Transit Matters

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 Public transportation has many  unseen benefits such as; better fitness and health due to increased walking, less damage to the natural environment, and increased sanity on longer commutes to work. However, in Michael L. Anderson’s piece “Subways, Strikes, and Slowdowns: The Impacts of Public Transit on Congestion”, he discovers that the money saved from congestion-relief is one of the most convincing arguments for switching to transit.

 In 2003 the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers began a 35 day long strike that stopped both forms of rail and bus services. This gave Anderson a unique opportunity to test the assumption that congestion-relief benefits of public transportation are valued at over $1 billion dollars a year. Anderson used sensors already located among major L.A. freeways to determine the increase in congestion due to the strike, and the monetary value of that increased time to riders.

 Anderson discovered that during peak hours of freeway usage during the transit strike, drivers were spending an extra 0.19 minutes per mile average on the freeway.his added up to over 114 hours of delay a year (Anderson, 2014). However, the added time is not the most surprising part of his research. Anderson discovered that the value of a functioning transit system was anywhere between $1.20 and $4.20 per passenger mile in congestion relief benefits. Looking at only busy freeways and creating a yearly total, Anderson found the yearly congestion relief benefits of a functioning transit system to be $1.2 billion in savings for L.A.

 While these numbers are significant and make a poignant argument in favor of public transportation, there was one last important  finding. When calculating the per mile benefit of each driver, Anderson calculated the per mile benefit to each transit passenger and discovered that it is much lower. This means that transit service is saving billions of dollars a year in congestion relief benefits to drivers but only a quarter to  half as much in savings for transit riders. Anderson’s findings suggest that transit is vital for a variety of reasons and that being a socially responsible driver means wholeheartedly supporting public transportation.



Edited by: Lacey Clark

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