☆ VTA transit workers may strike. Will anyone notice?
Image by Jim Maurer
The threatened walkout of local transit workers causes little concern because so few people ride transit in the Valley. Randall O'Toole explores, in this highlight from a beloved Opp Now exclusive, why VTA is one of the worst-performing agencies in the U.S.
The reasons why VTA stands out as such a poor performer have to do with Silicon Valley’s growth pattern and the agency’s fascination with expensive yet inappropriate rail transit systems.
Transit and Job Densities
Many people believe that population density is the key to high transit ridership. Through the urban-growth boundary and the often-subsidized construction of hundreds of high-density housing projects in Santa Clara County, urban planners have tried to increase the region’s density.
In fact, they succeeded, as in 2019 the San Jose urbanized area had, at 6,300 people per square mile, the third-highest density of all urban areas in the United States. Only Los Angeles (7,300) and the San Francisco-Oakland area (6,800) were higher; the New York urban area (which includes northern New Jersey, most of Long Island, and urban parts of Westchester County) had the fourth-highest density at 5,400 people per square mile. Yet the region’s transit ridership is low despite its high population density.
The real key to transit ridership, it turns out, is not population density but job density. Transit works best when it is a hub-and-spoke system with lots of jobs at the hub allowing downtown workers who live just about anywhere in the region to get on a bus or train and go to work without having to transfer.
In the United States, transit works best in the New York urban area, carrying 30 percent of the region’s commuters to work in 2019, because there are nearly 2 million jobs located in a small part of south Manhattan. Transit works moderately well in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco-Oakland, Seattle, and Washington DC, taking more than 10 percent of commuters to work, because these areas all have more than 200,000 downtown jobs. No other urban area in the United States has anywhere close to 200,000 downtown jobs, and in no other urban area did transit carry 10 percent or more of commuters to work in 2019.
Statistically, the correlation between per capita transit ridership and the number of downtown jobs in the nation’s 66 largest urban areas is a near-perfect 0.87 (a perfect correlation would be 1.0 while 0.0 is entirely random) The correlation between ridership and population density is only 0.55, and probably much of that is because areas with high population densities tend to have lots of downtown jobs.
San Jose’s low transit ridership is directly related to the region’s wide dispersal of jobs. Despite its high residential density, an analysis of census data by demographer Wendell Cox found that fewer than 29,000 jobs, or 2.7 percent of those in the region, are located in downtown San Jose. This means transit cannot work as a hub-and-spoke system.
Read the whole thing here.
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