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Transit Ridership Declines in CLT


kermit

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23 minutes ago, SgtCampsalot said:

Red Alert:

Has Minneapolis implemented the key to successful Bus transit?

The Twin Cities Figured Out the Formula for Increasing Bus Ridership

 

^^^This is exactly what I'm talking about...

On 5/3/2018 at 12:27 AM, cltbwimob said:

I would like to see them implement a BRT-lite concept in all major corridors not covered by light rail to augment the LRT system.  It should have somewhat limited stops, run on 10 minute headways during rush hour, have signal prioritization, prepaid boarding,  nice shelters, and be branded separately from the normal bus service (I'm thinking carry the Sprinter brand throughout).  Really the only thing that would be different from BRT would be lack of dedicated lanes.

A couple of hypothetical candidate routes:

1. Waverly/Rea Farms-Uptown 

2.  Waverly/ Rea Farms-Southpark-River District 

3. Ballantyne-Southpark-Park Rd SC-Uptown 

All told I suspect there could be 12-15 routes and they could be designed to create a web of BRT-lite routes-both radial and circumferential/crosstown-that blanket Charlotte.  This plus buildout of the transit plan would put most of the population within a short distance of either an LRT line or a high quality BRT-lite line, and I suspect would generate good ridership for the system.

 

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Alon Levy just posted "Rapid Transit in Low-Density Boomtowns" where he explicitly discusses ridership issues in places like Charlotte (but Charlotte is not explicitly mentioned). He mostly focuses on the issue of putting transit on top of a city which was mostly developed for cars. In general he paints a discouraging picture but he does offer two examples of success which might be applied here (and also inform the affordable housing discussion in the coffee house).

The first positive example is from Stockholm:

Quote

The big question about TOD is, who is it for? In Nashville specifically, the far left opposed the light rail plan, essentially because it would cannibalize funding that could go to public housing. Now, public housing could be used to beef up density along rail corridors. Stockholm built public housing simultaneously with the subway, placing housing projects on top of rail branches, and as a result has per capita ridership today that’s not much lower than the level of Paris, Berlin, or Munich.

The second positive example was Calgary (the city with the second highest transit mode share in North America but its housing density is not hugely different from Charlotte's):

Quote

The big thing Calgary did was develop its CBD to be high-rise. In the early 1980s Calgary was a small, monocentric city, and since then it’s grown more monocentric, developing downtown parking lots as high-rise buildings. When I visited it had a more prominent high-rise downtown than Providence, a bigger and older metro area, and walking between the high-rises was reasonably pleasant.

In low-density cities with demand for more growth, the best opportunity appears to be centralizing jobs in the CBD. The straightforward application involves developing parking lots, as in Calgary, and relying on the private market to do the rest of the job.

While his conclusions are fuzzy he does make a case that rapid transit can work in low density cities like Charlotte if both job and residential development are planed to be complementary. I think we did a pretty good job with that on the Blue Line (at least in the area North of New Bern), but we have stumbled with the BLE (thanks to our lack of a permanent planning director and the slowness of the UDO). Charlotte is quite similar to Calgary in terms of the relative importance of the CBD (thanks to big banks needing a High Street location for their HQ) so finding a way to discourage job sprawl should also be a viable route to much higher ridership. Gateway station and a high-frequency airport transit link will help, but there are certainly other strategies (property tax breaks for spec office?) to accomplish this as well.

 

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23 minutes ago, PuppiesandKittens said:

Uber/Lyft plus cheap gas = transit ridership declines.  Period.

Sure, unless you are Seattle, Phoenix, Houston or New Orleans (or just about any European city). Somehow they managed to suspend those iron-clad rules.

image.png.39eaf22057c4b7f52502633819470404.png

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3 hours ago, kermit said:

Sure, unless you are Seattle, Phoenix, Houston or New Orleans (or just about any European city). Somehow they managed to suspend those iron-clad rules.

image.png.39eaf22057c4b7f52502633819470404.png

Please forgive my ignorance, but your chart shows about 30 cities with ridership declines and 3 with increases.  Does every single city have to show a decline for a general reason for drops in transit ridership to be valid?  Having 90% of the cities you list possibly support that reason doesn’t suffice?  I’m confused.

Of course there may be other factors in a particular city that affect ridership, but for 90% of the cities listed to show drops in ridership, when employment and population are growing, indicates a widespread reason for the drops.  NYC, for example, has lost transit riders and surveys show that those declines are in part due to Uber.

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^ I think you are right about the proximate causes of ridership decline, I apologize for implying otherwise.  Having said that, I think the three places showing gains indicate that transit agencies still have some moves to make. I think it would be a mistake for any of us to throw up our hands and suggest that its pointless try to compete.

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No worries, and you're exactly right--clearly those 3 (and others) are doing something right.  The huge drop in ridership in Charlotte is curious; I'd think that perhaps cities with larger urban cores would be less affected by low gas prices, but then Philadelphia's ridership dropped considerably, and Houston's ridership increased, so it looks like large-scale studies to show what the top 3 are doing differently than the others would be helpful.

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