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I was just thinking about suggesting mass transit to YouCut last week.
I think we should all take as many pics as possible of empty city busses rolling by and then post here or at some other central spot on the net.
It’s ridiculous.
And the few routes that do have people riding them — you guessed it, everyone on board got their bus pass either directly from the city (for free) or with a voucher (for free)!
Excellent article, thanks for the post.
Dang that article was long. But it’s true.
I hate Dart. Dallas is just not conducive to public transportation. Too spread out and people work too many places. Huge buses go by empty.
But if one speaks out against Dart, one is a called a racist.
Don’t ask me why.
There is a passenger train now between Boston and portland maine. Recently it was reported that it turned a profit. What that really meant was that it did not need a bigger subsidy this year.
The train station shares space with the local Trailways. Twenty times the people use the busses between the two cities becasue the busses acutally go where the people want...like the airport.
My daughter used it once and th four other people in her car were RR employees who go down to Boston for the day because they retired with free passes.
The busses are also quiet, smooth riding and safe. The train called the Downeaster, is a leftist feel-good money waste.
Over $1 billion was spent on the highly underutilized Phoenix light rail system. If we hadn’t blown all that money, we could have been hospitable to those illegal aliens for a little longer.
I commute to the greater DC metro area everyday. To take mass transit I’d have to:
1. Adjust my schedule because it doesn’t run as early as I leave.
2. Drive about 20 miles to the Metro Stop.
3. Park the car, which is either $4.75/day or $55/month if you can get a reserved spot.
4. Pay $4.10 to get one long bus ride from work. Total ride 45 minutes.
5. Ride the bus to work (this might be free or maybe a dollar or so). Total ride 20 minutes AFTER you get on the bus.
6. Ride the bus from work to bus station (maybe a dollar or so). Total ride 20 minutes AFTER you get on the bus.
7. Pay $4.10 to get to a station that is 20 miles from home.
Total ride 45 minutes.
8. Drive 20 miles home, which is the worst part of the commute in the afternoon.
Total time: At least 65 minutes not including driving to/from Metro stop and waiting for bus each way.
OR
I can drive to work. Leave when I want and get there in 45 minutes in the a.m. and get home in about an hour or so in the afternoon. Driving is faster and cheaper.
As a transportation engineer with some background in public transportation I find this analysis about as useful as Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act. There are many people who depend on urban mass transit as a basic means of mobility. I realize the guy sitting in the suburbs with a Hummer and a mortgage supported by my tax dollars doesn’t care a wit about an elderly woman who cannot drive any more, or a young couple who can’t make two car payments. I ride public transit every work day and see these people. They count out their quarters and pay their fare, which is more than I can say for a lot of people in this society.
The absolute lack of empathy and understanding of the economic condition of our society in this article is just stunning. I’m waiting for the Cato Institute to write about all the tax subsidies for the general aviation airports that support a handful of private planes and serve little additional public purpose, or all the special legislation that benefits the investment banks.
There is nothing “conservative” about a policy that ignores the basic needs of persons who have no other means of mobility than walking. If these think tanks would give out of their theoretical settings and spend some time with real people on our mass transit systems they might come up with some constructive improvements rather than the shallow economic analysis presented here.
Wait until our Socialist Masters ban the Automobile - then UMT will make a profit - won't it?
Jean Love and Wendell Cox are Illinois-based consultants who specialize in transportation, privatization, and the economics of the public sector.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington DC, was founded in 1977 by Edward Crane and Charles Koch, the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries, the largest privately held oil company in the U.S.
It should be no surprise that Big Oil funds propaganda to keep America addicted to Oil.
This study was published in October, 1991.
It’s almost 20 years out of date.
Excellent.
Paging Daniel Pink...
Wow:
Unquestionably, the major explanation of the inability of the public transit industry to contain costs has been the inflated salaries and benefits of public transit workers. Public transit employees are paid as much as twice the amount received by the average nonsupervisory worker in the United States and 65 percent more than the average U.S. worker.
Although the education requirement for transit drivers is less than a high school diploma, they receive nearly 11 percent more in total compensation than do private-sector employees with four or more years of college education. The average compensation for all transit employees exceeds the average salary for U.S. employees with college degrees by more than 30 percent.(34)
Public transit fringe benefits average 50 percent of employee pay—nearly double the fringe benefits of the average private-sector worker.(35) Hence, when fringe benefits are added to the equation, the average transit employee receives 70 percent more in compensation than the average U.S. employee (Figure 6).(36)
Worse yet, the pay premium enjoyed by transit workers appears to be widening. Philadelphia’s fiscally troubled Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, for example, has developed a 1992 budget that includes a 5.5 percent wage increase (more than one-third more than the national average wage increase in 1991) for employees.
Yet SEPTA is planning service cutbacks, demanding additional subsidies, and threatening to shut down the system if a new, dedicated tax is not provided for the deficit-plagued transit system.(37) San Francisco’s Bay Area Raid Transit system reports that unionized employees have rejected an offer of a 4 percent wage increase for each of the next three years.
