Increased public spending on transit may not have boosted ridership

See The Facts about Transportation Spending by Veronique de Rugy of Reason. Excerpt:

"Despite huge increases in transit funding over the past two decades, ridership has remained constant. Using American Public Transportation Administration (APTA) data, the chart above reveals that ridership has barely changed as funding has drastically increased—especially if you control for the increasing number of transit systems, and the level of population growth over time.

Although transit funding in 1995 was eight times more than it was in 1978 (17.4 billion and 2.2 billion respectively), the total increase in ridership was only about 2 percent. Total ridership in 1978 (7.8 billion trips) was actually more than ridership in 1995 (7.7 billion trips)—the only difference was in the amount of funding. Between 1989 and 1996 ridership fell by 11 percent; again, this was while funding increased by 42 percent.

These funding increases have included federal, state, and local taxpayer assistance to transit. Moreover, about a quarter of these subsidies come directly from highway user fees. Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole claims that “because transit produces less than 5 percent of urban transport, while autos produce more than 90 percent, it is safe to say that most of the taxes supporting transit are subsidies from auto users to transit riders.”

The reasons for the shortcomings in transit ridership have less to do with the amount of available funds than with the fact that rail lines are expensive to build, maintain, and operate, and the fact that most transit systems have at some point been forced to significantly raise fares and/or curtail services, often leading to the loss of transit riders.

According to O’Toole, “Thanks in part to the high cost of rails, transit systems in Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and the San Francisco Bay Area carried fewer riders in 2005 than two decades before. Los Angeles lost 17 percent of its bus riders when it began building rail transit.” The fact that transit workers are generally members of public sector unions hasn’t helped either.

None of this means that transit agencies will never be able to attract new riders. But it does mean that simply throwing more money at transit isn’t the answer."