No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Rail Transit in 2005

Jan 17

2007

Rail transit continued to do poorly in many American cities in 2005, at least judging from transit data recently released by the FTA. The FTA publishes data in two different forms. The first has data in rather cryptic files that are easy to manipulate as spreadsheets. The second has almost identical data that are easier to read but harder to work on.

To simplify matters for you, I took the data I think are most important and put them in one downloadable spreadsheet. This file includes, for every transit agency and every mode of transit they operate: operating costs; capital costs; fares; trips; passenger miles; vehicle revenue miles; and vehicle revenue hours. The file also tells what urbanized area the agency operates in.

At the end of the file, I have listed trips and passenger miles by major mode (bus, trolley bus, light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail) for each of 99 urban areas (I listed 100, but Ogden data are combined with Salt Lake City). This part of the file also gives the daily vehicle miles traveled in that urban area based on table HM72 from the 2005 highway statistics. Based on this, the spreadsheet calculates transit’s and rail transit’s share of motorized passenger travel in each urban area.

I have also updated my rail transit spreadsheet to include 2005 data. This spreadsheet includes ridership data by mode going back to 1982 for each urban area that had rail transit in 2003. So far I have not yet added Minneapolis or Houston, both of which opened light-rail lines in 2004, to the spreadsheet.

I am going to make just a few comments here and then write in more detail about these data in future posts. Despite all the hype about rails, rail transit has a pathetic share of travel in every U.S. urban area, with the possible exception of New York. In New York, transit carries 9.7 percent of motorized passenger travel, most of which is rail transit, 7.4 percent of the total.

After New York comes San Francisco-Oakland (transit 5.1%, rail 3.5%); Washington DC (transit 4.1%, rail 2.9%), Chicago (transit 3.7%, rail 2.7%), and Boston (transit 3.1%, rail 2.5%). To boost transit — or, perhaps more accurately, slow the transit’s decline — to these almost insignificant levels, these regions have invested tens of billions of dollars.

For regions that have invested only billions of dollars, transit is almost completely inconsequential. Portland transit is 2.2% (rail 0.9%), L.A. 1.8% (rail 0.5%), Denver 1.4% (rail 0.2%), Salt Lake 1.1% (rail 0.4%), Dallas 0.7% (rail 0.2%). Transit ridership (but not market share) is at least growing in these urban areas. In regions such as St. Louis (0.8%/0.3%), Baltimore (1.4%/0.3%), and San Jose (0.9%/0.3%), transit use is on the decline despite (and in at least some cases, because of) investments in rail transit.

Yet transit, especially rail transit, remains highly visible on the landscape — just try cycling around all those big buses and across slippery rails — and in our pocketbooks. Many of these cities are spending well over half of their transportation capital budgets on transit systems that the most optimistic projections say will eventually carry no more than 3 or 4 percent of passenger travel. Meanwhile, our cities get more and more congested each year.

Transit can play an important role in providing mobility to people who can’t drive and even to some who don’t want to drive. But for it to do so, transit agencies have to spend their funds as effectively as possible. Dropping billions on expensive rail lines is not getting people out of their cars and in some cities it has actually harmed transit-dependent riders. In future posts I will do a region-by-region analysis of the 2005 data, discuss some of the myths spread by rail advocates, and describe the flaws in the transportation planning process that have led to this sad misplacement of priorities.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner