Late last year, I promised we’d check back for an update on US transit ridership. The new numbers are out today and they’ve never been higher. Here’s the Washington Post:
Despite job losses and falling gasoline prices, record numbers of Americans rode subways, buses and commuter rail last year, boosting public transportation ridership to its highest level in 52 years…
It’s not just an annual record either. Even during the last quarter of 2008 — after gasoline prices had plummeted—ridership numbers were significantly higher than they had been the year before. Most likely, the explanation is manifold; it’s in part because of the sour economy and in part because travel habits are “sticky,” an idea I explored a bit last year.
It’s true that fourth quarter ridership numbers were a bit lower than previous quarters in 2008, but some of that decline is likely owing to the holidays when commute trips fall off. The gains in transit ridership are still big and they mirror recent declines in driving. Here are a few interesting tidbits from the American Public Transportation Association’s release:
This represents a 4.0 percent increase over the number of trips taken in 2007 on public transportation, while at the same time, vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) on our nation’s roads declined by 3.6 percent in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Public transportation use is up 38% percent since 1995, a figure that is almost triple the growth rate of the population (14 percent) and up substantially over the growth rate for the vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on our nation’s highways (21%) for that same period.
What’s worrisome, however, is that transit agencies across the continent are badly strapped for cash. Even as demand for transit seats climbs, most agencies are facing the prospect of funding shortfalls or service cutbacks.
You can find the full APTA news release here; summary fourth quarter stats and annual comparisons here; and mode-specific fourth quarter stats here.
John Niles
I celebrate growing transit use as a very good thing to be happening in America. And we need a clear-eyed view of how to make it happen sooner and more comprehensively.Note a potential misdirection of focus in the above post. The language suggests automobile trips are moving in large chunks to public transit: “The gains in transit ridership are still big and they mirror recent declines in driving….a 4.0 percent increase over the number of trips taken in 2007 on public transportation, while at the same time, vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) on our nation’s roads declined by 3.6 percent in 2008,…”4% may be bigger than 3.6%, but the starting bases on which the percentages are applied are different by a multiple of 25.With the U.S. nationwide annual passenger miles for cars and light trucks at 4,546 billion and for all transit including Amtrak and water ferries at 182 billion (2006 data from Table 4-3 in the US DOT’s 2009 Pocket Guide to Transportation), a 4% increase in public transportation against a 3.6% decline in car travel doesn’t change the nationwide mode split by enough to matter.Given the current fiscal crisis in public transportation mentioned in the post above, the country needs a strong focus on speed of implementation and efficiency in all plans for expanded transit, the opposite of what we are seeing around central Puget Sound. For example, Sound Transit is now in a one year process of seeking Federal Government permission to modify the I-90 corridor for passenger railroad service in a plan that spends $5 billion dollars between now and 2030 to add a forecast of just 5,000 additional daily round-trip transit riders to the region. This million-dollars-per-new-transit-customer cost-to-benefit ratio would have been a useful educational item in the Prop 1 campaign of last fall, but Sound Transit held off releasing the draft Environmental Impact Statement for East Link until after the election.Under-funded and unfunded existing plans to devote more existing road space to buses and HOVs are likely to have a far greater, quicker payoff in adding transit riders and growing transit market share than taking decades to reorganize the urban landscape around multi-billion dollar passenger railroad spines.My reading of the latest news on climate change data is that we don’t have decades.