You original statement, “This dramatically lowers the congestion-reducing benefit attributed to transit, and severely undermines the argument that we should spend more on transit to reduce road congestion,” is just one of many reasons to provide transit.

Your argument does make sense in sprawled, auto-centric cities (i.e. most of America) where it is inherently more difficult to make transit a more viable option. However, if the MTA stopped running in NYC, there would be so much congestion that the city would shut down as happens every time there is a transit strike.

And when the oil supply slows to a trickle, transit powered by domestically produced electricity, is going to become the only game in town (I’m paraphrasing, I know.)

uhhh… while yeah road congestion is down, other reports show many transit systems bursting at the seems! While you might not be able to prove causation with 100% certainty, it sure seems there is a likely correlation.

The data shows that only a tiny share of the decline in driving was attributable to people substituting transit for driving. Here is a summary from Robert Dunphy, senior resident fellow in Transportation at the Urban Land Institute:

The number of transit trips increased 174 million in the quarter, so the total miles traveled by those riders, using a standard 5 miles for the average trip distance, comes to an increase of 876 million – just under a billion passenger miles. The Vehicle Miles of Travel (VMT) for the same period, for all types of vehicles, including trucks, declined by 35.5 billion. That would put transit’s share of the decline in driving at a mere 2.5 percent.

A July survey by NuStats in found that, indeed, two out of three respondents reported driving less, but largely by combining trips, eliminating trips altogether, and working from home. The use of public transit as a replacement for driving ranked behind combining and eliminating trips, using a more fuel efficient car, working from home, using toll roads to save gas, and car pooling. Even walking instead of driving was more common than public transit.

http://thegroundfloor.typepad.com/the_ground_floor/2009/01/transits-up-drivings-down-have-we-reached-the-tipping-point-.html

uhhh… while yeah road congestion is down, other reports show many transit systems bursting at the seems! While you might not be able to prove causation with 100% certainty, it sure seems there is a likely correlation.

Plus the big reason to provide transit is that 30% of Americans can’t drive! And probably 10-20% of those that do probably shouldn’t (bad records, DWI, old age, other impairments). Things will only get more critical as the population ages.

There are a ton of other reasons to provide transit that have been talked about ad nauseam on this blog. If someone else cares to elaborate further, please do.

That was sarcasm if you didn’t notice.

It doesn’t. I wasn’t suggesting that it does. The point is that since road congestion has declined there’s less reason to expand transit to relieve congestion. Congestion in Los Angeles, for example, declined by 24% between 2007 and 2008. So there is now much less need for transit expansion in LA to reduce congestion than there was in 2007. The same is true in almost every other metropolitan area. In many of them, congestion is down by 40-50% or more.

Of course, you might argue that the reduction is only temporary and that congestion will soon rise back to 2007 levels or higher, but you’d need to make a case for that with evidence.

Those numbers are down because people were doing things other than drive.

You mean they didn’t just vanish into thin air? Gee, for second I thought he had something there.

Those numbers are down because people were doing things other than drive. Like, I dunno, take the bus, walk, or even ride a little red wagon. How does this prove otherwise?

And not just small declines in congestion, but dramatic ones. This dramatically lowers the congestion-reducing benefit attributed to transit, and severely undermines tha argument that we should spend more on transit to reduce road congestion.

How much of this is just a recession, and how much is people choosing a new way of life? There aren’t a whole lot of folks who radically alter their preferences late in life — just listen to the local pols to hear those whose eyes are closed. To see where things are going, one has to measure trends among the young.

Is that possible using VMT data? Auto ownership data? Or is it necessary to use one of the population surveys, with data on age that can be crossed by autos available and journey to work?

I’d be interested to see the trend among those age 20 to 29 over the past 30 years. They are certainly earning less:

http://www.gothamgazette.com/print/2208

How about their vehicle choices?

Local reaction on New Haven’s new $757 million bridge:

http://www.designnewhaven.com/2009/03/q-bridge-built-for-2x-necessary-traffic.html

Politicians are still of the mind set of buil, build, build when it comes to roads. The stimuls has a large amount of money for road projects and even a tax break for people that buy new cars. And look at all the moeny we spent bailing out the auto industry just so they could lay-off a substantial portion of their workforce.

We are a long way from thinking that anything other than SOV transportation is the mainstream.