Mass Transit: Expensive Yet Worthless

Mass transit as a means of business travel is an antiquated model more than a century out of date. It's time to re-think our infrastructure spending priorities.

With more companies opting for a hybrid office-home work arrangement, the need for commuting daily to work is trending downward. This is relieving traffic in some metro areas, but it is also exacerbating a multi-year decline is the use of mass transit.

It is no secret that transit agencies have seen a steep decline in ridership for decades. That’s because mass transit as a means of business travel is an antiquated model more than a century out of date.

In 1890, when American cities were rapidly installing electric streetcars, most urban jobs were located downtown and streetcar lines ran from downtown hubs to transport people to and from work. Few jobs existed in the suburbs aside from service, farming and mining.

Look at Where the Jobs are Now

Today, less than 10 percent of jobs are in downtown areas. Large urban cities, such as Los Angeles and Houston, have multiple job centers that are larger than in the downtown sector, yet transit in these cities still have hub-and-spoke rail systems centered around their respective downtowns.

In the U.S., miles driven by automobiles in May 2021 rose to 96 percent of levels in May 2019. However, transit ridership in 2021 is only 42 percent of 2019 levels. Add to this fact that transit is heavily subsidized – getting nearly 80 percent of funding from various government sources – and the trends against transit begin to mount.

Even in New York City, known for its broad system of subways and its downtown-centered job pool, subway ridership has only recovered to 30 percent of 2019 levels and is showing no signs of further gain. The drop in ridership revenue will surely result in additional government subsidies and a reduction in service as the system struggles with empty seats caused by the combination of telecommuting technologies, job relocation and fear of crowds.

Urban planners have insisted that the decline in mass transit can be mitigated through the installation of light rail transit, and cities such as Charlotte, NC and Denver, CO have indeed won new rail riders. But this gain has come at the loss of 2.5 bus riders for every new rail rider. Dallas, TX, Los Angeles, CA, and Salt Lake City, UT have lost both rail and bus riders after spending billions of dollars on light rail transit.

Here’s another reality: Just 4.3 percent of U.S. workers live in households without cars, and 58 percent of these workers don’t rely on mass transit to get to work. If transit doesn’t even appeal to people who don’t have cars, how can it appeal to those who do?

Urban Planning Run Amok

There are a lot of bad ideas floating around on how to increase transit usage, including the notion that we must make driving more expensive in order to increase transit’s appeal. Some are proposing a redesign of American cities to serve obsolete transit systems – forcing more jobs downtown, building high density transit developments, and allocating more street area for dedicated bus lanes. Enormous changes in urban planning, city design and human behavior are needed to get even a small uptick in transit usage.

Case in point: Seattle, WA. Land use policies and tax subsidies increased the city’s population density by 25 percent since 2000 and increased the number of jobs to 281,000, up from 215,000. These policies, however, came at a terrible cost; housing is no longer affordable and traffic into and out of downtown is gridlocked most hours of the day. Seattle gained 190,000 daily auto commuters but only added daily 58,000 transit users.

Or how about Minneapolis, MN? In 1973, Congress began issuing funds for light rail systems in major cities across the country, and Minneapolis stepped right up. The result is not impressive; light rail systems in Minneapolis carry far less passengers at a slower rate than its bus system and requires a $50 subsidy for each one-way passenger trip. For the same cost as its North Star light rail system, Minneapolis could have given every daily round-trip commuter-train rider a brand new Toyota Prius every single year for the next 30 years.

In 2008, California voters were promised a light rail system connecting Los Angeles to the Bay Area. The project was initially budgeted at $33 billion but is now estimated to cost $100 billion or more. It was supposed to be completed in 2020 but is now projected for completion in 2025. Maybe the scaled-back 171-mile segment from Bakersfield to Merced – a train from nowhere to nowhere – will be completed at some point. Or maybe it will not be completed at all, depending on the need for additional funding from government sources. Never mind the need to bore through a few mountain ranges.

What About the Environment?

To those who claim that rail transit helps the environment, a Cato Institute study reports that rail transit actually consumes more energy per passenger mile and produces more greenhouse gases than the average passenger automobile when you consider the extensive feeder bus system (with comparatively lower ridership than municipal buses) that delivers passengers to the trains. So much for green solutions.

Is all of this worth billions of dollars in annual spending? Is mass transit in general just a pipe dream of urban planners? Have we crossed over long ago into different travel and commuting habits that render mass transit obsolete?

Why are billions being spent on transit and infrastructure that hardly anyone will use? It is clear to many that the key constituencies for this spending are not transit riders, but union transit workers and the light rail companies who build and service these systems under contract for years.

We have reached the point that, outside of New York City, hardly anyone needs mass transit anymore. With the availability of ride-hailing services to pick up the remaining transit passengers out there, the argument that we urgently need transit simply cannot be made in today’s world.

Transportation spending should be re-directed toward building roads and the supporting infrastructure. Americans use highways for 87 percent of their passenger miles, while they use Amtrak and transit for about 1 percent. The trend away from mass transit is permanent, and transportation spending should reflect this reality.