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Long Island, NY: Ridership Grows after Suffolk County Redesign

Posted on November 5, 2025 in General, Network Redesign 0

Suffolk County covers the eastern two-third portion of Long Island. Its vast expanse hosts historic towns built up around Long Island Railroad stations and swathes of suburban development. Around 90% of Suffolk’s population and activity is concentrated in its western third, while the rural eastern end includes the popular resort area known as “the Hamptons“.

Starting in 2020, Scudder Wagg led our firm’s work on an initiative to redesign the bus network for Suffolk County Transit (SCT). The new network we designed was launched in late 2023. JWA also supported SCT in implementing the network: we developed a new detailed system map and a schematic map, revamped their route timetable brochures and bus stop signs, and advised on many other technical elements like website design.

The plan consolidated services to offer much better frequency (at the cost of a reduction in overall coverage). In the old SCT network, only 3 routes had a frequency of every 30 minutes or better, but now 12 corridors (11 full routes and one offset corridor) have service every 30 minutes on weekdays. The plan also invested in reliability improvements and greatly expanded service in the evenings, on Saturdays and on Sundays. With the new network, nearly all routes now run 7 days per week and much later into the evening. All these investments in more useful frequencies and spans (keys to useful, ridership-oriented service) and improving reliability by fixing outdated timetables added up to a 30% increase service.

Here is the SCT network before the redesign (click all images to enlarge and sharpen):

 

 

Colors still represent frequency but note that the levels are different in this map: red means service every 30 minutes while deep blue is service up to every hour. A lot of service was concentrated in the much denser western third portion, but it was a jumble of infrequent, uncoordinated routes with many deviations and irregular timetables.

Compare this to today’s SCT network, in the official network map that we designed:

 

 

You can see many more red corridors, particularly in the County’s denser western portion. We were able to increase frequencies and provide much more legible service pattern by consolidating service. There are now only two service types: 30-minute service and 60-minute service. This frequency is proclaimed clearly in the new maps, brochures, bus stops, and the website.

However, achieving this much frequency required streamlining many complexities.  In the western part of the county, the old network had many infrequent routes close together.  The new one has more frequent routes, but further apart.  Walking distances are greater but waiting time is less, which produces an overall increase in access to opportunity but many complaints from individuals who have to walk further.  We were on the front lines of much of this conversation.  In fact, our planners were there helping on the street when the plan was implemented.

Another key feature of the new SCT network is timed transfers (or pulses). At seven locations across the County, buses on several routes arrive together every 30 minutes or every hour. Passengers can transfer between routes with a short wait and be on their way. Ensuring reliable timed transfers is critical to making the new SCT network as useful as possible, given that routes only run every 30 or 60 minutes. This network design strategy is useful where you can’t afford better frequency and you have multiple but dispersed sets of moderately dense places and no dominate central core. However, it requires thinking about the connection points first, and designing the network around them.

With more frequent service on many corridors, and timed connections in the places where the most people would need to transfer, we estimated that the average resident would be able to get to 50% more jobs in 60 minutes and the average low-income resident would see a 60% increase in access to jobs. These outcomes meant not only that transit users would have more choices in their lives; they were also a solid indication of the higher ridership potential of this new network.

 

The County implemented the new network on October 29, 2023 and the results since have been impressive. Based on data reported to the FTA National Transit Database, ridership increased by about 15% in just the first three months (November 2023 to January 2024) and after 12 months, ridership showed an average of a 25% gain compared to the same month in the prior year (November 2022-October 2023 compared to November 2023-October 2024).

Ridership is now about 39%  higher as of July 2025 (comparing the 12-month rolling average ridership in July 2025 versus October 2023) and County staff recently touted the ridership success at a Car Free Day event. Our team at JWA is excited to be continuing to support SCT with various efforts to continue to improve this network including developing updated schedules based on the most recent real-time tracking data and some route adjustments now that we have more data on reliability, ridership, and customer concerns.

