Transit Ridership At Historic Peak

[CHamilton]

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

A response:

How Transit Pays for the Automobile’s Sins

An op-ed in Friday’s Washington Post by three professors of urban planning rained on the parade of transit advocates celebrating a new 57-year high in transit ridership. Ridership, the authors wrote, has actually fallen on a per-capita basis since 2008 (as has driving, by the way), as well as outside of New York City....

But here’s the thing. Comparing spending on transit with spending on highways per trip or per mile is an inherently misleading exercise. In part, that is because it fails to recognize an important fact: Much of the transit service we provide in the United States is designed specifically to cover for the failures of our lavishly subsidized car-centered transportation system....

 

[neroden]

FWIW, rail was up almost everywhere. Small-town buses were actually up too. It's the big-city buses -- which are slower than driving -- which were down.