
Why the Media Fixation on “Transit Is Failing” Stories? - another
http://humantransit.org/2016/04/why-the-media-fixation-on-transit-is-failing-stories.html
======
kazinator
People love to hate public transit, and will click on any headline that
promises to fuel their sentiment.

In particular, people who commute using single-occupancy vehicles are happy to
read anything which externalizes and validates their views about the viability
of transit.

~~~
mwfunk
Can't you just use the same logic to make the opposite point?

"In particular, people who commute using public transit are happy to read
anything which externalizes and validates their views about the viability of
single-occupancy vehicles."

In general, it's not constructive to make arguments based on questioning the
motivations of people you disagree with. I try to always assume rationality
and good faith on the part of everyone, even when they appear to be
brainwashed or just plain crazy from a distance. Trying to figure out why
people might be irrationally disagreeing with you is a lot less useful than
trying to figure out why people are rationally disagreeing with you, even when
they are being irrational (because aren't we all, in one way or another?).

~~~
zardo
I don't know, with that kind of thinking your inevitably going to question
your own rationale for believing what you do. And who knows where that could
go.

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barney54
I think the reason has to do with the perception that ridership should be
rapidly increasing and it isn't. Population is up, urbanization, is up, but
public transit isn't keeping pace. That's an interesting story because it is
non-obvious. I don't think there much else to the media fixation than that.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Building good rail transit infrastructure takes a pretty long time, and it's
very expensive. You can also have good bus service, but having it competitive
with driving usually requires bus-only lanes, and that's a difficult
proposition in America. If you look at Seattle, for example, people there are
desperate for new transit, and they want it done as soon as possible, but the
timelines for the upcoming ST3 package have most of it taking upwards of a
couple decades to complete.

For most Americans, getting around means driving, and other modes are seen as
either impractical (walking), a toy (biking), or just for the poor (transit).
It's a relatively difficult culture in which to improve alternative modes of
transport.

~~~
CamperBob2
_For most Americans, getting around means driving, and other modes are seen as
either impractical (walking), a toy (biking), or just for the poor (transit).
It 's a relatively difficult culture in which to improve alternative modes of
transport._

Self-driving cars will go a long way towards improving this. The focus needs
to be on avoiding silly mistakes in the meantime, like sinking billions of
dollars into new fixed-rail transit routes that will be obsolete the day they
enter service.

~~~
sandworm101
Self-driving is also a long way off in terms of the entire fleet. Poor people
aren't driving new teslas. Even if every new car sold is non-human drivable,
it will take a couple decades before the entire fleet is wholly autodrive. It
would also be naïve to assume that any future tech will dominate the market
when there isn't even a product yet in the market. City planners cannot take
autodrive for granted.

(imho it won't ever happen. People like driving cars, but that is a different
debate)

~~~
CamperBob2
_Even if every new car sold is non-human drivable, it will take a couple
decades before the entire fleet is wholly autodrive._

Coincidentally, that's about how long a typical urban rail transit project
takes these days. Here in the Seattle area, we're looking at a 30+ year
timeline for light rail construction. In military parlance this is known as
"fighting the last war."

 _It would also be naïve to assume that any future tech will dominate the
market when there isn 't even a product yet in the market. City planners
cannot take autodrive for granted. (imho it won't ever happen. People like
driving cars, but that is a different debate)_

I like to drive, too, and I spend an unreasonable proportion of my own money
on cool cars. But the fact is that self-driving tech will turn driving into a
hobby rather than a necessity. Right now, our "hobby" kills about 30,000
people per year in the US alone.

The transition away from human drivers will look like an example of punctuated
equilibrium. It may seem like little progress is being made, but we'll all
wake up one morning and discover that the status quo has become impossible to
justify. Life (and death) on the roads will change faster than almost anyone
can imagine.

 _Poor people aren 't driving new teslas._

Not a problem, because the idea that everybody has to own one or two cars to
be a full-fledged adult is going to become obsolete at around the same time.

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massysett
In Washington DC it has taken over ten years of crashes, worker and passenger
fatalities, and awful service for the press to start telling "Metro is
failing" stories. Up until then the stories generally were positive.

~~~
saulrh
Out of curiosity - per day or week: how many people ride the DC Metro, how
many people die on the Metro, how many people drive, and how many people die
driving? Metro services have the same issue as airlines in that a non-issue
failure rate ends up reviled in the news because there's the same name
attached to every single incident and everybody is completely failing to group
up the alternatives to examine them.