 

Monterey-Salinas: Big Ridership Gains from Network Redesign

Posted on November 4, 2025 in General 2

We’re proud of the ridership growth from all of the network redesigns we do, but our recent project in Monterey County, California had results that were off the charts: 45% ridership growth in two years, for a growth in productivity (ridership / quantity of service) of 25%, far above the 15% growth that occurred nationwide in similar systems.  The enormous improvements in ridership and productivity contributed to MST winning the 2025 APTA Outstanding Public Transportation System award for systems in its category.

Why?  There was one other factor: a simplified fare system that made transfers free.  But the much-improved travel times from our redesign, especially in lower-income areas, definitely mattered too.

Located just south of the Bay Area, Monterey County resembles all of California in miniature.  There are scenic and touristed wealthy communities along the coast (Monterey, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove), and a huge interior valley with an agricultural economy and a large city of its own (Salinas).  There’s also a vast rural area, half mountainous (including Big Sur) and half agricultural.  And if you think of Monterey as a little San Francisco, then the adjacent town of Seaside would be its Oakland: more affordable, less touristed, more diverse, with lots of people commuting to jobs in Monterey and Carmel.

Urbanized areas of Monterey County. Big Sur is in the county, much further south along the coast. Along Highway 101, the county also extends further south in a long agricultural valley.  Google Maps.

In 2021, Daniel Costantino led our work to complete a Comprehensive Operations Analysis for MST, which led to a redesigned bus network that the agency implemented in November 2022. A major finding in our early analysis of the MST network was the mismatch between service and activity and need. In the old network

  • The greater Monterey-Seaside-Marina-Carmel area had just over 40% of the urban population but had nearly 60% of MST urban service.
  • The Salinas area had nearly 60% of the urban population, but only 40% of MST’s urban service.

So a major element of the redesigned network was reapportioning service and bringing more service to Salinas. This required interesting discussions with the Board, which is constructed on a one-city one-vote basis and therefore underrepresents the residents of the county’s largest cities.

In the Monterey area, we encountered many other interesting design challenges.  Here is this part of the network as it was before the redesign.  See the caption for the meanings of the colors.

Old Monterey Peninsula network. Colors mean all-day frequency. Purple means every 20 min, blue means every 30 min, pale green means every 60 min, and pale beige means worse than every 60 min.

Note the complex tangle of very infrequent routes (worse than hourly) on the south side of Monterey.  These had arisen from years of trying to respond to demands for service to some important destinations that had been built in very transit-hostile ways and therefore couldn’t be served efficiently, including, unfortunately, the courthouse.  Meanwhile, the network’s busiest route, the combined A/B service between Monterey and Seaside, was only every 20 minutes, just below the 15 minute threshold where ridership tends to take off.

We were able to increase frequencies on the most important links, bring the A/B spine up to every 15 minutes and the Monterey-Carmel link to every 30 minutes.  To do the latter, though, we had to give up stopping at the  Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, a hilltop fortress whose slow and complicated access path consumes too much running time.   We served that with an hourly frequent route instead.  Obviously, a major hospital should have a more frequency, but it also needs to take responsibility for the high costs imposed by its location and layout.

The new design looks like this (from the new MST map that we designed):

Redesigned Monterey Peninsula network. Map by Jarrett Walker + Associates.  See legend below.

The new design also improved timed connections between routes at the two densest hubs in the county: downtown Monterrey and downtown Salinas. This is an important part of how we achieved faster travel times.  The line linking these two biggest hubs, Line 20, is obviously especially important to keep on time, because timed connections at both ends rely on it.  While this line is exposed to some traffic congestion, a new Bus Rapid Transit project, called Surf, will create a five mile bus-only roadway to help protect this line’s running time.  In fact, the case for the busway is stronger now, because the new network design is helping more passengers along that path.

For this project, we did not conduct the same kind of job access analysis that we did in Akron, but the travel time matrix clearly showed how much better this new network would be for most people in most of the county. This helped sell the value of the redesign to the agency board and the community overall:

Carmel Valley, the only area with travel time losses, is a rural and mostly affluent area.  The vast majority of the region saw huge travel time savings, especially in the lower-income valley communities of Salinas, Soledad, and King City.

