Tag: transit

Why transit advocates should avoid the “what white people want” card

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

So I got plenty of blowback on yesterday’s post (and not from the gentle and insightful commenter here) about what a mean meany meanpants I am for not being nicer about the “need” for light rail as a means to coddle white transit riders who won’t use buses. I’m used to histrionics from sensitive wee flowers who want their casual racism unquestioned, let alone being unwilling to condone the All Things Rail All the Time thinking that dominates transit.

Here’s why people should never play the “what white people will ride” card, when advocating for any mode or service, ever.

1. White people already dominate urban policy, including transit policy, without any help from the rail fanboys acting as amplifiers. If there is one thing transportation policy in the US has not suffered from, it’s a failure to prioritize what white people want. So supposedly, white people want high levels of service, which means rail, if you believe you can’t serve passengers well with buses.(Which I don’t, but lots of people do.)

Unfortunately, an aversion to buses or low service quality doesn’t explain why many white people moved themselves, and continue to move themselves, into auto-oriented enclaves not served by rail or anything else. It does not explain why white people throughout the US have systematically voted for one property tax avoidance measure after another, thereby sealing off city governments’ most likely own-source revenues to support the operations and building of urban transit systems. Aversion to buses alone doesn’t explain why legislators in states across the US passed measures forbidding state gas taxes to be spent on anything other than roads. Then there are the enclaves that sue transit operators for putting stops and stations in their neighborhoods, regardless of whether it’s a bus stop or rail station. Then there is the fact that white people whine like a swarm of gnats at the mere mention of higher gas taxes, or vehicle registration fees, or tolls, or parking charges, thus squelching all the likely nonlocal alternatives to the property tax which can yield revenues with which to provide more transit.

Call me crazy, but I think these are the very last people we should spend transit resources on, let alone lavish them with premium services, since, short of actually deploying the US military against transit infrastructure, they couldn’t make it more obvious they don’t want anything to do with transit.

Substitute “transit” for “toast” in the conversation, and we have nailed what an apparently not insignificant group of white Americans have communicated through their revealed preferences–in land markets and politics: they want to be isolated from transit, and they don’t want to pay for it.

The opposite is true as well: when empowered white constituencies want rail, they usually get it via their influence in land markets and regional politics. Unless it’s rail to LAX which I believe may have incurred the wroth of a one-eyed Gypsy woman who also told off Lon Chaney,Jr.

So “what white people want” is already nicely represented among the power elite without transit people acting like white people’s preferences are special.

2. What white people will ride is the wrong question. The right question: what transit level of service is sufficiently good to attract the most customers?

There’s a big difference in framing between “let’s worry about what white people think is good enough for them” and “Our service should be so good that even fussy, time-sensitive, amenity-sensitive customers will demand it.” Think about it. I’m willing to entertain the latter as a service goal, by all means. The former? Racist.

3. Poor transit service quality is a legitimate reason not to take a bus. Refusing to take a bus, no matter how well it actually operates, because you associate buses with poor people or people of color, is odious. And it’s definitely not a reason we should spend one thin dime of public investment in modes you think are higher class.

Some US regions, like my own, are decades away from being able to serve neighborhoods without residents of those areas ever having to use a bus. Treating buses like an inherently second-class service in these environments means we undermine riders in those areas for a long time.

And if people really do refuse to ride buses no matter how good the bus service is, that sounds less like demanding good service and more like an ironclad excuse to keep your lazy ass in your car in perpetuity while pretending you’d be willing take transit, but only in some fantasy future when rail transit will be built over every square inch of a metropolitan region.* And catering to that nonsense is a way to always have a ready-made, ironclad rationale for arguing we should prioritize rail investment over every other transit goal.

And if we really believe that white people won’t take a bus because of their social biases (rather than service quality concerns), why would our response to that be “please, please, oh pretty please with sprinkles on top, let us use up precious resources to kowtow to your your morally repugnant, anti-social beliefs by gold-plating a small number of facilities for you, you poor dear fragile thing” instead of the way a civilized public should respond, which is: “Stop it.”

