A little bit of balance
Jarrett Walker responds to the ‘transit isn’t green ’cause it runs empty’ argument in his Human Transit blog:
If public transit agencies were charged exclusively with maximizing their ridership, and all the green benefits that follow from that, they could move their empty buses to run in places where they’d be full. Every competent transit planner knows how to do this.
Just abandon all service in low-density areas, typically outer suburbs, and shift all these resources to run even more frequent and attractive service where densities are high, such as inner cities….
The outcry would be tremendous, the politics toxic, the prospects for implementation zero. I would never propose it. But there’s no question that such a service change would dramatically increase ridership, dramatically reduce the number of empty buses, and thus improve how transit scores on the kind of tally that Cox and his allies propose.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, transit agencies have to balance contradictory demands to (a) maximize ridership and (b) provide a little bit of service everywhere regardless of ridership, both to meet demands for ‘equity’ and to serve the needs of transit-dependent persons.
the prospects for implementation zero.
somebody please tell all the agencies that have drastically cut service, and all the other agencies that are about to…
But Jarrets argument is also why increasing transit budgets fails to actually deliver environmental benefits. Most of the US doesn’t live in Manhattan, it lives in suburban communities with fairly low population densities. In these areas the buses are running mostly empty most of the day and most of the night primarily to serve populations that are too poor to buy a car.
Spending more money on transit for this population makes the lives of the poor people in these communities better, but really doesn’t deliver any type of environmental benefit.
Yet in the US transit advocates try to argue that transit delivers some type of environmental benefits when it for most areas of the country it fails to deliver that benefit.
First and foremost, a [government/publicly operated] transit service is a public service.
There are many public service entities that require subsidies and do not make a profit.
To expect a public service to operate at commercial efficiencies and under commercial principles (i.e. demonstrable business cases), while an admirable goal, would, in many cases, undermine the transit service’s mandate.
Jarrett is quite wrong. The notion that all of the excess capacity can be identified by location is not at all accurate. It’s time of day that’s the fundamental and unresolvable problem, peak versus non peak hours.