I’ve focused on just one part of the network, but we made many other changes.  South of Salinas, we were able to increase the frequency of the route that connects a long series of towns extending south through the agricultural valley; this is one of the higher-ridership rural corridors we’ve encountered.  Salinas saw an expansion in simpler and more frequent service.  Perhaps the hardest place to serve was the California State University Monterey Bay.  Scattered across an abandoned military base, it’s remote from other major destinations and not on the way between them, so we were only able to get two hourly routes to it.  We hope that MST will be able to support better service as the empty spaces fill in.

We really enjoyed working in this complex and very scenic county.  Congratulations to everyone at Monterey-Salinas Transit for their award, and for all the great work that led to it.

Akron: Major Ridership Growth Through Network Redesign

Posted on November 2, 2025 in General, Network Redesign 1

(The introduction to this series of posts is here.)

During the pandemic, we did a network redesign for Akron’s transit agency METRO.  The agency covers all of Summit County, Ohio, the next county south of the Cleveland area.  We already knew the neighborhood, having worked on Greater Cleveland RTA’s redesign a few years earlier.  Evan Landman was our project manager.

Historically an industrial town, Akron has experienced the familiar rust-belt decline.  There is still manufacturing, but it relies on a smaller and more diverse economy, including a university downtown, medical centers, and so on.

The agency had already adopted a Strategic Plan that called for a focus on the busiest corridors, while maintaining connectivity for people with the greatest level of need.

Here is the old network on the left, and the new network that emerged from the project on the right (click on all images to enlarge and sharpen.)  Note the legend!   As always on our maps, colors mean frequency, and that’s critical.

The old Akron network on the left, the new one (“Stable Scenario” on the right. Click to enlarge and sharpen.

A few things are especially worth noting here:

  • The old network’s most frequent routes were every 20 minutes, just below the 15 minute threshold where service starts to really become useful. Because most other routes were every 30 minutes, there was no way to coordinate timed connections downtown.
  • The old network had a downtown circulator that was just too short, and that could be replaced by a portion of a longer, more frequent line.
  • The south central part of the city, a relatively low-income and diverse area, had a complex tangle of four overlapping routes that all came only once an hour. We replaced these with fewer, more frequent services that overlap each other less, a common way to increase access.
  • We’re especially proud of what was possible in the vast rural area north of Akron, which borders the Cleveland urban area just off the map to the north. This area had an ineffective tangle of “express” services that ran just a few trips a day, and that were highly specialized around certain employers even though there wasn’t much ridership.  The place replaced them with a simple pattern of a half-hourly service all the way from Akron to Southgate (north off the map) which is a major hub for Cleveland RTA services.  The half-hourly service splits into two hourly strands in the rural area, to cover more territory, but converges at both ends to provide 30 minute frequency where demand is higher, and to provide 30-minute frequency all the way from Akron to Southgate.  Our analysis of outcomes at the time showed that the Reimagined network would be immensely more useful in connecting people in Akron and Summit County to the places they need to go. In 45 minutes or less:
  • The average county resident would be able to reach 60% more jobs using transit.
  • The average person of color would be able to reach 88% more jobs using transit.
  • The average low-income person would be able to reach 103% more jobs (more than double!) using transit.

Major activity centers and destinations, such as Summa Hospital, saw even greater increases in access to people and jobs in the region. The isochrone example below shows how the new network increased the number of people who could reach the hospital in 45 minutes by 77%. These kinds of access gains are the reason we knew that this new network would improve ridership relative to the previous network.

The Metro Board approved the Transit Development Plan in March 2022 and Akron METRO implemented the new network in June 2023. Ridership increased 24% in the first year after the network launched. As of July 2025, ridership was up around 40% compared to the year before the new network.  (In our introductory post we cite a different figure because those figures are standardized to the period December 2022 to July 2025, for comparison to other redesigns.)

The Reimagined network was a significant expansion, adding about 27% more service, but it was also a huge step in the direction of being useful to more people. It is much easier to achieve major gains with more service, yet the access outcomes improved far more than the additional investment would suggest, indicating that the new network didn’t just expand service, it drastically improved ridership potential.