I get that things don’t work that way in majoritarian politics, but can’t we be a little more sensitive in transit towards our patrons of color than to say we should upscale some service areas with very expensive investments because that’s all white people will ride?

*If you refuse to ride a bus, but you are walking or biking or skateboarding or using your solar-powered jet pack, you are allowed to ignore me.

“White people won’t ride the bus”, if true, is racism, not a rationale for light rail. Just saying.

Lisa Schweitzer6 Comments

I’ve heard “white people just won’t ride a bus” roughly a million times during my career. It’s conventional wisdom. I also hear it used for why we need more rail investment to attract choice riders out of their cars. “White people just won’t ride the bus.”

Since when does indulging racism serve as a justification for putting billions of taxpayer money into something?

Oh, yeah, since forever if our mortgage policies are any indicator.

Some of this may be code for the belief that light rail is always better service than buses, and you won’t get choice riders without better service. I’m a lifelong transit commuter, and I could care less about what is under the vehicle. I want service that comes every 5 minutes, no vomit on the seats, reasonable reliability of arrival time, and amenities at stops. All those things can be accomplished with light rail or buses, if there is a sufficient investment in the buses. Oh, no no no, rail people tell me. Rail is better because it has dedicated ROW. Oh, baloney. As we prove over and over in LA, if your rail is interacting with traffic signals, it’s going to be slow. And there is more than one way to get your own ROW: sure, building LRT is one way. Or having the political guts to just take away two lanes of car traffic for dedicated bus service is another way. Gulling people into giving you billions for the former so you can avoid have to annoy people with the latter is good politics, but it doesn’t make for inherently better transit.

And since white people apparently don’t ride the bus, we fling our resources at rail projects for white people, since improving bus service would just make life easier for all those brown people who are dumb enough to use buses, not like those clever and discriminating white people, and when has making life easier for brown people ever been a public priority in the US? So then since buses are ghetto, and that’s just that, there’s no point in working on them. Buses are more difficult to operate well, and doing so requires more political courage (see taking lanes away for cars), and if buses do run well, people might not vote for fantasy rail systems and they won’t give us any money for transit–so there’s really nobody who is going to advocate for putting the resources you need to run buses well into buses, except for things like the Bus Riders Union and we all know what those people are like. And so, quelle surprise, buses don’t run well. But that’s ok because white people won’t take the bus.

Rail and buses (and taxis) work together to create a *system*. A system matters. Modes are just tools for systems. The Tube may be the most obvious and capital intensive of London’s transit, as is the subway in Moscow. But both those cities also have comprehensive and frequent buses and ubiquitous taxis to help people with their last mile. And there’s a whole lot of white people on those buses.

The bus *versus* rail idiocy in the US undermines our service here and transit riders, particularly people of color, suffer from the racism that has defined our approach to different modes.

If we approached investing in our wardrobe way we talk about investing in modes, this is how the conversation would go:

Man, why buy shorts when you can buy pants? Pants are a-numero-uno. With pants, your whole leg is covered, as well as your privates. It’s premium. All the way, all the time. You never have to worry about how you look in a fancy restaurant. You’re covered. Totally. In pants. They are so much better. Yeah, they cost more, but they do so much more! All the time.

But what about shorts? Shorts are inexpensive, and they also cover your privates, and they are so comfy in hot weather by the beach.

NO WAY! With shorts, you can’t do everything you can in pants. Pants are inherently better! Investing in shorts would be a waste of money, since you can always still wear your pants on the beach, but you can’t wear shorts at a country club, now can you? Can you?

But what about those places where shorts are more convenient and comfortable? Like a basketball court.

Oh, screw those places! Those places are so marginal, nobody really needs to go there. Look, pants are all the rage with classy people. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll concentrate development to direct people to go to places where their investment in fancy great pants makes sense, and get them to eschew those places where shorts might work better because we just don’t think shorts are worth investing in.

