Transit Ridership At Historic Peak

[WhoozOn1st]

Use of Public Transit in U.S. Reaches Highest Level Since 1956, Advocates Report -- http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/use-of-public-transit-in-us-reaches-highest-level-since-1956-advocates-report.html?ref=todayspaper

"The ridership in 2013, when gas prices were lower than in 2008, undermines the conventional wisdom that transit use rises when those prices exceed a certain threshold, and suggests that other forces are bolstering enthusiasm for public transportation, said Michael Melaniphy, the president of the [American Public Transit Association].

"'Now gas is averaging well under $4 a gallon, the economy is coming back and people are riding transit in record numbers,' Mr. Melaniphy said in an interview. 'We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how people are moving about their communities.'"

 

[afigg]

The APTA press release on the 2013 numbers with additional stats and data: Record 10.7 Billion Trips Taken On U.S. Public Transportation In 2013. Their news release has a link to their 4th Quarter 2013 ridership report which has detailed summary statistics for each heavy, light, commuter rail system and probably all the medium to large bus transit systems. Should note for those who have never looked at the APTA reports, they list ridership by estimated unlinked trips, which means someone connecting to a second subway line should get counted as two trips. So the unlinked trip number is higher for the multiple line transit systems than the number of daily passengers.

Excerpt from the APTA press release

In 2013 Americans took 10.7 billion trips on public transportation, which is the highest annual public transit ridership number in 57 years, according to a report released today by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). This was the eighth year in a row that more than 10 billion trips were taken on public transportation systems nationwide. While vehicle miles traveled on roads (VMT) went up 0.3 percent, public transportation use in 2013 increased by 1.1 percent.

“Last year people took 10.7 billion trips on public transportation. As the highest annual ridership number since 1956, Americans in growing numbers want to have more public transit services in their communities,” said Peter Varga, APTA Chair and CEO of The Rapid in Grand Rapids, MI. “Public transportation systems nationwide – in small, medium, and large communities – saw ridership increases. Some reported all-time high ridership numbers.”

Some of the public transit agencies reporting record ridership system-wide or on specific lines were located in the following cities: Ann Arbor, MI; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Espanola, NM; Flagstaff, AZ; Fort Myers, FL; Indianapolis, IN; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; Oakland, CA; Pompano Beach, FL; Riverside, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; San Carlos, CA; Tampa, FL; Yuma, AZ; and New York, NY.

Since 1995 public transit ridership is up 37.2 percent, outpacing population growth, which is up 20.3 percent, and vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which is up 22.7 percent.

Of course, the US population has increased by a lot since 1956, so reaching the highest transit ridership numbers since 1956 means that the transit market share is still well below what it was in 1956 when streetcar systems still existed in many places. Still, having public transportation grow faster than the population and VMT given the poor state of local transit systems in many US cities says that there is a shift underway.

 

[Anderson]

I saw another piece on this; basically, around 1960 transit ridership was a bit over 10% of all trips (and this was after significant cuts in transit systems). This number went into freefall over the next few decades, bottoming out around 4.5% in 2000 (remember, the 60s, 70s, and early 80s featured significant cutbacks in commuter rail and other transit operations). It's since rebounded to somewhere in the 5-6% range.

Put another way, we'd probably need somewhere in the ballpark of 20 billion trips to equal the market share of the late 50s. At the moment, I'm not even sure if there's that much effective capacity to be had in the US. There are a ton of transit systems (mostly the bigger ones) that probably could not deal with doubling traffic. MARC would be slammed, VRE is already right up against capacity (and that's bleeding over to Amtrak), etc.

It's also worth noting that the LIRR is stuck up against ridership records from the 40s. Metro-North is in a similar boat (in spite of having less coverage than the NYC and New Haven had), etc. SEPTA is basically back to where it was in the early 80s (without any expansion of the network to what was operated by Conrail in the early 80s). And so on...

 

[CHamilton]

In the Seattle area, the press is covering the story, and adding local numbers.
Seattle sees big gains in public transit ridership

SEATTLE (AP) — The Seattle area saw big gains in public transit ridership last year, as more people boarded buses, trains and subways nationally than at any time since the 1950s.
Record ridership on Sound Transit drove the increase, with about 30.3 million boardings last year, an increase of more than 8 percent from 2012. The agency operates regional buses, the Central Link light rail and the Sounder commuter rail....
Statistics from the American Public Transportation Association show that King County's bus system saw ridership jump more than 3 percent, as did Kitsap Transit in Bremerton. It was up half of 1 percent in Spokane.
However, the figures also show that bus ridership was down slightly in Olympia, Tacoma, Richland and Vancouver.
It was also down more than 12 percent in Everett. The Everett Transit System cut its service 15 percent in mid-2012 to balance its books, and it stopped offering free rides to seniors and some other populations — charging them 25 cents instead, said agency spokeswoman Sabina Popa.

