Discussing Mass Transit, Part II How Much is Enough?

August 20th, 2008 at 01:23pm Common Sense Alliance 1530

Transit is very conducive to empirical analysis.  Translation: Since you can count, measure and time every detail of a transit system, the use of real information to evaluate what the public is getting for its money is both easy and advisable.  Otherwise, without some factual basis to evaluate what transit does now and how much more it can potentially do, public policy decisions will be based on perception and assumption - or perhaps on nothing at all.

RFTA is about to propose a major service expansion, so this is an ideal time to gain some insight into the standard statistical tools used to measure transit performance, consider which numbers really matter or apply, and propose some new data points for weighing where we are and where we might want to go from here.                  

For example, if the population of the RFTA service area was a single city, it would have ranked as the 479^th largest in the United States in the 2000 US Census.  In 2006, area transit service ranked as the 119^th largest bus based system in the United States using operating and maintenance (O&M) expenses as the measure. 

Clearly, our area is not scrimping on the amount of transit services offered, but this comparison serves to illustrate a problem trying to use many of the conventional benchmarks.  Our bus system doesn’t actually show up at the 119^th position on the federal O&M list because that list tracks transit agencies that receive a particular type of grant intended for urbanized areas.  Local federal assistance comes from grant programs intended for “other than” urbanized areas, even though our system dwarfs many of those found in genuine urban centers.  Federal reporting requirements are considerably reduced for “other than” areas, which partly explains why some key data (the most important being Passenger Miles Traveled and Average Trip Length), isn’t collected locally.

Still, RFTA does compile all sorts of numbers, required or not, and the federal government provides statistics from 500+ bus systems around the country which we can use for comparison - sometimes. 

Because the RFTA service area doesn’t qualify as an urbanized area by any standard, the presence of such a large system in a sparsely populated area means that many comparisons don’t reveal much more than the uniqueness of the situation.  Most buses spend their lives grinding around the streets of a major urban area, while the RFTA fleet racks up most of its miles cruising down the highway.  This circumstance provides an example of a statistic that seems at first glance to reveal a major efficiency problem, but which doesn’t actually tell you anything without knowing the length of an average trip:

Passenger trips per vehicle mile:

National Average:  2.9

RFTA Average:  1.5

Fortunately, Boarding and Alighting surveys (recording where people get on and off the bus), though less than thorough, do exist for the corridor.  This information will allow us to make some educated estimates of the passenger miles and trip length statistics for the corridor.  We know, you probably can’t wait.   

Although the final details are still being worked out, the basic RFTA proposal is to nearly double the amount of bus service along the Highway 82 corridor.  Consequently, along with determining which of the national statistics provide a meaningful context, we will also sort out which local statistics are relevant to the analysis of this particular route.

While we wait for more specifics of the RFTA plan, it is useful to get a sense of context, a sort of broad overview of our place in the public transportation world.

We rank #3 in the nation for per capita transit operating expenditures, behind New York and San Francisco.

We rank #9 for transit trips per capita, in between Philadelphia and Seattle.

No doubt our status as a resort area has pushed up the number of transit trips in relation to our population, but just the local ridership on the Highway 82 corridor, if it were a standalone system, would give us a rank of 26^th in the nation in transit trips per capita - despite our much lower population density.  This performance is obviously very impressive, but it does raise serious questions about how many more potential local transit customers are still out there waiting to be served.                        

Next:  Part III
Who’s minding the store?

Entry Filed under: Transportation, Aspen, Pitkin County