Discussing Mass Transit Part IX - More things that make you go hmmmm.

October 29th, 2008 at 08:26pm Common Sense Alliance 1530

The use of percentages for analysis can reveal much that is valuable, but even when the math is correct it is the context which determines whether the results are more misleading than informative.

If you sold two widgets last year, and four this year, you’ve gotten a 100 percent increase in sales!  Unfortunately, you’ve still only sold four widgets.

If you go to a new area that’s never seen a widget, initially you may have a huge percentage increase in sales, but that will level off as you fill the demand for widgets.  In a recent letter to the editor, the executive director of RFTA suggested that we need to go all the way back to 1987 to generate statistics with a broader perspective.  That would allow us to find bus ridership growth percentages that actually exceed population growth percentages.  The problem with this idea is that in 1987, valley service only extended as far as El Jebel. 

The entire area from El Jebel to Glenwood Springs obviously had an untapped segment of the population whose transportation needs are suited to a bus, and they provided a fresh source of new ridership when the service was first introduced.  In contrast, the current Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) proposal will be an incremental service increase in an area where most of the transit clientele has been well served for over a decade.   

The decade from 1997 to 2007 is the appropriate base period to determine what we might achieve with a major expansion in bus service, and whether the cost is proportional to the benefit, because the area served has been relatively constant during that time.  We have previously established that during this period population in the RFTA service area grew by about 38 percent, bus ridership by 21 percent, and Operating and Maintenance (O&M) expenses increased by about 130 percent.

O&M expenses are generally as much as 80 to 90 percent of the total transit budget, and represent the nuts and bolts of getting the rubber on the road.  Consequently, there is a close relationship between miles driven and O&M costs.  During the same period in which O&M costs increased by 130 percent, RFTA reports increasing their total miles driven by 6 percent.  Let’s call that a ratio of 21 to 1 between increases in costs and miles, and move on to what little we know about RFTA’s future assumptions.

The first full year of BRT system operation is expected in 2014, and RFTA projects that O&M costs will increase 100 percent, to about $40 million per year.  However, RFTA also estimates that they will have increased their total miles by 53 percent, resulting in a plummeting ratio of 2 to 1 between costs and miles in the years before the full BRT plan kicks into high gear.

RFTA may be expecting some stunning reversal in recent trends in O&M costs, but the source of these savings is unknown.  When asked for a pro forma of projected income and expenditures, RFTA provided a financial plan that ends in 2014, just at the point when the complete costs of the new system need to be known.

It currently costs about $31 million per year to operate both the RFTA and Snowmass Village transit systems, making this the second largest public expenditure in the area behind the school system.  (The Aspen and RE-1 school districts = $42 million)

The 5 million passengers on the two bus systems replace something in the range of 2-4 percent of the private vehicle trips made in the RFTA service area each year.  The disproportion between person trips made in private vehicles and those in mass transit means that to achieve just a further 5 percent reduction in vehicle trips would require bus ridership to increase by 2 to 3 times over current levels.

A 100 to 200 percent increase in bus ridership is not an achievable goal for such a mature service, and it seems doubtful that we are prepared to spend more on transit than we commit to education - just to make a negligible reduction in traffic volumes.  But neither does there seem to be any awareness that this is the real context of support for expanded transit service.

Next:  Part X
Where do we go from here?

Entry Filed under: Transportation, Basalt, Snowmass, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Aspen, El Jebel, Pitkin County, Rifle, Eagle County