You have to be surprised by this factoid:
Last year nationwide usage of mass transit was the highest since 1956—a
recent New York Times report gives credit to improved service, local economic
growth in some areas and the folks who don’t grab the car keys when they head
to work in the morning.
But then WashingtonPost.com took the bloom off the rose:
Transit use expressed as “trips per capita” is actually declining when
you factor in population growth, and in fact, mass transit use is tanking
everywhere except in New York City.
The Times said there were 10,650,000,000 passenger trips on buses,
trains and subways in 2013, yes, that number is 10.65 billion….
It said an encouraging item is that the volume gain in mass transit use
wasn’t significantly driven by high gas prices—prices at the pump were well
under $4.00 a gallon.
The American Public Transportation Association noted “We’re seeing that where cities have invested in transit, their
unemployment rates have dropped, and employment is going up because people can
get there [to their jobs].”
Yet, the declining number of transit trips per person calls into
question our public funding policies that give 20% of U.S. surface
transportation subsidies to mass transit, which accounts for less than 3% of
passenger trips and passenger miles.
The
Washington Post writers go deeper:
“So
there is no national transit boom . . . Resting our hopes on a transit comeback
distracts from our real transportation problem, which can be summarized in four
words: Driving is too cheap.
Drivers impose costs on society — in delay, in
pollution, in carbon, in wear and tear on our roads — that they don’t pay for.
As a result, many of us drive more than we otherwise would. Ending this
underpriced driving — through higher fuel taxes, parking and congestion charges
and insurance premiums based on miles driven — is a central challenge for
local, state and federal transportation officials . . . Increased subsidies for
public transportation have neither reduced driving nor increased transit use.
But ending subsidies to driving probably would do both.
Ending
these subsidies will be hard work, politically. Yet we will have no incentive
to do this work if Americans continue to believe that transit is making a
comeback on its own. It isn’t. Transit, like the rest of our transportation
system, is in trouble. We need to act quickly to save it.”
We
need to cut our use of private vehicles that burn fossil fuel. More usage of
mass transit—and the accompanying reduction in carbon dioxide going into the
atmosphere—is a step in the right direction toward mitigating the dangerous
impact of human-caused global climate change and global warming.
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