 

[SarahZ]

Man, I would be stoked... STOKED... if Kalamazoo had a decent bus system. We have buses, but the routes and schedules suck. It can take three hours to go to a grocery store that's four miles away from me. Bleh. <_<

I'm really excited about the idea of moving to Chicago. We're hoping to be there in the next year or so. I've been saving up for a new car, but if we end up moving to Chicago, screw that. I'll sell the one I have and use CTA to get everywhere. That idea makes me happy beyond description. If we want to take a road trip somewhere, like to visit my parents in northern Michigan, we can just rent a car.

 

[AlanB]

Should note for those who have never looked at the APTA reports, they list ridership by estimated unlinked trips, which means someone connecting to a second subway line should get counted as two trips. So the unlinked trip number is higher for the multiple line transit systems than the number of daily passengers.

Just to clarify that a bit; someone transferring from one subway line to another would NOT be counted twice on most systems. It is possible that DC's Metro & BART do, since they know where you entered & exited. But most systems don't know that, like for example the NYC system.

But a bus rider transferring to another bus would count as two rides. A bus rider transferring to either a subway or light rail train would be counted twice; a light rail to light rail transfer would count twice.

In an interesting twist, a transfer from LA's subway to the Blue line or Expo light rail lines would count twice. However, going from those light rail lines to the subway would only count once. This is because the light rail cars count passengers with automated counters, but the subway cars don't.

 

[Anderson]

So, how were trips counted back in the 50s? It seems likely you had a similar amount of double-counting in a lot of systems then, depending on how transfer tickets were counted.

 

[CHamilton]

Record U.S. transit ridership not matched in Houston

Yes, use of Metropolitan Transit Authority buses saw a pretty steep rise, 3.4 percent, in 2013, compared to 2012, according to the latest figures from the American Public Transit Association. Including all the types of rides Metro offers — light rail, regular and commuter buses, vanpools and paratransit — the agency provided more than 84 million trips.
The problem is in 2006, 102.9 million trips were taken. Although vanpooling is up considerably since then, bus use has dropped and light rail use is up only slightly, even as the city (just the city) added 100,000 more residents between 2010 and 2014.

Mass transit ridership grows from pathetically low to just low

Last year, the number of trips Americans took on mass transit reached its highest point since 1956, according to a report from the American Public Transportation Association. Unfortunately, stories on the subject are leaving out an important statistic: How many Americans were there in 1956?

The answer, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is 168.9 million. In 2013, the population was 314.1 million. Keep that in mind when you read articles about transit ridership’s rebound.

The New York Times, for example, devoted 651 words to its story on the new report....

But the Times neglects to point out the larger relative term: Compared to 60 years ago (when mass transit systems were actually less comfortable; the New York City subway wasn’t even air-conditioned), transit ridership is way down. The important number, after all, isn’t total transit trips taken, it’s total transit trips divided by population. Since our population has nearly doubled since 1956, that means our transit use has been cut in half.

 

[CHamilton]

Report: Utah's 2-fold growth in commuter rail ridership in 2013 largest increase in US

Between light rail, commuter rail lines and buses, there were an all-time high 44 million rides on Utah Transit Authority transportation lines in 2013 — a 36-percent increase from a decade ago, according to data reported by transit systems nationally and released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association

 

[afigg]

Just to clarify that a bit; someone transferring from one subway line to another would NOT be counted twice on most systems. It is possible that DC's Metro & BART do, since they know where you entered & exited. But most systems don't know that, like for example the NYC system.

But a bus rider transferring to another bus would count as two rides. A bus rider transferring to either a subway or light rail train would be counted twice; a light rail to light rail transfer would count twice.

In an interesting twist, a transfer from LA's subway to the Blue line or Expo light rail lines would count twice. However, going from those light rail lines to the subway would only count once. This is because the light rail cars count passengers with automated counters, but the subway cars don't.