Yeah, that whole conversation is painfully stupid to listen to. But it’s the conversation about modes I’ve had to sit through for 20 years. No wonder I’m bitchy, right?

And November just got interesting again—Villargaigosa’s Measure R extension

Lisa Schweitzer

So just when Santorum leaves and I’m faced with the possibility that reading about politics won’t be interesting enough to keep me away from doing real work (gasp! work!), LA’s mayor decides he’s going back to the ballot box to ask voters to make Measure R, a half-cent sales tax measure passed for 30 years back in 2008, permanent.

In Tony’s favor, it never hurts to ask, particularly when one is not running for re-election. For most US mayors who want to build more transit, the writing is on Belshazzar’s wall: we’re not likely to get a new transportation deal in DC at all before the November election. Unless something changes there–as in, we have a big, Goldwater-style doomsday for the GOP—if we get a deal after November it’s likely to be the Republicans’ deal. And they don’t want a federal infrastructure bank, and they don’t like sending money to California.

A couple journos called my Suburban Lair yesterday to talk about whether the Measure R extension has a chance of passing. I don’t think I gave them anything useful. Los Angeles County has had six or seven–I can’t remember–ballot box measures for sales taxes between 1975 and today, and three of them have passed: Prop A in 1980, Prop C in 1993, and Measure R in 2008. So based on the county’s history, it could go either way.

When Measure R was on the ballot, I spent time talking to both Democrats and Republicans about the measure, and among the Republicans, the fact that the measure would sunset seemed like a big deal to them. I can’t imagine they would be happy with the extension.

But if there is one thing that Mayor Tony’s crew knows how to do, it’s campaign. They are very good at it, and they got some key experience with Measure R, and they also have a pretty powerful network of businesses and nonprofits that threw their support behind the “Yes on Measure R” campaign–like most of the LA County museums. It seems likely that that coalition is still in place and readily activated for another initiative.

However, the continuation of the tax is a big deal, and the rationale–that they want to make sure they can borrow against the tax–has an assumption that will probably worry conservatives in the County: the fact that they aren’t comfortable borrowing against the tax that will sunset suggests that they know full well the tax as it is can’t support the existing project list without very, very low cost federal financing of the 30/10 plan. There are always cost over-runs, and it’s really really important that people not underestimate how expensive the subway to the sea is going to be. By releasing that sunset, the pressure to avoid cost over-runs goes away a bit. And that’s a problem for many conservative voters who see removing that constraint as a license to do what governments do: take on too much financial risk and manage projects poorly.

Doig on the TEA party and a “war on transit” in Salon.com

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

As regular readers will know, I am not a fan of culture war arguments brought up over disagreements about high speed rail or, well, much of anything. Too often, when people drag out the culture war arguments, it’s a thinly veiled way of saying “If you don’t agree with me and my democratic preferences, you must be some ignorant bohunkus who spends his Saturday nights jumping over clods of dirt, shooting holes in stop signs, and trying to impregnate his 16 year-old girlfriend in the back of his pickup.” I also hate histrionic headlines that use “war on” when what the author means, if people were acting like grown-ups, is “opposition.”

Gingerich has certainly indulged in this type of politics with his comments about Manhattanites and “going on the metro” and I read a bunch of conservative papers, like the Washington Times, that like to trade on similar cultural imagery about “the chattering class” and “the cocktail class.” What, Republicans don’t drink cocktails? (If not, they really should. Cocktails are one of mankind’s best inventions, like foot massages and shampoo that smells like strawberries. If you don’t drink alcohol, then get a Shirley Temple. Yum.)

Digressing, sorry.

In general, I’ve always enjoyed Will Doig’s writing, but his entry for Salon.com rather falls into the “TEA partiers should stop manipulating the ignorant bohunkuses by trading in stereotypes about city dwellers and start seeing the wisdom inherent in our priorities and democratic preferences” tactic in political arguments. Go check it out and see what see what you think.

