No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Transit Follies #5: Higher Fares and Less Service in Utah

Apr 6

2007

The Utah Transit Authority (UTA), which operates transit along the Wasatch Front from north of Ogden to south of Salt Lake City, opened its first light-rail line in 1999. Since then it has added to its light-rail system and last year began building its first commuter-rail line.

Now the agency is proposing to increase transit fares by 33 percent (phased in over two years) and, at the same time, to cut many of its bus routes. This has led to a storm of protest from transit-dependent people who say the revised bus routes will greatly reduce their mobility.

Photo courtesy UTA.

UTA says the new bus system will offer higher frequencies, faster service, and better evening service. But it will do all this at a lower cost because it won’t need as many buses during peak hours. In other words, UTA is cutting peak-hour service by cutting low-productivity routes.

A document describing the restructuring observes (on page 9) that UTA has two types of customers: those who are time-sensitive and those who are not. Others in the transit industry call these people transit choice and transit dependent. Transit-dependent people tend to have lower incomes while transit-choice riders tend to have lots of automobility (three cars per household, says UTA) so use transit only when it is convenient.

UTAs restructuring distinctly favors the transit-choice riders. As shown in the maps on pages 2, 3, and 4, the focus is on fast buses (meaning limited stops) and buses that operate every 15- to 30-minutes. Very few of today’s UTA buses operate on 15-minute schedules. Not surprisingly, most of the protests have come from the disabled and other transit-dependent people.

To me, it is more than a coincidence that UTA is restructuring its buses and dramatically increasing fares at the same time that it is going heavily into debt to build more rail lines. As page 45 (physical page 52) of the agency’s 2005 financial report notes, the agency had no debt before 1999 (transit agencies rarely have to borrow to buy buses) but was paying $11 million in annual interest by 2005. Moreover, page 8 (physical page 9) of the 2006 budget says that annual debt service increased to $24.5 million in 2006 to pay for the new commuter-rail lines.

Other increased costs include all of the planning and studies needed for rail transit. The 2006 budget says the cost of major investment studies was $14.6 million in 2006. While most of that cost is covered by federal grants, that federal money could have gone to improving bus service.

From the 2005 financial report, we can see that administrative costs doubled soon after the light rail first opened. The report also added a new category of costs in 1999, “operations support,” which quickly grew from $9.2 million in 1999 to $22.7 million in 2002. Although these costs previously came out of operations and maintenance, there was almost no diminishment in those costs when the new category was created.

When we look at UTA’s service record, we find some very peculiar things. From the 2005 National Transit Database (my summary here), we can calculate that UTA spent an average of $4 per bus trip and $1.20 per bus passenger mile, while light rail cost only $1.45 per trip and $0.27 per passenger mile. The reason for the high bus costs is low average ridership: UTA’s average bus loads were only 4.5 people, compared with a national average of more than 10. UTA’s light-rail loads were almost 28 people per car, compared with a national average of 25.

Were UTA buses this empty before light rail? I decided to look at UTA’s historic transit numbers to find out, and this is when it got really strange. According to the National Transit Database (which is numbers that transit agencies supply to the Federal Transit Administration), UTA’s bus ridership fell dramatically when the light-rail opened but mostly recovered by 2005. However, that 2005 recovery always seemed suspicious to me.

So then I looked at APTA ridership reports. APTA asks its members to report annual transit trips by mode, and according to these numbers, bus ridership increased, not declined, when the light rail opened, and has remained constant ever since. APTA numbers show no dramatic increase in 2005, but the NTD increase ends up matching the APTA number in 2005.

Who is right? UTA, FTA, or APTA?

A completely different story is told by a chart on page 6 of UTA’s restructuring proposal. The 1996 through 1998 bus ridership in this chart is the same as APTA’s, but when the light rail opens UTA’s bus numbers steadily decline until they matches the National Transit Database number for 2004 (but not 2005).

Which numbers are right? I have the least faith in APTA numbers, but the NTD numbers jump around too much to be persuasive. UTA’s numbers look right, if only because I would expect bus ridership to drop when light rail starts. If the actual numbers are lower than the numbers in the National Transit Database, then 2005 bus loads may even be lower than 4.5.

The numbers in the chart are trips, but to calculate average loads (passenger miles per vehicle-revenue mile), we need passenger miles and vehicle miles. The only source I have for these numbers is the FTA/NTD data. According to these data, UTA buses carried pretty typical loads before the light-rail line opened: about 9 people in 1992, slightly less than the national average but not terribly so. Operating costs per trip and passenger mile were also very competitive. (The 1990 average load was almost 11 people per bus, but I find that suspiciously high since the 1989 and 1991 numbers were both around 9.)

It is tempting to think that UTA is slyly attributing a lot of the rail planning and administration costs to buses in order to make its light-rail trains look more efficient than they really are. But the bus operating costs are not unduly high per vehicle mile. They just aren’t carrying enough passengers. It is my guess that too many buses serve low-density areas.

This suggests that the light-rail lines cannibalized the bus system by taking the premiere, high-load routes, a problem UTA exacerbated by converting downtown bus lines that paralleled the light rail to light-rail feeder buses (which tend to run empty as most suburbanites get to rail stations by auto).

Did I mention that transit carries only 1.1 percent of motorized travel and just 3.9 percent of Salt Lake-area commuters to work? That’s up from 3.6 percent in 2000 but down from 5.5 percent in 1980, when no one in Salt Lake City had ever heard of light rail.

I support the idea of fast, frequent buses running on existing roads, which to me is the optimal form of bus-rapid transit. But such bus routes should be operated on top of the existing system of local bus service, not as a replacement for it. Unfortunately, because it is spending so much money on new rail lines, UTA can’t afford to do both.

By building rail, UTA replaced a relatively efficient bus system with an costly and inflexible train system. By restructuring the buses, UTA is sacrificing the needs of transit-depending riders in order to capture a few more wealthy transit-choice riders.

21

Trackback  •  Posted in Planning Disasters, Transportation  

Reprinted from The Antiplanner