While NYC subway system does not directly count connecting trips, they are clearly providing APTA with estimates of the each train trip on the subway lines. I couldn't find a MTA stat for total subway ridership for 2013, but they state that the annual total of riders for 2012 was 1.654 billion. The APTA 4th quarter ridership report states 2.651 billion passenger trips in 2013 and 2.545 billion in 2012 for MTA NYCT. Only way those numbers correlate is if MTA is providing unlinked trip numbers.
The unlinked transit passenger trips are estimates with varying levels of accuracy. It will be more accurate for WMATA with entrance and exit data while the NYCT numbers are educated guess estimates based on how many entered and where. For open transit systems without faregates and only random spot checks to verify passengers have valid tickets, the error margin will be larger. Over a very large data set, the errors may roughly even out. Even if there is a bias towards undercounting, the APTA numbers provide a useful snapshot of transit trends over the past 15 years.

 

[AlanB]

So, how were trips counted back in the 50s? It seems likely you had a similar amount of double-counting in a lot of systems then, depending on how transfer tickets were counted.

In a closed system like the NYC subway, you still had turnstiles to give you counts. And I believe that they also would do some passenger counts on board the trains. For open systems, the only way was to count on the trains. They wouldn't count every train every day, just take a sampling and extrapolate from there. That was the standard for many years until Salt Lake City got caught being overly extravagant in their counting and therefore their extrapolations. At that point the FTA mandated installing automated people counters over the doors as the technology was now available. Systems with older cars had to outfit a certain percentage of the fleet with counters and then could extrapolate from there. For new cars it's just standard now.

 

[neroden]

Nationwide numbers aren't that meaningful over this long a time period. Cities which had extensive streetcar systems in 1956 and have nothing now will obviously not have their transit ridership recover.

It is more interesting to me to look at the numbers on a per-city basis; where is Phildaelphia compared to its 1956 situation, where is Houston, etc. I believe there are APTA reports which have this information, somewhere.

The Fourth Quarter Ridership Report is definitely missing some smaller systems, since I noticed immediately the absence of Dayton's trolleybuses -- maybe Dayton isn't reporting data. Ah, yes, I see a note about that, and also about Kenosha, Norfolk, and Little Rock.

If you dig into the data, there are actually a lot of year-over-year drops in ridership for 2013 (probably due to the continuing economic depression), and bus ridership in the "largest systems" put together is actually down year-over-year. This is outweighed by substantial boosts in ridership in cities which have recently reinstalled or improved rail lines, and in selected small-city bus systems.

As a side note, the inclusion of the Alaska Railroad in "commuter rail" (is that all their service or just some of it?) is an interesting classification

 

[Anderson]

Well, and in a few cases (Salt Lake, for example) you've seen a mass migration from bus to rail as the rail lines have been expanded, in no small part because the rail lines are replacing some of the busiest bus lines (and, I suspect, also "cutting" ridership by converting some bus-rail trips into all-rail).

 

[Anderson]

I decided to go ahead and dig around the report. Here's roughly what you get:
-Heavy Rail and Commuter Rail had the best years, followed by Light Rail. Buses were off slightly, with Trolleybuses off more.

Heavy Rail:

-The reason for this was Hurricane Sandy: 4th Quarter results from PATH were up 35% versus last year, though the year as a whole was flat (likely due to some spillover effects from Sandy into 2013). The New York MTA was also up about 12% for the quarter (bear in mind there was less of a disruption as far as the share of the system affected).

-The other big winner here was Miami (which if I'm not mistaken would be a result of the airport station opening in 2012), though LA Metro had a good year as well.

-WMATA was the biggest loser. If I'm not mistaken, this is down to a messy combination of construction, broken escalators, and rising fares.

Light Rail:
This was all over the place. New Orleans had a spectacular year; it seems that the new streetcar line was a hit. Denver and San Diego also had solid years, while Salt Lake chalked up gains due to system expansion. NJT showed gains...again, due to Sandy. The overall effects here were less pronounced than in heavy rail due to there being more systems (and NJT not being one of the largest). Bad years were had by Buffalo (which has documented problems mentioned on some blogs), Sacramento, and Dallas.

Commuter Rail:
First of all, the situation with a few routes should be addressed:
-Alaska Railroad: This seems to cover the "non-tourist" lines (i.e. the Denali Star/Aurora and Hurricane Turn). It definitely excludes the cruise-oriented trips (ARR indicates a total of about 400k riders, but a lot of that is cruise-related); I don't know about the two lines operating south out of Anchorage.

