Monday, December 22, 2014
Cheap gas prices not a problem
Not if you don't have a car. As part of the next generations move away from cars, the use of public transport is increasing. People who found public transport could work for them are staying with it even with the drop in gas prices.
Riders like Mr. Needham get a lot of value from public transportation, as do people in many other cities where investment in transit is leading to record-high ridership rates and persuading more people to leave their cars at home despite the latest plunge in gasoline prices.Cities that have not had their transit systems dismantled at the behest of Big Auto & Big Oil are seeing increased usage by people who no longer want the hassle of cars. The downside of this is that too many people live in areas where public transport does not meet their needs. And it won't until the Republican menace is smashed,
The American Public Transportation Association said Wednesday that about 2.7 billion passenger trips were taken on transit systems in the third quarter of 2014 — an increase of 1.8 percent, or about 48 million trips, over the year-ago period — the highest third-quarter number since the trade group’s records began in 1974.
Cities with increased ridership include San Francisco, Chicago and New York, all of which reported annual increases in the number of riders for the both the latest quarter and the first nine months of 2014.
The national increase, which follows a 57-year high in ridership for all of 2013, reflects improvements in the reach, trip frequency and quality of public transportation, and weakens a traditional link between gas prices and transit use, said Michael Melaniphy, president of the association.
While previous spikes in transit use resulted from increased gasoline prices, and people would typically get back in their cars when gas prices retreated, that relationship is unraveling as transit services improve, Mr. Melaniphy said.
The latest evidence of a break in the link is an increase in ridership at a time when retail gasoline prices have fallen to their lowest in more than four years, he said.
“People are saying, ‘I came because of fuel prices; I’m staying because of the experience,’ ” he said.
With 60 percent of transit trips made by people commuting to work, the increased ridership is also fueled by a strengthening economic recovery that generates more jobs, and by improvements such as more frequent service and the availability of apps that offer users real-time updates on transit services.
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Our problem here in the SF Bay Area is that transit ridership has reached levels that strain the limits of the mass transit infrastructure. CalTrain has no more engines and cars to put on the tracks at peak hours, same with BART, even the much derided VTA light rail is packed solid at peak commute hours, and all of this is *with* the Libertopian Google and Apple busses hauling tens of thousands of tech workers per hour. Unfortunately it will take years to get enough capacity to take care of the demand for mass transit here, BART's cars have to be custom built (BART decided on a wider gauge than normal to help keep trains from being blown off the Golden Gate Bridge back when the plan was to run the trains across the bridge, a plan that was never adopted because Marin County dropped out of the BART coalition but the legacy lives on), and CalTrain wants to electrify their tracks both to reduce costs and to have faster service (because electric trains can accelerate faster than diesel trains), both of which are going to take time and money to accomplish.
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