That stuff doesn’t strike me as being particularly useful, and I also think Doig is a bit wrong in painting the House actions as simple TEA party politics, and I also think he’s misinterpreting Reagen’s actions in creating the Mass Transit Fund. (As I argued yesterday, that might have been just as easy a way to keep transit funding restricted as it was a “boon” to transit. See arguments about scattered light rail investments rather than larger, separately funded mass transit investments.)

More than anything, a lot of the culture war imagery just reminds me of how debased the discussion about social class is in the United States. It’s a discussion polluted by these stupid stereotypes about who eats what, who reads what, who lives where–and not about wealth, racism, and power. And please. The big questions in cultural difference deal in matters of oppression for those who, unlike Doig and urban dwellers like him, are actually victims of cultural violence: women who are punished for being rape victims, girls bought and sold, etc. The fact that some people don’t want to pay for your transit strikes me as, well, less of a pressing intercultural difference than whether your husband can murder you for failing to produce sons.

Who lives where in the US is not unrelated to wealth and power, certainly, but I doubt that the issues about how to provide public transit fall into that discussion.

Mostly, culture war arguments are lazy. Both sides use culture war arguments to whine and accuse rather than getting off their butts and constructing principled arguments. For example, I have yet to hear one compelling reason why the Federal government is a better funder of sidewalks and bike lanes than states or cities, other than the typical arguments that “those things are good for us!” Of course they are. Why can’t you fund them at the city, or in the case of transit, the state level?

(Tomorrow, I’ll try to construct a principled argument for federalism in transit, I promise, now that I’ve played devil’s advocate for a bit.)

The anti-federalist case for transit funding

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

So I’m getting email after email and snarky comment after another that I’m anti-transit simply because I don’t necessarily want to get on board with federal funding for everything from sidewalks to trolleys. Now, I know better than to expect nuance from the interwebs, but still. Honestly people. How many gillions of posts does one have to write about transit to demonstrate their love? How many years do you have to spend researching it, teaching it, and riding it?

Let’s look at some possible advantages to the anti-federalist position.

First all, there are some compelling reasons for getting rid of the Federal gas tax entirely rather than squabbling over it, if you are pro-transit, anti-highway person. Or just returning the money to its source states.

Why?

Well, places with major urban areas like California tend to be donor states in the distribution of the Federal gas tax. We put in more than we get out. California transit could be better off tomorrow if we eliminated the federal gas tax by 18 cents and raised the state gas tax in California by 18 cents. Motorists would pay the exact same they pay now. The latter move would mean we keep that revenue in state instead of sending it to little used highways in Montana and Mississippi. Ditto New York. Ditto Ohio. Ditto all the donor states.

The large donor states are always, always the ones with major metros in them. So by taking their gas tax dollars and apportioning it at the federal level, with comparatively small amounts dedicated transit funds, we spread the revenues over a larger geography than makes sense if you want more funding for urban projects.

So put that in your federalist pipe and smoke it.

Finally, even though nobody (but meany mean pants me) likes the idea of funding transit programs out of the general fund, I think they are being a bit knee-jerk in their rejection of the idea. The Highway Trust Fund, which everybody is dancing in circles over, is just dwindling in purchasing power because the tax hasn’t been updated in so long. I don’t see any updates on the horizon.

But with general fund allocations, there’s nothing that keeps the Feds from saying they want to allocate $100 billion to transit every single year if they want to. It’s not limited by gas tax receipts…and if America really is an urban nation, there may be big, long-term advantages to going with general fund allocations for urban programs. Look at Obama’s budget last year: he found 8 billion for his high speed rail project out of the general fund for one mode. Now, that budget died a miserable death, but what if he had had a cooperative Congress? The Feds spend $9 billion a year now out of the gas tax, so it’s not a foregone conclusion that general funds grants for transit would be lower than dedicated funds.

