Can transit solve society’s problems? Only if people ride it
From Transit in the 2000s: Where Does It Stand and Where Is It Headed? Michael Manville, Brian D. Taylor, Evelyn Blumenberg, UCLA
Since 1985, for example, Los Angeles County has spent billions of dollars to go from having no rail service to having over 100 miles of rail lines today. But ridership on LA Metro, the agency that made these investments and that accounts for the vast majority of county transit use, peaked absolutely in 1985, when the county had almost two million fewer people. From 1985 to 2015, LA Metro ridership fell 25% per capita. This combination of rising supply and relatively flat ridership has made transit steadily less productive over time as people have been using it less per inflation-adjusted dollar spent on it.
Consider what transit today is asked to do. Public transportation is variously charged with the missions of reducing traffic congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions; of promoting economic revitalization and creating jobs; of reorganizing land use patterns and creating denser, more attractive urban environments; of providing mobility for those without it; and more. This is an ambitious agenda to be sure, and one with the rare ability to win support from environmentalists, labor unions, businesses, and even drivers.
But trouble lurks. Little historical evidence supports the idea that transit can solve these diverse problems. At its height public transportation was criticized as a cause of congestion, not a salve for it. Similarly, where some proponents argue that transit will revitalize urban areas, historically it was an engine of decentralization, pushing population outward into streetcar suburbs. Even if we think that transit today can accomplish different goals than it did in the past, the fact remains that for most of these problems transit is not the best or most cost-effective solution. If we are worried about greenhouse gases, we should tax carbon. If tackling congestion is our priority, we should price peak-hour driving. Income supplements are proven to reduce poverty and in a nation organized around the car, buying poor people automobiles increases mobility far more than building suburban light rail. Transit’s advantage is political: it offers a way to solve problems that many people can agree on. Its disadvantage is practical: it may not be a good way to solve those problems.
Of course, the perfect need not be the enemy of the good. Transit may not be the best way to solve these problems, but it is a tool we have that voters are willing to deploy. Here, however, we come full-circle: even if we assume transit can help solve these many social and environmental problems, it can only do so if people ride it. And despite funding transit heavily so it can solve these problems, it has not been gaining riders for decades and has recently been losing them.
It is thus possible, and perhaps likely, that at least some of the longer-term declines in transit productivity and more recent declines in patronage result from a tension between transit’s politically popular environmental and economics purposes and its less popular but more tractable social service mission. Put simply, many voters who do not ride transit have strong influence over it, and they may have different ideas for what transit should be than do the many riders who are numerically smaller and often cannot vote. Investments that please the first group may not deliver ridership, while investments that please the second may deliver ridership but be less likely to win funding support. If the second group is also shrinking, the result could explain recent trends in increasing transit supply and falling ridership.