On net, the total network productivity (ridership relative to service hours) is up about 9% compared to the year before the new network launched.  This is an extraordinary improvement in the context of overall trends in the industry.

The enormous improvements in ridership contributed to Akron METRO winning the 2025 APTA Outstanding Public Transportation System award for systems in the 3 million to 15 million annual riders category and the immense success was recently featured on the CBS Evening News: https://youtu.be/DNZnZJPvytU

We really enjoyed working with CEO Dawn Distler and the whole team at METRO.  This is a remarkable story about how much network redesign can improve people’s lives.

 

Our Bus Network Redesigns Are Increasing Ridership!

Posted on November 2, 2025 in Network Redesign 0

Amid all the gloomy headlines about transit funding crises, some transit agencies are reporting great news.  Our firm has been behind many bus network redesigns that are bringing more people onto public transit, especially in the US.  These plans have not just dramatically increased ridership.  They’ve even increased the productivity (ridership divided by service provided, or roughly, “bang for buck”).  That means more people using each bus, and more people benefiting from expanded access to opportunity.  Here are three of our most recent examples.  This table compares the average for the 12 months ending June 2025 to the average for the 12 months ending Dec. 2022.

The last row shows how productivity grew nationwide in similar sized systems (all US agencies serving populations of 250,000 to 1.5 million).  So clearly, some of the ridership growth might have happened anyway.  But our redesigns all came in above that trendline, growing productivity more than the national average for peer systems.

This series of posts will provide deep-dives into some of these recent redesigns.  In each case, I don’t want to just brag about our firm’s achievements.  I want you to see why these were ridership-increasing projects, and why they contain insights that other agencies can use, especially if they are trying to achieve more with less.

For a long time, I’ve resisted providing high level summaries of ridership changes resulting from our work, for a few reasons:

  • Ridership is not the only goal of most transit agencies. The competing goal of coverage is important to almost all transit agency boards in the US, so we have never unequivocally pursued ridership as the only goal.  We encourage agencies to give us clear direction about what percentage of their service they want to devote to a ridership goal, but that’s never 100%.
  • Ridership is affected by the network design but also by many other things: fares, service quality, the economy, pandemics, etc. In many projects we’ve done, other things happened at the same time that make it hard to sort out which thing caused what ridership change.  For example, Alexandria, Virginia started free fares on the same day they started the new network.  Our San Jose, California redesign was implemented a month before the pandemic, so we only got one (promising) month of data.
  • We are most sure of the impact of a network redesign right after it’s implemented, before too many other things have happened, but we never see the full benefit then. It takes time for people to discover a new network and change their routines.   Benefits that arise from better serving existing travel patterns mostly show up within a year, but there are two other benefits of network design that take years to appear:  (1).  People relocate in response to better service, and (2) actual development may occur in response to the redesign, especially because of policies that permit more density around service of a certain frequency.  Those longer-term benefits are even harder to attribute to the network design as opposed to other things, because after more time, more other things have happened that also affect ridership.

So attributing the causes of ridership is always messy.  We like to talk instead about expanding access to opportunity, because that explains why a network redesign improves ridership in most cases.  So in the series of posts to come, we won’t just brag about our ridership numbers; we’ll look at exactly what each redesign did to produce that outcome, and what difficult tradeoffs were required.

Links to the individual articles are below.  This post will be updated as we get more data.

(Thanks to Alex Boccon-Gibod of JWA for the peer analysis.)

 

Broken Links from the Typepad Shutdown

Posted on October 26, 2025 in Meta 1

Readers are pointing out that some of my old posts now have broken links to images.  This is because Typepad, the blogging platform where my personal blog lived for 21 years, shut down on October 1.  In early days of this blog, I sometimes linked to photos that I stored over there.  Now those links are lost, and I don’t always have the images they referred to.

It will take me a while to repair all of this.  Some posts may have to be rewritten to work with new images.  Meanwhile, please let me know by email (the envelope icon on the black bar above) if you find broken image links.

