The Key to Transit: 240,000+ Downtown Jobs
1st May 2018
The Antiplanner actually runs some numbers.
An op-ed in last Friday’s San Antonio Express-News argues that San Antonio is “one of the least-suited big cities in the world for building rapid transit.” This is because, though San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city, it’s jobs are so spread out that transit just can’t work for most people.
According to Wendell Cox’s report on downtowns, in 2008 transit carried more than 10 percent of people to work in just five metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. These also happen to be the only metro areas that had more than 240,000 downtown jobs. Transit in Philadelphia, which had just under 240,000 jobs, carried only 9.3 percent of metro-area jobs. San Antonio has only about 60,000 downtown jobs, so is less than a quarter of the way to needing an improved transit system.
The problem with public transit is that it takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, i.e. there are additional efforts needed to get from your home to the transit stop and then from the destination transit stop to your objective (job or shopping or whatever). Back in the days when jobs in an urban area were concentrated ‘downtown’ because information and goods moved at the speed of feet (so concentration made sense), and when people lived in a broad catchment area where they needed to go from OUT to IN and then back OUT again, mass transit made a lot of sense — and it still does in places like New York City where that logic still applies.
Otherwise, it’s just a reactionary bureaucratic wish-we-were-back-in-the-good-old-days-of-the-horse boondoggle, as one can tell from the boilerplate talk about ‘getting people out of cars and into trains’.