Where Did Transit Ridership Grow in 2006?

No Light Rail in Vancouver!

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Light rail costs too much, does too little

I’ve played with the 2006 transit data (previously) some more. The summary file now breaks down trips and passenger miles in each urban area by the main modes: buses, trolley buses, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail.

I then transcribed these numbers to my rail transit data file, which includes data from all rail urban areas dating back to 1982. This file also includes miles of driving, but the Federal Highway Administration hasn’t published 2006 data yet. The file also lists the number of route miles of each form of rail transit, but I wasn’t able to interpret the “fixed guideway” file that came with the 2006 data, so I didn’t fill these numbers in for many cities.

Still, we now can compare trends in transit ridership and passenger miles in the various rail cities. Here are the results.

Atlanta: Ridership declined, but passenger miles increased. Maybe suburban commuters are using rail but inner-city residents are driving more?

Baltimore: Ridership and miles both increased by about 3 percent (but remain well below 2004 numbers).

Boston: Ridership and miles both decreased, with ridership falling nearly 8 percent. I suspect the MBTA inflated its numbers for 2005, since they represent a huge increase over 2003 and 2004 levels. Boston’s numbers have always been pretty unreliable.

Buffalo: Ridership and passenger miles both grew. Light-rail ridership grew while bus numbers declined.

Chicago: Bus ridership fell while rail ridership grew.

Cleveland: 5.5 percent increase in ridership but only a 1.5 percent increase in miles.

Dallas-Ft. Worth: 4.7 percent increase in ridership and a 2.2 percent increase in miles.

Denver: Light-rail trips grew while bus trips declined by almost the same number, netting a 0.2 percent increase in total trips. Light-rail trips tend to be a bit longer, so this resulted in a 4.1 percent increase in miles. Like Atlanta, Denver might be getting a few suburban commuters out of their cars at the expense of losing inner-city transit riders.

Los Angeles: A 5.3 percent increase in trips, most of them bus trips as L.A.’s transit agency restores bus services lost when it was on a rail-construction binge.

Miami-Ft. Lauderdale: A respectable 2.9 percent increase in riders, mostly bus riders as Miami’s automated guideway and Ft. Lauderdale’s commuter-rail line both lost riders. South Florida has spent hundreds of millions on its “Tri-Rail” commuter rail system and obviously is getting little return for its (our) money.

New Orleans: A shadow of its former self, New Orleans transit is carrying about 20 percent of pre-Katrina levels.

New York: Bus ridership declined slightly while rail ridership increased, for a total 2.3 percent gain in riders and 6.0 percent gain in miles.

Philadelphia: 3.2 percent decline in riders and 2.5 percent decline in miles.

Pittsburgh: 2.1 percent gain in riders, mostly light rail. But miles increased by only 1.3 percent. However, transit is not yet back to its 2002 levels.

Portland: Transit ridership fell by 2.9 percent, with most of the loss being buses, though light-rail trips fell by 0.5 percent. Passenger miles magically grew by 0.8 percent for both modes.

Sacramento: California’s capital opened a new light-rail line, leading to a 20 percent growth in rail ridership, but a 6 percent loss in bus ridership for a net 3.5 percent gain. Since the new line added 22 percent to the region’s rail miles, and rail lines are supposed to be synergistic, a 20 percent growth must be a disappointment.

Salt Lake City: Ridership grew by a meager 0.3 percent, with rail ridership growth offset by bus ridership declines. Strangely Utah’s transit agency is claiming a 98 percent growth in bus passenger miles even though bus ridership fell by 3.4 percent. That would mean that the average length of a bus trip jumped from about 4 to about 7 miles. Four is more in line with bus trip lengths in similarly sized cities.

San Diego: Ridership and passenger miles both grew by about 7 percent.

San Francisco-Oakland: Ridership fell 1 percent and miles grew 1 percent as the Bay Area’s bus systems continued to decline and BART ridership grew. Since the former serve low-income neighborhoods and the latter middle-class suburbs, this is another example of the equity questions raised in Atlanta and Denver.

San Jose: Recovering from the huge ridership losses in the early 2000s, San Jose claims a 22 percent gain in light rail riders and a 3 percent gain in bus riders. They have now surpassed 2004 ridership, but at this rate it will take 3 more years to reach 2003 ridership. The Altamont Commuter Express gained virtually no new riders.

Seattle: Transit trips grew by 8 percent, nearly all of which was attributable to buses.

St. Louis: Transit ridership has been falling since 1998, but trips grew by 7 percent in 2006 and are now almost back up to 2001 levels.

Washington: DC’s subway system gained 6 percent more riders while its bus system lost 8 percent for a net loss of less than 0.1 percent.

Minneapolis-St. Paul and Houston aren’t on my spreadsheet as their rail lines opened since it was originally created. But both are doing okay, the Twin Cities having gained about 5 percent more riders and Houston 8 percent.

So many rail systems gained riders, and only a few — notably including Portland — lost. A few systems also seem to have gained rail riders at the expense of losing bus riders.

My standard of comparison is Las Vegas, which has a privately operated (but publicly subsidized) bus system. Las Vegas’ population is growing by about 6 percent per year, but its transit ridership is growing even faster. In 2006, it carried 13.4 percent more riders than in 2005, a growth rate that isn’t approached by any of the rail cities.

Las Vegas shows that you don’t need an expensive rail system to grow your transit ridership. While the growth in other cities looks good, what really matters is growth in per capita ridership. This will be addressed in a future post.