California Legalizes Life Near Public Transit

Posted on October 10, 2025 in Urban Structure 22

Castro Valley BART station, surrounded by parking and low-rise residential. Zoning such low densities around rapid transit is no longer legal under SB 79.

OK, the headline is a little exaggerated, but California’s Senate Bill 79, authored by Senator Scott Wiener and just signed by Governor Newsom, is a game-changer.  It prohibits most cities from forbidding dense development near rapid transit stations.

All over America, we have built rapid transit systems and then allowed local governments to prohibit dense development around their stations, thus limiting how many people can take advantage of the transit service.  The result is not just a crisis of affordable housing but one of affordable living.  Not owning a car can be liberating, for a lower-income person especially, but only if they are allowed to live in a place where public transit gives them ample access to opportunity.

For much of the late 20th century, the solution to low income housing was dense developments on cul-de-sacs nowhere near anything.  This development pattern assumed that everyone would need a car, thus impoverishing the residents further.  Because not everyone in those developments had cars, transit agencies were then forced to run inefficient services to these places that were designed without transit in mind.  We deal with this problem in almost every US network redesign we work on.

SB 79 overrides local zoning just in the areas around rapid transit stations (rail or high-end Bus Rapid Transit).  This is not nearly enough places, and it’s not all the places where transit can provide for a liberated life without cars.  But it’s a start.  If you want to dig into the details, I’d start with this writeup at M. Nolan Gray’s blog, Arbitrary Lines.

SB 79 passed the Legislature by the narrowest of margins.  The City of Los Angeles formally opposed it.  It cleaved the Democratic Party’s activists from some of its more self-interested donors.  And it has some wild exceptions: cities below 35,000 population (read: Beverly Hills) and counties with fewer than 15 rail stations (read: Contra Costa County).  The legislative process is never neat, and usually has some of these indefensible exceptions.  But that doesn’t change the fact that a real line has been crossed and a new way of thinking about our public transit resources is becoming essential.

Is SB 79 all good news?  No, it’s bad news that it was necessary.  It’s bad news that in the midst of a historic crisis of homelessness and housing affordability, so many California local governments were still happy to wring their hands and demand that the problem be solved somewhere else.  I support the right of local communities to express their own values in their governance.  But when values harden into denial about an urgent crisis of housing and affordable living, the state must step in, and it has.

“Nobody Walks Here. It’s Too Hot or Cold or Wet or Dry.”

Posted on October 8, 2025 in General, Walking 15

Pedestrians in Mexico City

Almost everywhere I travel as a consultant, someone asks me whether it’s realistic to expect people to walk given the extremes of their climate.

They don’t just ask me this in Edmonton and Singapore.  I’ve even been asked this about Los Angeles, where the climate is very mild by global standards.  Well-traveled elites can form wildly nuanced intolerances about weather.  But how much should these opinions matter?

For example, if you’re a popular economics pundit based in the bucolic climate of San Francisco, almost all of the world’s urban climates will seem extreme to you, so it may seem logical to say:

And yet when I travel in the “Global South” I see lots of people walking.  They may not be having an ideal experience.  The infrastructure may uncomfortable or even unsafe.  But they’re walking.  They are probably walking because they can’t drive or can’t afford to buy a car, but then, their cities are already congested, so their cities wouldn’t function if everyone was in cars.

These people’s behavior matters.  Once more with feeling:  The functionality of a city, and of its transport system, arises from the sum of everyone’s choices about how to travel, not just the preferences of elites.  When elites make pronouncements about what “people” will tolerate, while really speaking only of themselves, they mislead us about how cities actually succeed.  They also demean the contributions of the vast majority of people who are in fact tolerating extreme weather to do whatever will give their lives meaning and value.

Most people don’t travel that much.  Most people have therefore adapted, often unconsciously, to the climate where they live.  (As they say in Saskatchewan, “there’s no bad weather, there are only bad clothes.”)  There are ways to adapt to most weather conditions.  There are things you can do as an individual, and then there are also things that great urban design and planning can do.

