Obsolete Transportation Month

Randal O'TooleFromCalifornia toNorth Carolina, transit agencies have declared September to be " Transit Month. " “This month is all about celebrating the vital role of public transit for our communities,”says one transit agency, which means “getting elected leaders to make transit a priority issue.”In fact, transit plays a vital role in only one community, and that ' s New York City, where more than half of all residents who had a job took transit to work before the pandemic. Transit has also influenced the development of about a half-dozen other large downtowns, namely Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington. These downtowns have more than 200,000 jobs and more than 10 percent of workers in their urban areas take transit to work.Nowhere else in the United States has such job concentrations and transit carries less than 10 percent of workers in every other urban area. In fact, outside of New York and these six downtowns, transit could disappear tomorrow and, while a few people would be inconvenienced, the main economic repercussion would be that taxpayers would save tens of billions of dollars a year.The average American traveled more than 16,000 miles by automobile in 2019 but just 164 miles by urban transit.Transit has become obsolete because it follows a nineteenth-century business model that assumes most people work in big-city downtowns when in fact less than 8 percent of people do. As a result, transit carries less than 1 perce...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs