Fun with Bus Funds

By Fester:

USA Today is reporting that mass transit ridership is at record levels and initial near real time reports indicate continued gains in ridership:

More people are riding the nation's buses and trains, breaking records for the first quarter of the year. Transit operators expect the increase to be greater in the second quarter as gasoline prices soar.

A report set for release today by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) shows trips on public transit January-March rose 3% over the same period last year to 2.6 billion rides. Light rails saw the biggest jump: 10% to 110 million trips.

Early figures for April show ridership going even higher as gas hovers near $4 a gallon, says APTA president William Millar.

However there is a problem that will be emerging and that is financing increased services.  Most if not all mass transit agencies receive local, state and federal capital and operational subsidies.  This is not unusual as all transit modes receive some type of public subsidy.  However mass transit is seen as a weaker client with a strong claim than the automobile claim which is a stronger political client with a weaker claim on the merits.  Weak clients produce weak support. And given weak state and local budgets as revenues shrink and claims increase in a pro-cyclical pattern, public transit is often one of the first areas cut after social services.   

Chris Briem at NullSpace looks at how this cycle has impacted the Pittsburgh region as our local mass transit agency, PAT, has already engaged in several signifcant reductions in services to balance its books over the past few years:

This all reminds me of the Port Authority route cuts last year. Now as gas prices are hitting $4/gallon, people are actually thinking about switching their mode of commuting. How many folks that might have switched to a bus last year can't now because their route was eliminated. The cuts were concentrated in the longer and, in the past, less used routes to the suburbs. Yet, those were the routes that really served the marginal transit riders which are most likely to switch to riding the bus as gas prices go up.....

So to cure (or is that partially cure?) the Port Authority's short term budget woes, the cuts implemented were precisely the routes that could be enticing new riders out of their cars and onto public transit right now. Maybe the Port Authority should be thinking about putting back some of those routes? But no, while most parts of the country is at least thinking of how to leverage public transit to deal with current energy costs, the only debate that is going here is over the drink tax....

The routes with high ridership are on the whole already in place as they have the strongest claim to continued service on cost-efficency and effectiveness grounds.  It is the more marginal routes that can actually benefit from a change in the bus v. ride cost benefit analysis that are at the most risk of being cut-back as states seek to save an expensive dollar.  And this story is played out in advance in Pittsburgh but it will continue to play out across the country as there is a demand, service and resource mismatch.