Back in 2009, Kevin Libin used Rubin's numbers (with proper credit) for a National Post transit hit job. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
Of course, Morris and Rubin are right that it's dishonest to compare the efficiency of a single-occupant car with that of a full capacity bus. But the report that they criticize (PDF, page 4) is careful to give figures for buses with one, five, eleven, forty and seventy passengers, and in the Reason "debate" the authors insist that they were not making such a comparison.
Morris and Rubin quote figures from the National Transit Database that the average bus in the United States has ten people on it (about forty people can sit on a bus, and seventy can fit on if some people stand), for 25% occupancy, and light rail has 24%. Morris acknowledges that heavy rail (metro) systems have 46% occupancy, but he doesn't mention that rail systems are much more energy-efficient than buses.
25% occupancy is also not normal for a bus outside of this country. In places where transit is more widely used, there are more than ten people on average. For example, in Zurich and other Swiss cities (PDF) there are 14 on average (35%). Trams carry 53 people on average, and if you assume that each tram can seat 100 people, that's 53% occupancy. In the Czech Republic and in major African cities (PDF, bus occupancy ranges from 63-80%.
There are actually quite a few systems right here in the US that have higher average occupancy rates than 25%. In fact, there are twenty with rates over 40%, including Morris's own LA County MTA and Brownsville, Texas. Here's a graph of the occupancy from 2007 (given in passengers, not percentages, so you have to divide by 40) with the farebox recovery ratio:
So Morris has three straw men here: the report that compares a single-occupant car to a fully loaded bus, picking on the inefficient bus, and using US bus occupancy figures. But he actually admits that 25% occupancy is not destiny, even in the US, in the second half of his post: "Given its current low load factors, transit generally has plenty of capacity to absorb new customers with practically zero additional energy expenditure."
There's a lot more to say about this post. The funniest thing is that Morris's general thrust is actually the main point that I've been hammering at for years: you can accomplish more of your transit goals by restricting or pricing car use than you can by building more transit. He's right: I hate his post. Not because I disagree with his point, but because he does such a sloppy, condescending job arguing it.
3 comments:
Restricting or pricing car use, as Shakespeare would say, "Aye, there's the rub." As long as private motor vehicle are the most common means of local transport outside of a handful of big cities, restricting or raising the price of driving will be political suicide. Granted, when "peak oil" forces fuel prices in the US to European levels, pricing will have been accomplished without political action, but until then getting drivers out of cars and into buses is an uphill fight.
He also seems to take the stance that the only reason for transit is to save the environment. He says nothing about land use, safety, mobility, space efficiency, or congestion. It's sloppy, irresponsible journalism, if you can even call it that.
The headline was trolling, and he didn't get at the heart of the issue.
Sure, US buses are energy-inefficient. He says it's because we don't have the density, but his solution is to figure out how to make driving more expensive.
Buses suffer from the same howling inefficiency all infrastructure serving low-density areas suffer from. Fix the city's form and you'll have people on buses again.
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