The main disadvantage of that approach is the political instability. The funds allocated out of the HTF for transit are pretty stable year after year. But stability may be less useful to capital projects than the big allocations possible out of the general fund, at least over the long term, than wrangling over the HTF which is going to yield less and less over time–increasing competition for projects and discouraging heavier capital investments. We’re already feeling that effect. Why do you think we already have so much light rail instead of commuter rail built all over the west coast?

I’M JUST SAYING!

The House Transport Bill is anti-federalist, not anti-transit

Lisa Schweitzer9 Comments

Transit advocates should thank gridlock the transport bill from the House is more symbolic than anything. It’s not going to go anywhere, not because the bill has no supporters, but because nothing is going anywhere in DC these days.

The bill a does a bunch of really unfortunate things, but the one that has the average urbanist’s undies in a twist is that the bill cuts transit, walking, biking projects off from the Highway Trust Fund, to fend for themselves in the general budgetary process at the federal level.

The whinge from the urban blogosphere is already deafening, however. HOW DARE those mean House Republicans hate wonderful transit? What’s wrong with them? They must represent suburbs.

What House Republicans are disputing in this Bill isn’t whether cities should have adorable little trolley trains and wonderful bikes lanes and capacious sidewalks. What they dispute: that the feds, and not cities themselves, should pay for them.

You know the transit fanboys around the blogosphere are writing the outraged posts now full of Richard Florida factoids about about how important cities are to America, and how cities generate 86 percent of economic value in the US, and how most Americans (80 percent) live in cities and how all that means Federal transport policy should be federal transit policy. We’re important, in sum!

However, anti-federalists see those exact same factoids as reasons that cities can afford to build their own damn transit.

But, but, but! Transit revitalizes local business and increases property values!

Then local businesses and land owners can pay for it with all the new value they get. Why should they get windfalls from federal sources?

But but but controls on local property taxes don’t allow that.

Then why should federal taxpayers pay to provide something that the locals who benefit from it most don’t want to pay for themselves?

But, but, but! Transit clears the air, helps clear up traffic congestion, and prevents climate change!

If urban drivers are causing congestion and polluting urban air, how does taxing rural drivers and taking their money for urban projects make sense? If California has a problem with too much driving, nothing keeps you from raising the state gas tax. Tax your own drivers and build your own transit.

And the circular argument goes on and on. Disagreement about whether the federal government has a role to play, and what that role should be, in the provision of urban goods can’t be reconciled with assertions about how great particular urban goods are.

LaHood hasn’t helped matters. LaHood hasn’t really understood the role he was chosen for; he seems to assume he is still running for office, and his typical MO is to play to his urban choir with blather like livability rather than go out of his way to help those not in his choir understand why projects for motorists should get the ax when motorists’ tax dollars keep the HTF afloat. His predecessors were able to progressively open the Fund to redistribution from motorists to other modes largely by doing the opposite of what he’s done: by not drawing attention to themselves or to their agendas.

I’ve always though the Secretary of Transportation should ideally be a rather boring job. But LaHood is a politician, not an agency guy, and he’s over-politicized his job by screaming as loudly as he can and stomping his way into the spotlight as often as he can, both around transit and high speed rail. In so doing, he’s thrown his agency into the tsunami of the deepest political divides in Washington.

In fairness, this bill has been a long time simmering. Republicans have never loved paying for transit out of the HTF, but LaHood’s bombastic, self-promotional, New Sheriff In Town style has thrown gasoline on the low simmering fire.

Duranton and Turner on the fundamental law of traffic congestion in AER

Lisa Schweitzer5 Comments

This paper in AER is getting its kicking around the web from the transit fanboys and those outside the transport field who don’t get why managing congestion is treated as a goal for public transit. The commentariat is in umbrage: surely transit riders benefit from transit, yada, yada, and this result means nothing. Andrew Gelman gets a buy on his comments because he’s brilliant, I love his Bayes book, and I learn more from his blog than I learn from most books. Everybody else needs to chill.