Are there extreme exceptions?  Dubai comes to mind.  I’ve walked in Dubai, scurrying from one rectangular block of Modernist shade to the next, often needing to cross high-speed streets full of reckless drivers.  But Dubai’s problem is not that it would be impossible to walk there.  It’s that the city was mostly designed by elites who assumed that nobody would walk (because they as elites wouldn’t walk) and they’ve therefore made choices that make walking difficult.  There are pleasant walkable areas in Dubai, notably the historic port that was laid out back when everyone walked.

And in every city there will be times when walking is less pleasant.  But people and economies adapt to that.  The Spanish ritual of the siesta is a practical adaptation to the fact that it’s often unpleasantly hot in the mid-afternoon.  So people often rest then, and instead drive their economies late into the evening.  Most cities also tolerate a few days a year when the weather is so bad that the economy isn’t expected to function normally.  In Portland, where I live, winter ice and snow have this effect; these events are so rare that the city can’t expect to handle them the way Chicago does.  We mostly shut down the city for a day or two, and that ends up being the least bad solution.

The human ability to adapt is the key to our spectacular success on this planet.  Our problem is that the people who lead our public conversations, our elites of wealth and opinion, are often some of the least adaptable people on earth.  And when societies assume that we should listen to those people, we all end up internalizing the message that there’s something wrong with us if we even try to walk in Phoenix in July or Chicago in January.

And that’s wrong.  Sometimes walking a few blocks is the key to liberty and prosperity in someone’s life.  Most people do what makes sense in the place where they live.  Only if we recognize that will we make the investments in urban design to make walking more bearable in extreme weather.  And only then will our cities include everyone.

 

“Should We Let Public Transit Die?” My New Piece in Bloomberg

Posted on September 20, 2025 in Funding, General 18

It’s been embarrassing to be traveling in Europe during critical weeks when several states I care about — including Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Illinois — are going through major transit funding crises.  But the same crises are coming for much of the US in the next year.  So I wanted to lay out everything I could offer in the way of arguments for why US transit deserves funding, why it’s going to need more, and what arguments we can make to win this difficult battle.  Bloomberg Citylab published it today.

I’m especially proud of the line, “If you drive to the mall, bus riders subsidize you.”  But there’s a lot there and I hope you find it useful.

Again, it’s here.

Bern: A Frequent Bus to Corn

Posted on September 14, 2025 in General 10

 

Is there a more confident, polished, completely self-satisfied city than Bern, Switzerland?

It’s not just that it’s the “Federal City” (please don’t say “capital”) of a famously wealthy and orderly country, the meeting point among its French, Italian, and German identities.  It’s not just the long history of sovereignty, not just as a city but over a vast canton reaching to the summits of the “Bernese Alps”. It’s not just the fresh, cold water falling into pools all over the old town.

It’s that nothing about it seems accidental, as some aspect of most cities does.  Everywhere I looked I saw design, intention, control.

So when a frequent trolleybus takes me past cornfields, I know someone intended this.

I noticed this odd shape of Bern first when we climbed its highest hill, the Gurten, and looked down:

Many well-planned European cities have hard edges, with ten-story buildings looking directly out on farms, but it’s not as common to see farmland so completely surrounded by the city, so that urban infrastructure, such as frequent public transport, will waste some of its capacity serving a place with no demand.

But the frequency!  While we were at a cafe in the old city I kept wanting to photograph how incredibly often the trolleybuses were coming by.  One seemed to always be at the stop.  But of course, you can’t photograph frequency, and all I got was photos of a very nice bus.

Switzerland, like much 0f Europe, is very sentimental about agriculture.  Around the Paul Klee Center, a major museum devoted to the early 20th century painter, still more expensive urban land was devoted to corn, with an interpretive sign of course.

But every city sets aside land for some ceremonial purpose, so if agriculture is what people want to see from their frequent buses, it’s what they should have.  Even the old city has steep terraced slopes that have been gardens for centuries:

If you are anywhere near, I do recommend Bern, a walkable historic city on a dramatically fast-moving river.  If you need transport things to do, there are funiculars, sleek modern trams, and abundant trolleybuses.  For true access geeks, there’s also the half-hourly event at the rail station when trains in all directions are there at once and leave within a few minutes of each other, an aspect of the famous “clockwork” nationwide rail schedule.

