NewGeography.com blogs

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said that young people are returning "to upstate cities such as Buffalo." The Governor continued, “This is reality, these are numbers.” Cuomo was quoted in a 27 September article on the population and economic stagnation in New York. Actually, the latest American Community Survey domestic migration data for the Buffalo metropolitan area, there was net outmigration in 2011-2015. The rate of net loss was nearly double the metropolitan area loss rate among those aged 20 to 24, and more than triple the metropolitan rate among those aged 25 to 34. That is the reality, at least according to data developed by the US Census Bureau.

After years of substantially increasing numbers, working at home has now exceeded transit as an employment access mode. In 2017, 8 million people worked at home, compared to 7.6 million riding transit in the U.S. Since 2010, the share of workers at home has risen 21 percent, compared to transit’s 1 percent rise. More details will follow on newgeography.com shortly.

The Nikkei Asian Review reports that: “A high-speed rail line connecting Seoul to Incheon International Airport will be abolished after just four years of service, as the expensive, politically motivated project loses the ridership race to buses.” Incheon is the principal international airport for the world’s fourth largest urban area, Seoul, which has 24 million residents. The Review reported that “Average daily ridership last year totaled only 3,433 passengers, which left 77% of seats unoccupied. Carriages were especially empty during weekday hours.”

The Review contrasted this with the airport volume: “Yet 42.23 million passengers boarded international flights during the first half of 2018, up 14% on the year, transport ministry data shows. … These numbers indicate that air passengers simply did not choose KTX to reach the Seoul-area airport.”

The line had fallen 97 percent short of its projected ridership, according to The Korea Times, which reported that daily ridership was to have reached 490,000 by 2010, yet was only 16,000 last year. This may have been the highest projection error in the history of an industry plagued by such inaccuracies (see: High-Speed Rail: Toward Least-Worst Projections).

The Sunday Times (London) reports that it has obtained a secret Cabinet report indicating that “The HS2 high-speed rail project is “highly likely” to go as much as 60% over budget and cost “more than £80 billion.” HS2 refers to the high speed rail project intended to link London to Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and the East Midlands. According to The Sunday Times the government’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) called the plan “fundamentally flawed” and in a “precarious position.” Further, according to The Sunday Times, "cost escalation in the £56bn project could threaten wider public spending, interfering with funding across other government departments.”

The Cabinet report comes just weeks after release of a report by the European Union Court of Auditors. Particularly relevant to the HS2 are the Court's findings that EU high speed rail projects have been overbuilt. As we reported, “The European Court of Auditors found that high-speed rail has been built to considerably higher standards than required by their actual operation. They concluded that average speed are so far below the design speed that it 'raises questions as to sound financial management." The Court further found that: “The costs involved could in fact have been far lower, with little or no impact on operations.”

Coincidentally, The Sunday Times indicates that many members of Parliament would favor improvements to the conventional rail service in the corridor, which would obviously cost much less.

The Economist provides a useful perspective on the continuing decline of mass transit ridership in its current number. It starts with relating how Juana, a Guatemalan immigrant to Los Angeles, no longer takes the bus and now drives everywhere. She told The Economist that she had "two aspirations, to learn English and get a car," which she did.

I heard a similar story a decade ago from a Gabonese student in Paris, who said that he needed a car "so that he could have feet."

The Economist shows that the broad ridership decline occurring in US metropolitan areas (see graph) is also occurring in some of international cities, like London and Madrid.

The Economist cites more liberal car loans, working at home and ride hailing services, like Uber and Lyft.

Juana's story is typical. For the most part mass transit is not competitive with cars. The average employee in the New York metropolitan area (with the most extensive mass transit system in the United States) can reach 13 times as many jobs in 30 minutes by car as by mass transit. In some US cities, the car reaches at least 100 times as many jobs. There is no conceivable level of public spending that can materially change that.

The car enriches lives in ways that mass transit cannot, by making millions of additional jobs accessible, by increasing shopping opportunities and by vastly expanding the potential for leisure and recreational travel. The reality is that when people can afford cars, they buy them.