Snapping up the marginal riders
The rise in gas prices is causing some people to switch to mass transit:
"It's costing people twice as much per gallon of gasoline today as it did about a year ago, and so the likelihood that more people will look to Metro to get them to work, to meetings or to a ball game is greater now than it was just a few weeks ago," Metro General Manager and Chief Executive Richard White warned, urging commuters to avoid the Metro during rush hour.
Despite the warning, ridership on the Metro during the first two weeks of September was up more than 4 percent from August and more than 10 percent from a year ago.
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In famously car-addicted Los Angeles, ridership on city buses and subways jumped 7.82 percent in August, while ridership on the Metro-Link, the regional commuter rail service for the metropolitan area, rose 6 percent, the largest monthly increase since last November.
Well, congrats for making up for falling behind population growth all those years, guys.
But seriously, factoring in population growth, a 10 percent increase in transit ridership after a year during which gasoline prices nearly doubled? That's pretty lame and mainly due to the fact that for many drivers, mass transit isn't a viable option. It's lamer still (sorry for the 9th Grade vocab, but that's where the transit debate has been stuck for all these years) that the increase in ridership doesn't improve the fiscal picture for transit agencies that are also suffering from high gas and diesel costs.
Agencies lose , riders lose, drivers lose.
Remind me again why Dulles Rail and the Purple Line are still multibillion dollar pipe dreams.
Post Author:
rj3 | 05:20 PM |
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Well, since you asked, my take is this. People consent to government spending on mass transit when they are users of mass transit. I'm a user of mass transit, and I would love the goverment to spend a little more on it. But the unfortunate reality is that much of America sprang up when the automobile was the latest and greatest technology. For most people, the automobile is so ingrained in their culture that they would consider it the worst indignity to have to squeeze in next to someone on the bus or the metro, as I do every day. European communities, being older on the whole, had a chance to develop mass transit ridership before automobiles were generally available. Most American communities did not.
