APTA Quarterly Transit Ridership Reports

[miketoronto]

Originally Posted by Innsertnamehere

Ottawa is likely dropping for the same reasons Washington is, federal government layoffs. LRT construction is also probably hampering ridership.

Or Ottawa's $20 million dollar cut to transit service a year or two ago is chasing people away from transit??????????

Ottawa overall had population growth, job growth, and traffic growth. So why would transit not continue to grow ridership?

Asking people to wait for less frequent buses, asking people to walk further to transit, and not enforcing development controls to build workplaces near transit, I think is the biggest reason for ridership decline.

[lrt's friend]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Or Ottawa's $20 million dollar cut to transit service a year or two is chasing people away from transit??????????

Ottawa overall had population growth, job growth, and traffic growth. So why would transit not continue to grow ridership?

Asking people to wait for less frequent buses, asking people to walk further to transit, and not enforcing development controls to build workplaces near transit, I think is the biggest reason for ridership decline.

Transit officials keep indicating that the main problem is federal layoffs. I am sure it is a factor. However, I believe it is a complexity of factors. Beyond the service cut a few years back, there have been further silent cuts because of the downtown congestion problem. Larger buses have been introduced into residential areas to address that and therefore fewer buses are needed to move the same number of people. Of course, that means lower frequency and longer waits. With the introduction of larger buses, the service further slows down because these bigger buses have to stop more frequently when handling more passengers. On top of this, there has been a movement of federal jobs from central locations to suburban areas, which are more difficult to serve efficiently by transit. In most cases, those locations are poorly located with respect to the rapid transit system. To be fair, most of these new suburban federal employment areas were formerly private sector or were legacy locations established before rapid transit planning began. There is, however, some lack coordination between federal and municipal planning. Also, because of strict and self-imposed municipal budget constraints partly the result of the massive investment going into building the new LRT subway, there is little current investment in transit improvements where ridership growth might be expected. We are going through a quiet period pending the opening of the subway in 2018.

My long-term concern is that while the city is decentralizing, the transit system is being further centralized. I question whether this will be effectively serving the city in the future.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Or Ottawa's $20 million dollar cut to transit service a year or two is chasing people away from transit??????????

Ottawa overall had population growth, job growth, and traffic growth. So why would transit not continue to grow ridership?

Because the federal government has cut tens of thousands of jobs ever since the Conservatives came into power. And Ottawa happens to be the capital of Canada. Less workers means less people using transit, simple as that.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by Doady

Because the federal government has cut tens of thousands of jobs ever since the Conservatives came into power. And Ottawa happens to be the capital of Canada. Less workers means less people using transit, simple as that.

We have seen the same effect in Sacramento. Most California government jobs are concentrated in downtown Sacramento, so the area's transit agency built out a downtown-centric light rail and bus system. When the state cut tens of thousands of jobs during and after the Great Recession, RT ridership dropped accordingly. And it's still down.

[Wizened Variations]

For the good data miners out there:

I would like to see information on a) the total number of jobs in metro areas, and, b) the number of jobs in the urban core, in major US metropolitan areas. Dividing the city core job number by the metropolitan job number would provide a percentage working in the core.

[Doady]

Originally Posted by fflint

We have seen the same effect in Sacramento. Most California government jobs are concentrated in downtown Sacramento, so the area's transit agency built out a downtown-centric light rail and bus system. When the state cut tens of thousands of jobs during and after the Great Recession, RT ridership dropped accordingly. And it's still down.

Yeah, the downtown focus is important to consider. People who lost jobs in Sacramento may have gotten new jobs, but these jobs might not necessarily be located downtown. Ottawa has an extremely downtown-focused system too (designed for one-seat bus rides from the suburbs to downtown), so it's the same problem.

[SFUVancouver]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Or Ottawa's $20 million dollar cut to transit service a year or two is chasing people away from transit??????????

Ottawa overall had population growth, job growth, and traffic growth. So why would transit not continue to grow ridership?

Asking people to wait for less frequent buses, asking people to walk further to transit...

Metro Vancouver's Translink has experienced some of this as well. It has 'optimized' bus service hours away from under-performing routes and reallocated them to busier routes and I suspect that this is cutting into transit use in the suburbs without a commensurate increase in busy urban areas since the extra service hours aren't necessarily service improvements so much as catching up on existing demand.

