Transportation For America » Despite new challenges, Americans continue flocking to public transportation

Despite new challenges, Americans continue flocking to public transportation

June 16, 2009
By Andrew Bielak

This week, the American Public Transportation Association released their ridership numbers for the first quarter (January through March) of 2009, and confirmed something that we’ve been suspecting: Despite facing a dismal economy, deep cuts in service, and painful fare increases, Americans are continuing to use public transportation in near record numbers.

As we’ve been documenting on our transit cuts page and interactive map, nearly 100 transit agencies have already cut service, raised fares, laid off workers — or are considering cuts of some kind to cope with the severe budget crises facing counties, towns and cities across the country. Nevertheless, as the new report from APTA shows, total ridership reached 2.6 million in the first three months of 2009 — nearly matching last year’s record numbers — and proving that public transportation is critical to American’s livelihood, even if it has become less accessible and affordable for many.

While these cutbacks have caused many agencies to lose some riders, many others are doing more than just hanging on in these tough times:

King County Department of Transportation in Seattle reported a 16.8% increase in light rail ridership, despite increasing fares earlier this year.
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority in Boston logged a 5.4% increase in ridership on its commuter rail system, in spite of a budget crisis that is prompting talks of a 15 to 20% fare increase, along with service cuts.
The San Diego Metropolitan Transit System experienced a 5.3% jump in ridership on its bus system, despite eliminating numerous bus routes and cutting others earlier this year.

While this crisis is causing extreme hardship for many agencies, most of them (specifically, those that service metro areas with more than 200,000 people) are not allowed to use federal dollars to help run their buses and rail systems. Congress recently approved legislation that allows 10 percent of the stimulus funds to be used on operating assistance, but this will not continue once those recovery funds run out.

U.S. Representative Russ Carnahan of St. Louis — one of the cities hardest hit by transit cuts — is sponsoring a bill that would allow transit agencies to plug the holes in their operating budgets with federal dollars on a permanent basis. Let’s make sure we get behind Rep. Carnahan and the others are working to rebuild our economy with a revitalized transportation system.

joshuadf

What’s the source on the Seattle figure? Metro doesn’t actually run the light rail, SoundTransit does, and the central line doesn’t even open until July. I suspect you mean the Sounder commuter rail, or maybe Metro buses.
andrew.bielak

The source is the first quarter ridership stats from the American Public Transportation Association. In the section for King County, it has a line for light rail which shows a 16.8% increase…Is there something we’re missing there?
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RJK

Sound Transit does not run the Seattle Streetcar. The City of Seattle owns the Streetcar, and has an operations/maintenance agreement with King County Metro to run the system. That’s probably why KCM has a “light rail” line item under APTA’s numbers.
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joshuadf

Ah, I forgot the streetcar could be considered “light rail”, thanks.
Tom Rubin

I’m not sure that the proposed legislation to allow a percentage of the ARRA (“stimulus”) funds for operating subsidies as, depending upon how it is phrased, it could actualy reduce the mount used in this way for many agencies.
Most of the transit funding here is 49 USC 5307, the standard FTA “formula” program. Technically, there are limitations on how much can be utilized for operations, but, as a practical matter, these limitations are not enforced — as is obvious to anyone who checks out the data in the FTA National Transit Database.
It would certainly be nice to have Congress make the actual national practice, which FTA is either totally unaware of, or has been doing an outstanding job of not finding out about it, for years.
But, if an “up to” limit is placed into statute, that is a bit harder to ignore.