First, I’m far from convinced that the emphasis on electric vehicles is going to be “the answer” – among other things, where is the electrical power going to come from?

BUT, it is far from clear that transit, overall, can make any contribution to GHG reduction. Here’s a graph that I spent a lot of time putting together ten years ago – that shows, for the nation, a passenger-mile traveled on transit creates more GHG than a passenger-mile on a light-duty vehicle (LDV) – which includes passenger cars, minivans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans, except for the largest of the last three categories.

While LDV’s had a clear advantage for 2010, since then, I’m confident that transit was falling further behind through 2019, the last pre-COVID year, because:

1. LDV fuel economy continued to improve after 2010 because the U.S. had been significantly increasing MPG requirements over a period of many years. Since the AVERAGE LDV registered in the U.S. was 12 years old pre-COVID, it takes a long time for older vehicles, which did not get the better milage, and we’ve had more than a decade since then where older, lower-MPG vehicles were replaced with higher-MPG vehicles – and this was more than enough to offset the more recent trend to larger LDVs that are not a fuel efficient.
2. In transit, the name of the game is average occupancy. There are several large transit agencies in the U.S. that get very favorable GHG ratings because they are so highly used that each vehicle is moving a whole lot of people, including the MTA-NYCT subway and bus system and, in the Bay Area, BART and Caltrain. However, most of the other Bay Area transit systems (with the exceptions of Muni and ACE) have very poor average passenger loads.

Of course, that was before COVID. Right now, auto utilization is pretty much back to what it was pre-COVID, but transit utilization has fallen off the edge of the cliff, particularly BART and Caltrain. We all hope that people will return to transit, but no one knows how long this will take. BART’s “FY23 Reimagined Short-Range Transit Plan,” presented to the Board 12/1/22, has “stabilize at 80% of pre-COVID forecast” – and that’s the UPSIDE projection. Caltrain has even further to go playing catch-up.

One central problem is that, to simplify, the number of people who were using transit pre-COVID appears to be roughly equal to those that have shifted to remote work. It most certainly isn’t that simple – I’m saying that the NUMBERS are comparable, not that those that used to take transit are all staying at home; obviously, a lot of former transit riders are now driving to work. The article doesn’t mention remote work (or education, or other activities) at all – and, while the headline is “public transit” and the (buried) lead is “public transportation,” there is more discussion about intercity rail than about what transportation professionals call transit. (By the way, intercity bus can be VERY competitive with intercity rail on GHG.)

Another problem is, people don’t like to hear this, but, for the most part, the best transit routes are already taken. Adding more service on existing routes, extending existing routes, and staring new routes are likely to be, for the most part, far less productive than the overall poorly performing existing routes (there are, of course, exceptions to every general rule.)

To put it another way, as we have learned very well over the last century-plus, if you want to make transit more competitive with driving for most US urban travelers, making transit more competitive simply doesn’t work very well and is EXTREMELY expensive, and takes a lot of time to implement, for, at best, relatively minor ridership increases. So, by default, what is left is to spend a lot less time, trouble, and money trying to make transit better and, instead, make driving worse.

Well, this has been a major part of the strategy and tactics in the U.S., and particularly California, and even more particularly the Bay Area, for many decades, and what we have learned is, so far, it has not been working very well to move transportation modal splits. At some point, even California politicos may begin to ask, in reference to a familiar transportation saying, “how long are we going to continue to continue to physically abuse this deceased equine?” (Of course, I have great confidence in the ability of our government leadership to never a learn a thing from past failures.)

Tom Rubin