The Duranton and Turner paper is significant for multiple reasons. First of all, transit fanboys have nobody to blame but themselves for the widely held perception that transit investment decreases congestion. It’s part of every “More rail, more rail, more rail” chant I’ve ever read in about 20+ years of professional life in transport planning. Why? Because if you didn’t promise those who don’t ride transit a benefit from the billions we spend on transit, they’d never hand over the billions to you. Outside of the few major transit markets in the US, transit riders themselves have never been a big enough constituency to hold their own in budget battles, which is one reason why they are at such a disadvantage in Federal budget talks.

Promising nonuser benefits has been the major marketing strategy of transit agencies for at least 40 years. Transit saves the air! It makes us skinny! It decreases congestion! And so on and so forth. Promises of this type, however, have the tendency to prompt empirically minded researchers like Matt Turner to get out their datasets and their instrumental variables and get all hypothesis testy on you.

Again: Gelman gets a buy because he readily admits he hasn’t been at the party for 20+ years, but it’s some serious gaslighting at this stage of the game, after transit advocates have spent decades schilling the investment based on nonuser benefits, to respond with “how silly those economists are! Transit provides mobility! Of course, that’s the benefit of transit!” Especially when ridership figures on many systems are so disappointing. That’s a pretty politically dangerous response for everybody who, unlike Gelman, doesn’t live in NYC because if we do cost-benefits on transit investment based on benefits to riders alone, we’d see a lot less investment. I assume that’s not what the fanboys want.

Anyway, so what’s interesting in the manuscript itself? Here’s the actual citation:

Duranton, Gilles, and Matthew A. Turner. 2011. “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities.” American Economic Review, 101(6): 2616–52.
DOI:10.1257/aer.101.6.2616

Here’s the abstract:

We investigate the effect of lane kilometers of roads on vehicle-kilometers traveled (VKT) in US cities. VKT increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads. The sources for this extra VKT are increases in driving by current residents, increases in commercial traffic, and migration. Increasing lane kilometers for one type of road diverts little traffic from other types of road. We find no evidence that the provision of public transportation affects VKT. We conclude that increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion. (JEL R41, R48)

So what? Anthony Downs (and other smart people) pointed out the theory of triple convergence quite some ago–that additional capacity on an unpriced system will erode until a congested re-occurs. In the absence of money prices, the only thing that disciplines demand on a facility are the time costs, and the time costs rise with…congestion. So one of the most misguided commenters asks: Where do all the extra drivers come from? The answer is easy:

a) population growth or
b) nowhere, since you don’t need additional bodies. You just need additional trips.

So if we provide a whole bunch of new supply, transit or otherwise, on a high-demand corridor, that supply will get used as the time costs are lower, and the out-of-pocket money costs of car ownership at that point are sunk and unrelated to trip time of day–until congestion starts in again. So if the congestion on the 405 clears up suddenly because we’ve provided commuter rail (I’ll just hold my breath until that happens), other drivers may opt on to the facility, or some of the drivers left may decide to sneak in a few more trips during the day.

There is a point when supply can become saturated: if you put a 50 lane road down in Des Moines, I doubt you’ll get gridlock. But that’s a flummery example. Nobody proposes such things.

Transit fanboys are reacting so strongly to the Duranton and Turner paper because for a very long time, people have argued Down’s triple convergence only in terms of highway supply. It was a rational for all those who said “You can’t build your way out of congestion” at the same time they argued for building more rail. The problem appears to be–and most people who understand economics have known this for awhile—that triple convergence holds regardless of whether the additional supply is highway or transit.

The problem that Duranton and Turner highlight concerns the highly counterfactual nature of most purported environmental benefits in public investment, not just transit. The promise that transit “clears the air” or “reduces congestion” or “reduces auto use!” contains an implicit caveat that few people acknowledge: transit is a cleaner mode than if we were to meet the additional travel demand with highway supply rather than transit supply. But it’s much snappier to say “Transit clears the air” than it is to say “Transit clears the air relative to what it would be had transit users driven cars.” These are benefits that occur from shifting future user behavior.

That’s why the California HSR advocates argue that their new $98 billion HSR investment is a bargain compared to the $127 billion of airport and highway expansion that nobody has actually proposed yet.

The point from Duranton and Turner: if your metro area has a problem with cars now—either related to congestion or to air quality—you are going to keep your problem, even if you build transit.

HOWEVER. And this is for the fanboys:

a) If you don’t have a problem yet with auto-related externalities, new transit supply may forestall those problems. Probably not forever, but you may buy yourself some time, and

b) Restated: if you already have a problem with auto-related externalities, new transit supply may help change the slope of how bad those problems get over time.

Transport London and its farebox ratio

Lisa Schweitzer

The BBC ran a story yesterday that Mayor Ken Livingstone promised to drop fares on Transport London by 5 percent by October 2012 if he is elected.

Boris Johnson, by contrast, has said that he will stick to the existing formula for raising fares, which is the retail price index plus 2 percent.

So that formula says it all; it’s a policy-level move to shift more of the burden onto the users themselves.

Sure enough, that’s what the Beeb’s numbers suggest, showing that users are covering about 54 percent of TCL’s costs–certainly not bad by any measure to US operators.

The other part of the story I don’t quite understand–they’re arguing over a surplus, which is not a word I’m used to seeing in transit finance, and I can’t quite figure out if there is an actual surplus or there isn’t–or there was, but central government austerity measures meant the agency used that surplus already.

What do you think of the approach? At least with a formula, transit riders would know what kind of fare increases to budget for, as I think US austerity measures are likely to pull back on federal support for transit very hard.

Where’s my transit revolution? Today’s infuriating commuting numbers from the ACS

Lisa Schweitzer5 Comments

Ok, so the answer to the question I pose is, inevitably: we haven’t spent enough on transit yet. However, the mode choice numbers in a report this morning from the American Community Survey discourage and, since I don’t take being discouraged very well, infuriate.

Let’s take a look at some of the graphics:

Voila Capture45

Blargh! WHAT? WE’RE TALKING FIVE DECADES OF TRANSIT INVESTMENT AND THE MODE SHARE AND COUNTS HAVEN’T CHANGED HARDLY AT ALL? WHA? WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?! “Wah wah wah I don’t liiiiiiiiiike buses. I neeeeeeeed light rail plunked down all over hell and gone just like Europe. THEN I’ll stop driving.”

We’ve done our part. We’ve built rail line after rail line after rail line. We’ve been condemning sprawl since the 1980s, advocating for denser residential patterns since roughly the same time. Living in the suburbs in our popular media is treated as the moral equivalent of being fat or smoking. DAVID FREAKING BYRNE IS WRITING ABOUT HOW COOL IT IS TO BIKE IN CITIES FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD. We’ve romanticized places like New York and Portland. WHAT’S IT GONNA TAKE, PEOPLE?

With mode shares, the percentage taking transit masks the fact that more people are taking transit in 2009 than in 1960, but still. In reality, this time period reflects a changing geographic distribution of the US population where, yes, people left the precious central city for the suburbs (something that doesn’t seem to have hurt NYC-NJ transit one little bit, BTW), but people also left rural areas for metropolitan areas. These numbers should be shifting simply by virtue of that phenomenon.

So that graphic shows the commute counts. Maybe commutes just aren’t shifting and we’d see a different story from 1960 to 2010 if we had leisure travel here.

Voila Capture46

So transit operators should advocate for open borders because immigrants are good customers.

This last one may be too hard to see. The report is freely available (until the Republicans decide to shut down the Census), so go look at the report.

Voila Capture47

Thirty years ago in public transit, there was NYC, and then there was everybody else. Today, apparently, it’s still NYC and everybody else.

I don’t see happy things ahead in terms of changing these numbers, especially with big systems like BART reducing frequencies, even with higher gas prices.

Blargh. Bad way to start my day.