-Keystone: This looks to be at least partly a reworking of measurements due to PRIIA.

-San Joaquin: Ditto.

-SCRRA: I can't say for sure, but it looks like the Surfliners may have been heaped in here as well.

Overall, a lot of the spiking was due to Sandy (again). The other major cases seem to be related to service expansions (MARC got a big boost in December, for example), and I suspect you'd find something similar down in Texas.

The trolleybus stuff seems to come down to a crash in ridership in Boston...was a line converted there?

 

[WhoozOn1st]

-SCRRA: I can't say for sure, but it looks like the Surfliners may have been heaped in here as well.

Seems fair enough to include some Surfliner numbers, as through rail 2 rail (Metrolink monthly pass holders can choose Surfliners between their station pairs, including weekends), shared service, and plain old schedules Amtrak does a fair amount of lifting for Metrolink - intercity rail doing commuter rail thing.

Amtrak might haul even more commuters were it not for crews' diligence in keeping them off most Surfliners, e.g. "This is NOT a Metrolink train. If you do not have an AMTRAK ticket or reservation, or a Metrolink monthly pass, this is not your train. A Metrolink train will..." on and on, dealing with the apparently perpetual problem of people boarding the first train that shows up.

 

[Eric S]

The trolleybus stuff seems to come down to a crash in ridership in Boston...was a line converted there?

Temporarily converted due to road construction, IIRC.

 

[AlanB]

Well, and in a few cases (Salt Lake, for example) you've seen a mass migration from bus to rail as the rail lines have been expanded, in no small part because the rail lines are replacing some of the busiest bus lines (and, I suspect, also "cutting" ridership by converting some bus-rail trips into all-rail).

There has been a small decrease in bus ridership in SLC, but nothing significant. In 1998, the year before the first LRT line opened, the buses saw 24,044,494 rides taken. In 2012 the buses saw 20,151,380 rides taken. I wouldn't call that a "mass migration. This data based upon reports from the National Transit Database, which is also where APTA gets its numbers from. The NTD reports however aren't available for 2013 and I'm not going to the excel spreadsheets to get the 2013 data like APTA did.

It's also important to note that overall ridership is up; combined LRT & bus in 2012 was about 37.6 million rides taken.

 

[CHamilton]

Transit ridership booming across America

Los Angeles -- Americans are boarding public buses, trains and subways in greater numbers than any time since the suburbs began booming....
Expanding bus and train networks help spur the growth.
Ridership on Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority light-rail trains increased 6 percent over 2012, as the public took advantage of an expanded network of lines. Overall, LA Metro gained 9 million trips to reach 478 million in 2013, the transportation association said. Among the other transit systems in California with record ridership was the Caltrain commuter rail service that connects San Francisco with Silicon Valley.

 

[CHamilton]

With Ridership on the Rise, Will Congress Step Up and Invest in Transit?

Yesterday the American Public Transportation Association reported that Americans made more transit trips in 2013 than in any other year since 1956. Of course, per capita ridership is still low compared to the 1950s, and we’re nowhere near the ridership peaks of the 1940s. But when transit trips increase 1.1 percent while population rises 0.7 percent, you know change is afoot.

APTA, which is meeting in Washington this week for its legislative conference, has some ideas about how to keep the momentum going in the right direction.

It goes a little something like this: Pass a transportation bill. Make it a six-year bill — not a measly two years like the current MAP-21 bill. Raise the gas tax, pass a VMT fee, do whatever you need to do to provide a steady funding source. And then invest $100.4 billion over the next six years in transit.

 

[afigg]

WMATA Metrorail has had ridership erosion for the past several years. There were price increases several years ago which caused a dropoff, but the main erosion has been mostly on weekends and evenings the last breakdown I recall seeing from WMATA. The weekend track work service disruptions and reduced service frequencies for single tracking have really taken their toll on weekend ridership as some have have stopped taking the Metro on weekends. The DC Metro is only half way through the 6 year improvement program, so the weekend track and station work disruptions will continue until they get caught up. Phase 1 of the Silver Line will open this year (it had better) and with all the TOD going up around the Metro stations, ridership should start to increase again in 2014. But weekend and evening ridership is going to be dampened until the 6 year track work program winds down.

One thing that is worth noting in the transit numbers is the dominance of the NYC subway system in terms of all transit trips in the entire US. The NYC subway system with 2.65 billion by itself counts for 25% of the 10.7 billion trips combined from all modes that APTA is touting. More people take the NYC subway than all the other heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail systems combined.