And don’t miss the opportunity to notice how similar they want the trams and buses to feel, so that you don’t develop attachments to technologies but just use whatever goes where you’re going.

But then, just walk.  Indeed, if you walk far enough, a pleasant city street may turn into a Wanderweg, the network of hiking trails that laces the whole country, which are so popular that you may find a little shop selling coffee or cheese by the path far from any road.  These trails, too, are part of the romance of agriculture.  While I was there, someone on Twitter was going on about how poor Europe is and mentioned that it has nothing like American national parks.  Yes, Europe has long been so thickly settled and cultivated that has few wild areas on the scale of Yosemite or Yellowstone.  What it has instead are hiking trails everywhere, and a population that sees walking through scenic agricultural land as a valid kind of recreation.

These last images are from Mürren, a recreational area with national-park-level scenery high the Bernese Alps, still part of the proud Canton of Bern.  But this kind of infrastructure is everywhere in Switzerland.  And of course there are also trains and buses, even in rural areas.

I’m a little reluctant to praise Switzerland for such abundant rural service, fashionable as that is, because it’s something you can do only if you have enough money.  Most countries have to economise more, and so they face the fact that however much they would like to provide access to rural areas, the demand there is usually so sparse that it is not something you do if you want to attract many riders.

But Switzerland does have the money to spend on this.  They can even afford to run frequent urban trolleybuses to cornfields.  And who am I to judge?

 

The Fall of Philadelphia

Posted on August 20, 2025 in Funding, General, Philadelphia 42

The Pennsylvania State Senate has decided that the transit system of America’s fifth largest city should be substantially destroyed.  Similar dramas are playing out in Illinois, Oregon, and Rhode Island.  Each crisis has arisen from the state legislature’s refusal to find new funding to save public transit, but Pennsylvania is the first state to actually push its biggest transit agency over the cliff.

(Oregon will be next to decide, at a special legislative session in late August.  Look for action in Illinois later this fall.)

In the Philadelphia area, SEPTA is making a 20% service cut but will eventually have to cut service 45%.  Cutting almost half of a transit system is not a way to make it more efficient.  It more like asking whether you’d like to keep your heart or your lungs.  Back in 2018 our firm did a detailed study of the Philadelphia network, and while we found many things to improve, none of those things would save even 10%, even if there weren’t unmet needs on which any savings should be spent.

So this will be a disaster with far reaching consequences.  A city whose high density makes transit essential for the city’s functioning will soon not function very well.  Service cuts will push transit riders back into cars (either as drivers or as people being given rides) triggering increased congestion.  It will also cause people to lose jobs and opportunities due to lack of transportation.

From what I can tell, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania State Senate seems to be motivated by pure cultural animus toward urban life.  One state representative has already replied with a proposal to return tax revenues to the county from which they came, to make the point that the rural counties are actually net recipients of government spending that is funded by urban -generated prosperity.

This raises one of the most insidious aspects of how many US states have constructed the powers of local governments.  Conservative state leaders appear to be nearly unanimous in their view that big cities should be prevented from governing themselves.  In particular, they are committed to denying local governments the freedom to ask their own voters to raise their own taxes to pay for things that they value.  The idea is to make city governments helpless while continuing to blame them for everything that goes wrong in cities.  It plays well in conservative media, but it’s not fair and it’s certainly not democracy.  When dense cities are not allowed to fund their services in a way that reflects their needs and values, it guarantees that the city will be a site of failure — failure that will be especially visible to the media because in dense cities everything is more visible.

A good backgrounder on this, which I’m reading now, is historian Steven Cohn’s book Americans against the City.  It’s a history of anti-urbanism the explains how foundational hating cities has been to America’s sense of itself.  None of which changes the fact that cities are engines of prosperity, and that to hate the city is to hate your own prosperity.

Cities need more transit.  Rural areas need more roads.  Let’s let everyone pay for what they value.

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