Bad service I can agree with - that's something that needs to be fixed. More
money, supportive legislation that makes it easier for them to acquire
capability, etcetera. But unless the Metro is killing someone _literally every
day_ I doubt its fatality rate approaches cars.

~~~
massysett
Metro's problem is gross and chronic mismanagement. Not a single fatality or
injury on Metro has been attributed to lack of money. So they do not need more
money or legislation to make it easier for them to acquire anything. A common
bogeyman among Metro apologists is "lack of dedicated funding," even though no
one has shown any link between this lack of dedicated funding and any of the
problems Metro is facing.

The airlines are an excellent example of how regulation and safety
consciousness can succeed in creating an extremely safe means of
transportation. Causes of mishaps are tracked down and fixed. Meanwhile Metro
kills people due to gross mismanagement.

I do not think "more people die driving" is an excuse for gross mismanagement
in a government agency.

------
rchowe
Public transit is a very visible part of government for people who live in
cities that have it, and it's controversial because it's partially financed
with taxpayer money whether you use it or not.

I feel like especially in southern California, there are a lot of people in
the suburbs who don't use public transit and who feel like the money spent on
transit ("moving poor people around") should go to road projects instead which
benefit them.

I was recently in Miami, and my friend who lives there said to use Lyft
instead of taking the bus or the metro, because "it's only used by poor
people". I compare this to Boston, where people complain about MBTA crowds and
management, but in general if you're near a subway stop you'll take the subway
over Uber of Lyft (when it's running).

~~~
TulliusCicero
> it's controversial because it's partially financed with taxpayer money
> whether you use it or not.

This is true of every form of transportation. It's just that motorists are
frequently unaware of how their preferred mode is subsidized by the
government.

~~~
twoodfin
Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic benefit.

This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road
construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and the
system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

The same is not true of most public transit systems.

Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for
suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is
directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> Actual cash subsidies for roads are minimal relative to the economic
> benefit.

Sure, but that's true of every mode of transportation, that's why we use taxes
to also build sidewalks, light rail, bike lanes, etc. On an absolute level,
subsidies for roads are still very large. And while some level of available
roads is obviously necessary, we really overbuild to support our sprawly
development style.

> This is another way to say that you could eliminate all subsidies on road
> construction/maintenance, make everyone pay a sufficient per-mile tax, and
> the system would continue successfully more-or-less as it exists today

Well, except that poor and working class people would probably not be able to
use it much anymore. Paying for infrastructure via most taxes is inherently
redestributive (exception for gas tax, obviously).

I'm actually generally for some more market-oriented policies around cars
though. Congestion charges and parking fees are a great idea.

> The same is not true of most public transit systems.

I mean, the poor make up a larger % of transit riders, particularly in the US,
so looking at it that way yes the impact would be larger.

> Now you can start arguing about implicit and explicit subsidies for
> suburbanization over the decades, but in the here-and-now, public transit is
> directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

No, you're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily
subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a
user fee).

~~~
twoodfin
_No, you 're simply wrong. Road construction and maintenance is heavily
subsidized by taxes other than the gas tax (which of course works more like a
user fee)._

You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all
transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive (as you
admit in your other comment they do in Europe at much higher rates). Very few
public transportation systems would.

If your definition for "subsidized" is "receives some amount of funding from
general revenue, or forbearance for hard-to-capture externality", then just
about every commercial aspect of our lives is "subsidized" in one way or
another and the term fails to have much meaning.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> You're missing the distinction I'm drawing: If all funding for all
> transportation schemes was entirely user-derived, roads would survive

That's very intellectually disingenuous. Whether one form of transport _could_
survive sans subsidy is orthogonal to whether they're receiving large public
subsidies right now. You said

> public transit is directly subsidized in a way that roads are not.

which is flat out wrong. Yes, roads probably do not _have_ to be subsidized,
and they'd still be around at least for freight transport and the affluent,
but right now, they are still heavily subsidized.

------
cptskippy
Is it just me or does the type of chart used only make it harder to interpret
things?

Why not plot actual numbers for population and ridership on a chart instead of
% change relative to 2001? It seems deceptive.

