Transit and the Collapse of Downtowns
25th April 2023
Transit advocates cheered when, in 2018, a census of downtown Portland found that 42 percent of the 102,000 people who worked downtown took transit to work. What they didn’t want to hear is that less than 10 percent of workers in the Portland area worked downtown, and transit only carried 3.4 percent of non-downtown employees to work. As demographer Wendell Cox says, “transit is about downtown.”
…
The migration of jobs out of downtowns joins telecommuting as major existential threats to urban transit. The problem is that transit agencies get so much of their money from taxpayers that they have had no incentive to redesign their transit systems for modern cities. Instead, many bus routes today still follow streetcar lines from a hundred years ago. Rather than fix this, most big-city agencies focused on building expensive rail lines into downtowns that were declining in importance long before the pandemics. Downtown property owners lobbied hard for these policies, but the result was that transit service to anyone going anywhere but to or from downtowns was lousy.
Indeed it is. Public transit is most successful where (as in NYC) everybody lives outside of DownTown and needs to get there for work or cultural amenities or whatever.