and their performance. Continue reading →

An investigation by WREG news has revealed that executives of the Memphis Area Transit Authority spend well over $100,000 a year on plane fares and hotel charges to attend various transit conferences in such cities as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Orlando, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington. As many as 10 MATA staff members attend some of these conferences. In one case, MATA’s CEO spent more than $11,400 on just one round-trip flight to Aukland, New Zealand, no doubt flying first class.

Reporters documented that MATA had spent more than $276,000 on travel and nearly $440,000 on hotels in the eight years between 2017 and 2024. Since travel would have been restricted by the pandemic for at least one of those years, the annual amount must have been more than $100,000. Meanwhile, MATA is currently looking at a $60 million deficit for its next fiscal year. Continue reading →

Transit agencies and supporters arrogantly believe that we should be dependent on them, thus justifying their gigantic subsidies, rather than being dependent on (meaning liberated by) automobiles. A case in point is the Maine Public Transit Advisory Council (PTAC), whose latest report claims that Maine transit is falling 89 percent short of meeting transit “needs.”

Click image to download a 5.8-MB PDF of this 66-page report.

The report counts “need” by estimating the number of trips that zero-car households would have taken if they had cars, based on how many trips people who have cars take per day, and assuming that all of those trips would be taken by mass transit. This completely ignores such facts as people who don’t have cars often don’t have the same mobility needs as people who do and they meet what needs they do have with other ways of travel that usually don’t involve mass transit. Continue reading →

Here’s the latest breathtaking finding from University of Oregon researchers: Fewer people (the article says “less people,” but it was written by journalists) ride transit during extreme weather events. As if we needed a university research study to tell us that.

There’s a flood, forest fire, tornado, or hurricane near your home today. Why aren’t you out riding transit? Photo by Howard Pelling.

Scholars at the University of Oregon Planning School wanted to know how climate change will affect transit ridership. Since everyone knows that climate change is going to increase severe weather events, they examined how such events affected ridership over the last 17 years. No one should be surprised to learn that ridership fell during such events. Continue reading →

Houston’s Metro transit is going back to basics, focusing on public safety and giving up its expensive light-rail and bus rapid transit plans. This follows the election of a new mayor, John Whitmire, who took office on January 1, 2024 and quickly replaced several members of the Metro board. Though Whitmire is a Democrat, he took office at a time when Houston was facing serious financial problems and so he is taking a fiscally conservative approach to spending.

By many measures, Houston’s Metro is doing better than most U.S. transit agencies. At the end of 2015, it implemented new bus routes, changing from a downtown-centric system to a grid system, as recommended by Jarrett Walker. Partly as a result, ridership grew by 5 percent between 2019 and 2019, a period during which ridership declined in most other urban areas. As of December 2024, ridership has recovered to nearly 88 percent of pre-pandemic levels, compared with a national average of 76 percent. Continue reading →

I suspect it has begun to dawn on transit agency officials that the Trump administration is not going to shovel money their way as the Biden administration did. That means many of the larger agencies are going to have to put some of their rail plans on the shelf for at least four years or until a more sympathetic administration takes power. Unfortunately, I doubt that many will seriously consider altering their long-term dreams of building rail lines all over whatever urban areas they serve.

Light-rail train in Charlotte. Photo by James Willamor.

A case in point is the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), whose ridership (as of December) is still less than two-thirds what it was before the pandemic. Despite this, CATS has grandiose plans for its future. Central to those plans are the development and operation of a 25-mile Red Line commuter train from downtown Charlotte to the suburb of Mount Mourne. This line is such a loser that the Federal Transit Administration refused to fund it back in 2011, so CATS tried and failed to get local communities to find half while the state would fund the other half. Continue reading →