------
strommen
Maybe I need to take off my tin-foil hat - but I think this reads exactly as
if somebody paid the newspaper to write a story about the "failure of mass
transit", and the writers/editors snuck in this graph as a hidden message.

~~~
code_sloth
I'm interpreting that chart as tracking the year on year percentage
increase/decrease of the population and ridership.

So the population has more or less been increasing year on year since 2005,
with a near zero decline prior to that.

The ridership has gone through a steep decrease which bottomed out at -35% in
~2005. Sure it's been decreasing less, but isn't it still decreasing? The
ridership line is flat near the end, but isn't it still decreasing at more
than 20% year on year?

How else can the chart be read? How am I reading it wrong?

~~~
strommen
The chart label of "% change since 2001" is pretty unclear, but based on the
quote "ridership...has dropped a staggering 23 percent since 2001", it seems
to mean "% _difference_ from 2001", not "% change year-to-year, since 2001".

------
mc32
It may have to do with for example, the VTA expanding service (in miles of
track) but the ridership not going up to match. Also, rail in places like the
bay area, or even buses, just can't justify the opex given the relatively
light ridership. Mass transit is rarely profitable (financially self
sustaining) but many transit systems, given housing density and
commercial/residential patterns, in the US, are woefully in deficits.

Edit: To add, I mean this in terms of more than just the high density
corridors and terminus to terminus lines. I mean if you live in Almaden Valley
and want to get to East San Jose or you want to get to Milpitas. Or if you
want to get from The Marina in SF to the Outer Sunset. Most SF transit is
designed to pull people in and out of the old downtown core (even MUNI uses
the terms "inbound" and outbound" which tell you a lot about the passenger
flow they had in mind. There is no "ring" line or N-S LRVs in SF.

~~~
occamrazor
Public transit has huge positive externalities in terms of reduced traffic. I
think that in Europe on average tickets cover only 25% of expenses.

~~~
mc32
It really depends. Many large metro systems in Asia do better than 100%
farebox recovery. Europe hovers between 30 to 60%. In the US anything above
35% is pretty remarkable -and there are a few over 50% but not many. Most
recover less than 30% from their boxfare. And that's mostly due to being too
"diluted". You have lines in suburban-like areas who cannot sustain the lines
via ridership.

I'm a fan of public transit I love punctual, clean, timely, dependable mass
transit, but I realize it may not be the best answer for agglomerations like
we have in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties in the Bay area or Dallas-Ft
Worth, TX.

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Scoundreller
I'm hoping the failure of transit leads into a 32-hour/4-day work week media
fixation... Overnight 20% reduction in load = dramatically faster service and
reduced congestion.

~~~
oceanplexian
Plus basic income bitcoins as a service and uber, but for light rail. Am I
right, guys?

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fucking_tragedy
It plays into the "ridesharing is the future" narrative that pulls in the big
bucks.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
Don't forget the self-driving cars!

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gaur
Reminds me of Paul Graham's article about newspapers shilling for suit
companies:
[http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

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throwaway_exer
As a long-time rider, the VTA infrastructure is excellent, and the route
coverage is good. It even has wifi.

In the short-term, if buses left and arrived on time, that would be a helpful
improvement. Longer-term, ride analysis from Clipper data could optimize
routes and frequencies.

When looking at farebox recovery numbers, remember that the bloated
bureaucracy, driver salaries and pensions have to be paid from that.

Doubling the speed of the light rail would make it much more usable.

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enraged_camel
I have zero evidence of this, but having witnessed Uber and Lyft spending over
$8 million dollars trying to pass pro-ridesharing legislation here in Austin
(which failed, thankfully), I can't help but wonder if these types of "Transit
is Failing" stories might be their astroturfers/PR agencies at work.

Think about it: as a ridesharing company, the more you convince people that
public transit is in bad shape and getting worse everyday, the more they will
clamor for your ridesharing service.

~~~
mistermann
> which failed, thankfully

Why are you opposed to Uber & Lyft?

~~~
cantankerous
OP implied he was opposed to the ride-sharing legislation and related
initiatives. Not Uber and Lyft.

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orasis
This is California specific. Don't bother reading if you thought the title was
about larger scale trends.

~~~
dsr_
Please don't post any comments about how you live in Montana, then.

In the meantime, I thought that it was not merely an interesting article about
a particular newspaper in a particular place, but an interesting observation
about how to lie with graphs and what interests newspapers really serve.

