Laura Bliss at CityLab writes: What’s Behind Declining Transit Ridership Nationwide?
Pick a culprit: The rise of ride-hailing services, budget cuts, cheap oil, or bad service.

My quote:

New York City’s subway system has posted its first dip in ridership since 2009, according to data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The news follows a news week full of reported transit passenger declines in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And, for years, nearly every city in the U.S. (with a few notable exceptions) has posted negative percent changes, too.

Which raises two questions as old as public transit itself: Where do the riders go, when they go? And how can cities bring them back?

Some of the factors behind these declines are national, as the transportation scholar David Levinson points out via email. The economy is expanding, and oil prices are plunging. People are buying more cars and driving them more often, both to work and to weekend activities that are better served by vehicles. American cities continue to suburbanize, and as they do, taking transit often becomes a less attractive option. Immigrants, long a strong base of ridership for agencies, are increasingly moving out of urban centers… and buying and driving their own vehicles.

I think the fall in transit (as shown in this link from Twitter, https://twitter.com/khoven/status/834830797244944386 which appears to be APTA / NTD data, but I don’t see it on their site) is much larger than Uber etc., due primarily to an expanding economy, continued suburbanization, and low gas prices. Only a few cities have stemmed it with transit investment and reorganization (Houston and Seattle notably).

1. People have more $ to buy and drive cars
2. People have more jobs to go to, and thus are more time constrained. Cars are faster than transit almost everywhere on a point-to-point basis.
3. People feel like getting out more with $ in their pockets, and cars are better at that for most people going to most places in the US. More substitution of out-of-home for in-home activities takes place.

Recently published:

• Danczyk, Adam, Xuan Di, Henry Liu, and David Levinson (2017) Unexpected versus expected network disruption: Effects on travel behavior. Transport Policy [doi]

This paper discusses the observed evolution of traffic in the Minneapolis-St Paul

(Twin Cities) region road network following the unexpected collapse of the I-35W Bridge over the Mississippi River. The observations presented within this paper reveal that traffic dynamics are potentially different when a prolonged and unexpected network disruption occurs rather than a preplanned closure. Following the disruption from the I-35W Bridge’s unexpected collapse, we witnessed a unique trend: an avoidance phenomenon after the disruption. More specifically, drivers are observed to drastically avoid areas near the disruption site, but gradually return after a period of time following the collapse. This trend is not observed in preplanned closures studied to date. To model avoidance, it is proposed that the tragedy generated a perceived travel cost that discouraged commuters from using these sections. These perceived costs are estimated for the Twin Cities network and found to be best described as an exponential decay cost curve with respect to time. After reinstituting this calibrated cost curve into a mesoscopic simulator, the simulated traffic into the discouraged areas are found to be within acceptable limits of the observed traffic on a week-by-week basis. The proposed model is applicable to both practitioners and researchers in many traffic-related fields by providing an understanding of how traffic dynamics will evolve after a long-term, unexpected network disruption.