Except as a very expensive jobs program for public-sector union members, it’s hard to see how public transit in the U.S. is succeeding.
A blog post by Marc Joffe of the Cato Institute looks at how public transit is doing in the U.S. It’s not pretty.
Transit ridership nationwide peaked at 10.7 billion trips in 2014. The pandemic low in 2020 was around 4.5 billion. In 2022, it was a hair over 6 billion.
That’s more than a 40 percent decline from peak ridership even though the pandemic is now over. “Given longer term trends, it seems likely that total transit utilization will never return to 2019 levels, and that once they have reached a post‐pandemic equilibrium, should not be expected to grow, at least on a per capita basis,” Joffe writes.
He estimates that trips per capita peaked at 35 rides per resident in 2008. It was only 19 rides per capita in 2022. Reporting these numbers per capita is useful to understand how population relates to the numbers, but not that useful as an average. Very few Americans use transit 19 or 35 times per year. Most use it zero times per year, and a handful use it hundreds of times per year. The mean is not the mode, in statistics talk.
Joffe then turns to look at costs. “For fiscal year 2021, NTD data shows aggregate operating expenses of $47.4 billion or $10.87 per passenger of which only $1.40 were covered by fares, yielding a farebox recovery ratio of 12.9%,” he writes.
The other 87.1 percent came, in large part, from taxpayers. Transit systems sell advertising and do a handful of other things to make revenue on their own, but most of the money to prop them up comes from government, especially for lightly used systems.
Joffe notes that 2021 was an especially bad year, and the farebox recovery ratio will likely be higher when we have 2022 data. Regardless, the waste on display in some systems is stunning:
An example is the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. NTD data for 2021 show $633 million in operating expenses, 18 million trips, and a cost per trip of $35.46. But BART’s 2021 audited financial statement shows $1.175 billion in operating expenses implying a cost per trip of $65.86. Among the costs included in the financial report but excluded by NTD is depreciation.
In the more normal year of FY 2022, BART had operating expenses of $1.226 billion (per its 2022 audit) and 38 million trips yielding a fully loaded cost per trip of $32.07.
Smaller rail systems can have even higher costs per trip. An example is Sonoma‐Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART), which runs trains between Sonoma County Airport and the ferry terminal in Larkspur, CA. In FY 2022, its audit showed operating expenses of $48 million covering 354 thousand trips, thus yielding a cost per trip of $134.74.
Maybe we just need to expand systems so more people can use them. Well, here’s an example of that:
In Santa Clara County, the Valley Transit Authority (VTA) has raised $530 million to extend a light‐rail line 2.4 miles and make related improvements. Projected daily boardings across the three stations served by the station are expected to reach 4,534 by the year 2043. But even this paltry ridership figure is misleading.
As we learn from Table 18 of VTA’s Supplementary Transportation Analysis, there would still be 2,322 boardings at the current terminal station, Alum Rock, if the extension was not built. Further, 896 of the projected light rail boardings would be from bus riders switching to the new transit mode. So, on net, this $530 million light‐rail extension is expected to add only 1,316 daily transit rides.
Joffe’s overall point is that public-transit spending is a wasteful way to do environmental policy. There are much cheaper ways to get cars off the road, if that’s your policy goal, than building expensive rail lines that few people will use. Reforming land-use regulations to allow more walkable development, tax credits for EVs, and smart traffic lights that reduce idling by adjusting to traffic patterns would each have greater impact on emissions at a lower cost than subsidizing bloated transit systems.
Most Americans don’t ride public transit because public transit stinks. In 2019, before the pandemic, only 5 percent of Americans took public transit to work. A higher share of Americans walked to work (2.6 percent) than rode a bus, the most-used form of public transit (2.3 percent). Despite billions in federal, state, and local subsidies, the transit ridership rate for commuters hovered around 5 percent from 1990 to 2019.
So if mass transit isn’t moving the masses, or saving the planet, what is it doing?
It’s a jobs program. The number of jobs in urban transit systems increased from 360,232 in 2007 to 419,474 in 2019. What are all those workers doing? Less than they used to, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor productivity in urban transit systems declined each year from 2013 to 2019 (again, pre-pandemic). Transit is an outlier in the transportation industry. Labor productivity in air transportation, truck transportation, and line-haul railroads all continued their upward trends in that span. More workers doing less work while providing lackluster service — it should come as no surprise that many of these are public-sector union jobs.
This shouldn’t be sustainable, but government doesn’t have to respond to profit-loss signals and will just keep plugging along, using tax dollars to fill the gap. Except as a very expensive jobs program for public-sector union members, it’s hard to see how public transit in the U.S. is succeeding.