To put the numbers in perspective, here is the APTA total by mode for 2013:

Unlinked Transit Passenger Trips by mode for 2013 in 1000s.

Heavy Rail 3,806,017 (NYCT = 2,651,804.6 or 69.7% of all heavy rail trips)

Light Rail 517,969

Commuter Rail 476,235

Trolleybus 92,697

Bus Total 5,357,870

Demand Response 212,294

Other* 189,310

* Other = Includes aerial tramway, automated guideway, cable car, ferryboat, inclined plane, monorail, and vanpool.

While NYCT is growing in ridership and expanding with the Second Ave Subway Phase 1 & No 7 extension, there are a considerable number of rail transit projects under construction or likely to start construction in the next few years across the US. I wonder how many years will it take before the combined passenger trip annual totals of all the other rail transit systems in the US equal that of just the NYC subway system? But LIRR, MNRR, PATH, NJT could also be lumped in with NYCT to compare NYC metro region with the rest of the US in terms of transit ridership.

 

[AlanB]

WMATA Metrorail has had ridership erosion for the past several years. There were price increases several years ago which caused a dropoff, but the main erosion has been mostly on weekends and evenings the last breakdown I recall seeing from WMATA. The weekend track work service disruptions and reduced service frequencies for single tracking have really taken their toll on weekend ridership as some have have stopped taking the Metro on weekends. The DC Metro is only half way through the 6 year improvement program, so the weekend track and station work disruptions will continue until they get caught up. Phase 1 of the Silver Line will open this year (it had better) and with all the TOD going up around the Metro stations, ridership should start to increase again in 2014. But weekend and evening ridership is going to be dampened until the 6 year track work program winds down.

Well I think that depends on just where you want to start measuring "the past several years." Back in 1996 WMATA saw 194,050,192 rides taken on the subway. By 2012 that had jumped to 285,306,675.

If one shortens the window to say 5 years, then yes, there has been a decline.

 

[cirdan]

Of course, the US population has increased by a lot since 1956, so reaching the highest transit ridership numbers since 1956 means that the transit market share is still well below what it was in 1956 when streetcar systems still existed in many places. Still, having public transportation grow faster than the population and VMT given the poor state of local transit systems in many US cities says that there is a shift underway.

Maybe more relevant than looking at overall population increase is increase in city populations. Outside of cities, public transit usage is still extremely marginal and this is not likely to change soon. Cities are naturally best suited to mass use of public transportation, and if you look at just the cities, or even at individual cities, I expect you'll find that usage never fell as far as it did overall, and that the rebound has been much stronger than the national average, especially in those cities that have put in urban or commuter rail, metros, streetcars, BRT etc.

 

[CHamilton]

• Why Aren’t Transit Figures in Portland, Dallas, or Wisconsin Following the Upward Trend?
• Utah Doubled Its Commuter Rail Ridership (Daily Herald)
  

Via Streetsblog

 

[WhoozOn1st]

Running behind schedule in my Op-Ed reading (slow orders, y'know) I came across the piece below in the Washington Post. These guys think that the ridership surge posited by APTA in its report that led off this thread is illusory and a distraction. However, they have an idea of what the REAL problem is, and I believe it's one with which many can agree...

"Use of public transit isn’t surging" -- http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/use-of-public-transit-isnt-surging/2014/03/20/0b44e522-b03b-11e3-95e8-39bef8e9a48b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

"Resting our hopes on a transit comeback distracts from our real transportation problem, which can be summarized in four words: Driving is too cheap. Drivers impose costs on society — in delay, in pollution, in carbon, in wear and tear on our roads — that they don’t pay for. As a result, many of us drive more than we otherwise would. Ending this underpriced driving — through higher fuel taxes, parking and congestion charges and insurance premiums based on miles driven — is a central challenge for local, state and federal transportation officials.

"Charging the right price for driving would give drivers a better-performing system, both by reducing congestion and raising revenue to help repair roads. It would help communities and the planet by reducing pollution. And, not least, it would help public transportation by leveling the playing field between transit and private vehicles. Increased subsidies for public transportation have neither reduced driving nor increased transit use. But ending subsidies to driving probably would do both."

 

[Swadian Hardcore]

IMHO, total ridership right now isn't that important, the population of the US was much lower in 1956. Percentage of population that uses transit is far more important.