Alas, the walkout, taken in response to a “disgraceful contract offer,” didn’t accomplish much. Strikers’ “energy” and “resolve” may have been “very strong,” but on Day 17 of their protest, a judge ordered the dispatchers, bus drivers and light-rail operators of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 265 back to work.
A bitter defeat. But crueler still, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority officials went nuclear. As the strike dragged “into a third week,” they provided frustrated San Jose residents “Uber vouchers of up to $5 for each ride with a maximum of 2 rides per day.” The tactic produced more evidence that transit may be morphing into something quite different from the sprawling, fixed-route systems owned and usually operated by cities and regional-government entities.
On-demand, personal mobility, to replace “mass” transportation? On the surface, it sounds preposterous. Wouldn’t a shift away from trains and buses that move huge numbers of passengers be outrageously expensive?
Not necessarily. It’s a myth that transit supplies a substantial portion of urban travel. Consultant Wendell Cox considers New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco the “transit legacy cities” due to their “development before the automobile became dominant.” Declining well before COVID-19, since the lockdown the bus-and-train market share for the cohort’s commuting has fallen by an average of 32.3%. In the nine-county Bay Area, the plunge was worst – a 46.6% tumble, down to 10.1%. (Philadelphia was the first of the six legacy locales where transit claimed less than 10% of work trips. It’s been joined by Boston, Chicago, and the nation’s capital.)
And Silicon Valley, where “social good” and “environmental responsibility” are enthusiastically embraced? During the pre-lockdown year of 2019, a mere 4.7% of San Jose metro commuters chose transit. In 2023, the figure sunk to 2.8%.
Look beyond Cox’s legacy cities, and transit’s market share drops to nearly nothing: Las Vegas (2.4%), Denver (2.3%), Reno (2.2%), San Diego (2.1%), Tucson (2%), Minneapolis (2%), Salt Lake City (1.9%), Atlanta (1.5%), Houston (1.4%), Phoenix (1.2%), Sacramento (1.1%), Nashville (1.1%), Orlando (1%), Albuquerque (1%), Charlotte (0.9%), Riverside (0.7%), Dallas (0.7%), Little Rock (0.7%), Indianapolis (0.7%), Knoxville (0.7%), Boise (0.3%), Memphis (0.3%), Oklahoma City (0.3%), and Birmingham (0.3%). Transit’s mounting irrelevancy is spawning a fiscal catastrophe, with cratering revenue exacerbated by the depletion of federal “relief” received during the COVID-19 bailout era.
That’s why cities – large, medium, and small – have begun to drift toward microtransit. Nowhere has the revolution been more profound than Wilson, North Carolina. Located about an hour’s drive east of Raleigh, with a population of just under 50,000, the city was an early adopter. In 2022, NPR reported that RIDE, its microtransit program, cost “Wilson about $1.6 million a year, compared to the $1.3 million it spent on bus service pre-pandemic.” Planner Rodger Lentz boasted that the city was now “providing well over twice as many trips … with a system that picks you up within 15 to 20 minutes of your request, versus a bus that was only running once an hour.”
Complete replacement of transit systems remains rare. Experimentation does not. In 2023, Via, “the global leader in TransitTech,” partnered with the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority to “match multiple riders headed in the same direction into a single vehicle, which provides more flexibility than traditional mass transit with fixed routes and schedules.” Later that year, Montgomery’s The M: micro transit (“you can access service when you need it, instead of having to plan your trip around a bus route schedule”) became “available for anyone to utilize.” In 2024, Annapolis eliminated two of its five bus routes, and now encourages residents to consider its Go! Time microtransit option first, because “it may be faster and more convenient than regular bus routes.”
So far, this year:
- Sugar Land (population 108,515), a suburb of Houston, commenced microtransit “within the heart of the city that includes most commercial centers, area hospitals, the regional airport, the University of Houston at Sugar Land campus and more.”
- New Haven (population 135,319), Connecticut’s third-largest city, kicked off a “pilot program that will provide affordable, reliable, convenient, shared, on-demand rides” with fares “starting at $1.75, with lower fares of 85 cents for seniors and low-income individuals.”
- Gainesville (population 145,812) in north-central Florida, extended its “Mobility on Demand … service for free transportation to clinic visits, health screenings and other essential community resources” to residents of the city’s east side.
- Chesapeake (population 253,886), the second-largest city in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, endorsed the application for a state grant to grow the area’s microtransit services. (Newport News and Virginia Beach currently have pilot projects.)
- Arlington (population 398,431), the biggest non-namesake city in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, initiated “a new on-demand public transportation pilot service called Arlington Express,” so “riders can catch a direct trip to or from City Hall or The University of Texas … campus to or from the CentrePort TRE Station, which connects to commuter trains.”
Unionized transit workers should be afraid – very afraid. But there’s cause for taxpayer concern, too. Many cities are using the microtransit phenomenon not to spend less and improve local mobility, but expand government. Subsidized ride-hailing for all comers is hardly a legitimate function of the public sector at any level, at any size. That’s why fiscally responsible elected officials and activists must insist that microtransit be a full or partial replacement for, not an augmentation to, existing infrastructure. In addition, access should be limited to low-income and disabled passengers.
We have the technology to evolve beyond the hugely expensive and increasingly vacant transit systems of today. Let’s use it wisely.
Dowd Muska is a researcher and writer who studies public policy from the limited-government perspective. A veteran of several think tanks, he writes a column and publishes other content at No Dowd About It.