As for development controls and channelling new employment development into areas, the super majority of new office development in Metro Vancouver that is in the development pipeline or under construction is adjacent to rapid transit or within easy walking distance with pedestrian facilities (sidewalks, crosswalks, etc.). This is extremely encouraging from a land use and transportation point of view and the conventional wisdom within the leasing and commercial development community is that the market for office product wants to be on rapid transit corridors and in close vicinity to stations. That doesn't mean that non-transit accessible office development is not occurring, but it is in the distinct minority region-wide.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Wizened Variations

For the good data miners out there:

I would like to see information on a) the total number of jobs in metro areas, and, b) the number of jobs in the urban core, in major US metropolitan areas. Dividing the city core job number by the metropolitan job number would provide a percentage working in the core.

That would require defining the "core." Nobody has established that in any way that would make comparisons even remotely parallel.

It's just like the repeated SSP discussions of what's "downtown." Nobody has even remotely come close to a standard definition.

In the latter case, the results are often laughable. Brookings, in an oft-quoted 1990s study about downtown residential populations, let someone from each city come up with their definition...and they ranged from the whole city-of to a square mile! That's roughly equal to what commercial real estate brokerages do, with similar variation, although in their case the statistics are only to support their markets, not compare downtowns.

[miketoronto]

I am not saying the federal government jobs are not important.
But the fact is that Ottawa as a region is still growing despite federal government cuts. The federal government is not the only employer in the region, and if your population and job counts are going up. Then transit should be as well.

Ottawa did such a great job of growing transit ridership in the 70's and 80's. In fact it was one of the only western world cities to turn around the fortunes of transit to such a high degree, with an almost doubling of per capita ridership numbers.

There is no reason this cannot continue. But the planners blaming federal government job cuts is not going to do that.
What needs to be addressed is the fact that the routing structure is too complex, buses in suburban areas operate at infrequent levels, many areas feature service which ends much too early, and Ottawa has become lax with mandating office development be built on the transitway.

Both Toronto and Ottawa were models with directing development onto rapid transit corridors. But both cities have been lax with this in the past 20 years, and it is showing with stagnant transit usage rates on a percentage basis.

Sometimes service optimization is good, if it is done properly. But you cannot cut $20 million dollars of service, and not expect it to have an effect on ridership.

[Wizened Variations]

Originally Posted by mhays

That would require defining the "core." Nobody has established that in any way that would make comparisons even remotely parallel.

It's just like the repeated SSP discussions of what's "downtown." Nobody has even remotely come close to a standard definition.

In the latter case, the results are often laughable. Brookings, in an oft-quoted 1990s study about downtown residential populations, let someone from each city come up with their definition...and they ranged from the whole city-of to a square mile! That's roughly equal to what commercial real estate brokerages do, with similar variation, although in their case the statistics are only to support their markets, not compare downtowns.

I suppose the closet estimation would be on census data breakdown scales. While you are correct that comparing metro X with metro Y can not be readily determined (due to the variable "political boundaries") area "a" in X can easily be compared with area "b" in X, i.e, using census data would provide at least some granularity. Perhaps comparing proximity of those census defined areas with a given metro area X might be a fairly good way to get the data to determine what area a core city (or cities) actually covers, independent of political boundaries.

[ssiguy]

Vancouver has done a very good job of focusing commercial and residential nodes at transit stations. It does, however, have several things going against it some of it it's own making.

First, Vancouver is not a head office city and despite having a large downtown population, it is also a very decentralized one. None of the areas largest employers are downtown..........no main universities, not it's largest hospital, not city hall and it's two biggies, the Ports, and Airport are obviously not downtown either.

Second, Vancouver's sole downtown planning policy of having more people living there was ill conceived. While at the first it looks good for livability and vitality, the plan didn't take into account Vancouver's relatively small and hard to access inner city..........it built so many condos that it is now left with very little land for commercial or office development. This has lead to many new office towers locating outside the downtown core. Even those that want to be downtown can often not find the space or the prices are too high because there is little available land for office expansion because it's all residential. Vancouver is finding out the hard way that too much of a good thing can have bad consequences.

Third, due to Vancouver's high downtown population, relatively small downtown workforce, and no university {except a couple small campuses}, Vancouver has a lot of reverse commuting. This can be very problematic with transit as transit frequencies and routes are based on most people going downtown in the am and leaving in the pm and hence it is much harder to serve those people that do the opposite.