The BART offer would bring drivers’ salaries to $48,000, janitors’ to $36,000, and mechanics’ to $53,000 per year; benefits, which add to the total compensation, would remain at 51 percent of wages and salaries, so that drivers would be compensated at more than $70,000, janitors at more than $50,000, and mechanics at $80,000 annually.(38)
Figure 6 Annual Compensation of Full-Time Employees, 1988 Derived from Statistical Abstract of the United States and UMTA section 15 report, 1988. (Graph Omitted)
Public transit has suffered declining labor productivity over the past two decades. Productivity as measured by hours of bus service produced per constant dollar fell an average of 43 percent from 1964 to 1985; the productivity decline for large transit agencies was 55 percent. About one-third of the cost increases over inflation in urban transit since 1970 can be attributed directly to the decline in productivity.(39)
Let us put the dismal record of transit worker productivity and performance into perspective. The unsubsidized private taxi industry employs about the same number of workers as transit but provides three times as many vehicle miles of service.(40) Yet transit is heavily subsidized by government and taxis receive virtually no public assistance.
One explanation for transit’s steep productivity decline is that transit employees are working less. Average annual service hours worked by each public transit employee (for buses) fell from 1,228 in 1964 to 1,028 in 1985. The decrease in productivity was worse for the largest transit agencies—from 1,205 hours in 1964 to 929 hours per employee in 1985.(41) Meanwhile, public transit driver absenteeism, which is epidemic in the industry, averaged 34 days a year in Miami, 32 days in Los Angeles, and 27 days in Pittsburgh, exclusive of vacations and holidays.(42)
Another cause of the anemic productivity levels in the transit industry is a provision of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, section 13(c),(43) which is administered by the U.S. Department of Labor.
That provision has secured for transit workers a degree of bargaining power that is not shared by employees or labor unions in other U.S. industries.(44) It sounds innocent enough, requiring that adequate labor arrangements be made to ensure that employees are not harmed as a result of federal funding. In practice, however, section 13(c) has been interpreted to require negotiation of generous labor agreements between transit agencies and their unions. Failure of a transit agency to make concessions to labor can result in loss of federal funding, thus giving transit labor unions de facto veto power over the coveted capital (and operating) grants.(45)
Section 13(c) has impeded efforts to improve productivity and efficiency in the transit industry. It requires up to six years’ pay for an employee whose job is eliminated as a result of economies or efficiencies. Assuming the 1988 annual compensation level of $41,000 for the average public transit bus driver, legally mandated severance pay could be as much as $250,000 per worker, compared with mandated severance pay (unemployment insurance benefits) of less than $5,000 for typical American workers.
Section 13(c) also has so skewed collective bargaining in favor of transit unions that they have negotiated not only higher-than-market compensation in the industry but absurd work rules that extract pay for not working. For example, the use of part-time labor is severely restricted or prohibited outright, even though part-time labor is ideal for public transit, because a large percentage of public transit service is consumed during rush hour periods in the morning and evening. Under current operating practices, to cover both morning and evening rush hours, drivers are paid for time not worked during midday. Most public transit labor contracts also require the full-time employment of substitute drivers. Sometimes substitute drivers operate buses and are paid for driving; other times substitute drivers are paid to sit and wait. Substitute public transit drivers, who have skills that can be learned in a month or less, are paid whether or not they work; substitute public school teachers, who must have at least four years of college, are paid only when they work.
The net effect of those restrictive work rules is that public transit bus drivers work as few as 36 minutes of each hour for which they are paid on some services, and the average is less than 50 minutes of work for each hour’s pay. Practices such as those would bankrupt a company in the competitive marketplace.
The combination of federal subsidies, excessive pay rates, routine cost overruns, and archaic work rules in the transit industry has prevented implementation of economical investment and operating procedures in public bus and rail service. That combination has been a major factor in transit’s cost escalation. The annual excess of transit costs over inflation (from 1970) is now more than four times the total amount of federal operating subsidies.
Most public transit labor contracts also require the full-time employment of substitute drivers. Sometimes substitute drivers operate buses and are paid for driving; other times substitute drivers are paid to sit and wait. Substitute public transit drivers, who have skills that can be learned in a month or less, are paid whether or not they work; substitute public school teachers, who must have at least four years of college, are paid only when they work.
The net effect of those restrictive work rules is that public transit bus drivers work as few as 36 minutes of each hour for which they are paid on some services, and the average is less than 50 minutes of work for each hour’s pay. Practices such as those would bankrupt a company in the competitive marketplace.
Two new suburban Maryland stations, which cost approximately $300 million to construct and opened in 1990, are attracting only 7,300 passengers a week—slightly more than half the 13,100 expected.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 passenger per minute !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ping to self
Chew on this one Willie!!!!
I´m very much in favor of mass transit, but the problem is that they always seem to see it as something intended to help ¨the poor,¨ with the result that it goes to and from neighborhoods that are awful, actually gets very little ridership there because those people don´t go anywhere (certainly not to work, and they probably use a stolen car the rest of the time), and gets a reputation for being dangerous and - well, for poor people.
One of the big reasons that there is not more use of mass transit by the middle classes is simply that it is perceived as something for poor people and, consequently, is unpleasant and becomes dangerous. Places where it does work, such as New York, it is perceived as simply a way of getting to work - for everybody.