On 8/29/2018 7:45 AM, Joerg wrote:

snip

Sacramento Transit is suffering a substantial decline in ridership. If
they can't catch more split-commute folks (car-transit and bike-transit)
they'll have serious budget problems soon. Observations:

This is an issue nationwide. There are multiple causes:

1. Ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft are heavily subsidized by
investors. When you have two or three passengers, an Uber or Lyft ride
is often no more expensive than mass transit, especially in cities where
the distances are not great.

2. Crime. People prefer the security of a personal vehicle, whether
their own or belonging to a ride-share driver.

3. Gentrification. There has been a big push in some areas for "Transit
Oriented Development." Great buzz phrase, but the reality is that it's
just another name for gentrification. How this worked in Los Angeles was
that the low-income people, that were the biggest public transit users,
were displaced by the construction of market-rate, expensive housing.
The poor people moved to more affordable, more remote areas, and bought
cars. The well-off people moved into the new housing, but for the most
part they don't use transit, they drive, because either their workplace
is not along a transit line, they work long or odd hours, or they don't
feel safe. There's a good op-ed about this he
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosenthal-transit-gentrification-metro-ridership-20180220-story.html.

4. Public transit agencies operate as social service agencies. This is
the case in my county. There is little emphasis on trying to get the
middle class to give up their cars and take transit. The largest city,
San Jose, controls the county transit agency and ensures that the
smaller cities do not get the transit that would work to get people out
of their cars.

The light rail from town to the outskirts is often more than maxed out
with bicycles on board. You carry them onto the train car. There are two
allowed per end section of a car but often there are three to four.

Does anyone enforce the maximum number of bicycles. I've been on those
trains where there were more than two bikes per section and no one said
anything.

So we know what needs to be done. They are trying to wing it with a 10%
fare reduction but that won't be more than a drop in the bucket.

The problem with fare reductions is that for many riders they aren't
paying themselves anyway. Their employer pays. So the transit agency can
charge less per person but it doesn't increase ridership because fares
were not the issue in the first place.

Finally, there is this article from the Onion
https://www.theonion.com/report-98-percent-of-u-s-commuters-favor-public-trans-1819565837.
Funny, but sadly true.