Where VTA went wrong
In an exceptional pair of stories this past weekend, SJ Merc reporters Maggie Angst and Eliyahu Kamishar delivered some top-notch reporting about the blistering criticism the Feds have delivered to VTA regarding dubious BART extension costs and timelines, as well as the sad (and tremendously expensive) tale of VTA and Caltrain's ridership implosion since the pandemic. Randall O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute provides some useful historical background as to how VTA took the wrong turn decades ago, and why we are still paying for those mistakes. O'Toole's piece is an Opp Now exclusive.
The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority is one of the worst-performing transit agencies in the country, and that’s saying a lot in an industry in which terrible performance is the norm. 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.
To its credit, VTA’s predecessor agency, the Santa Clara County Transit District, made some innovative attempts to compensate for the region’s lack of a concentrated job center. Early in its history, it started a dial-a-ride system that allowed anyone to telephone the agency to have a shared vehicle come to their door and drop them off at their destination. Essentially, this was Uber Pool or Lyft Shared before smart phones.
One of the problems with this system was that it was too successful. Demand swamped the transit center’s phone lines and most people who wanted rides were unable to get them. The region’s taxi systems sued the transit agency saying that the door-to-door service the agency offered was unfair competition. When an analysis revealed that the dial-a-ride cost per rider was higher than that of ordinary bus service, the transit district placated the taxi companies by dropping the service. Today, with smart-phone apps, VTA could probably offer a service at a cost competitive with its buses, but it hasn’t tried.
The other thing the transit district did was give up on the hub-and-spoke model. It had taken over transit service from three private bus companies—Peerless Stages, Peninsula Transit, and San Jose City Lines—all of which focused their services on downtown. But the transit district designed its bus routes to be more of a grid system, with many east-west and north-south routes that did not go downtown. Theoretically, this system should allow transit riders to get anywhere in the region while transferring from one vehicle to another no more than once. But low ridership numbers today show that this doesn’t work any better than the hub-and-spoke model for a region whose jobs are spread throughout the area.
Read the whole thing here.
Read the Merc story here.
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Image by Marcel Marchon