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The article says that people are willing to raise taxes for it. They're just not willing to use it. > Recently, transit scholars Michael Manville and Benjamin

The article says that people are willing to raise taxes for it. They're just not willing to use it. > Recently, transit scholars Michael Manville and Benjamin Cummins analyzed 21 local transportation funding ballots from 2001 to 2003, and found that, on average, these tax increases were approved by 63 percent of the vote. Yet a decade later, the share of commuters who drove alone in these places had fallen just 2 points, from 87 to 85 percent, while the share of transit commuters had stayed the same, at 5 percent.

majormajor 11y ago
It takes a quite high level of traffic to make taking public transit—which usually, at rush hour, means standing in a hot uncomfortable crowded bus or train car. Compare that to your own private comfortable seat with noise isolation and entertainment. There seems to be very little support for increasing the number of busses to run every five minutes instead of ten, for instance. Frankly, most cities in the US don't have that level of traffic in that many places. If it's not even going to make a difference to drivers in LA it's not going to be many current drivers' first choice in the relatively traffic-free (and much less dense) car-oriented cities outside of LA. (But then, there are network effects here too, and so the question is how much that changes as the LA network continues to be built out over the next 15 years. And LA is planning on also making road driving significantly more annoying in many areas too ("road diets") which is a probably-good but obviously controversial plan. Unless, in the meantime, self-driving cars are the final nail in the coffin for non-NYC US mass-transit...
WildUtah 11y ago
In fact, studies have long shown that 98% of US commuters favor transit, but rather fewer are willing to use it.[0] [0]http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-commuters-favor-public-tra-1434 http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-comm...
_red 11y ago
One of the aspects rarely mentioned is: navigating public transit is hard. Have you ever tried to read a bus schedule? They are not the most user friendly documents and require some effort to parse correctly. Its certainly not something you stroll up and engage easily. I suspect that "not user friendly" and "publicly funded" are correlated.
dragonwriter 11y ago
Supporting tax increases to improve transit may indicate people think that transit, as it is, is inadequate because it is underfunded. Not being willing to ride it as it is may indicate that people think transit is inadequate, for whatever reason. These two things seem remarkably consistent, rather than the opposite.

majormajor 11y ago

It takes a quite high level of traffic to make taking public transit—which usually, at rush hour, means standing in a hot uncomfortable crowded bus or train car. Compare that to your own private comfortable seat with noise isolation and entertainment. There seems to be very little support for increasing the number of busses to run every five minutes instead of ten, for instance. Frankly, most cities in the US don't have that level of traffic in that many places. If it's not even going to make a difference to drivers in LA it's not going to be many current drivers' first choice in the relatively traffic-free (and much less dense) car-oriented cities outside of LA. (But then, there are network effects here too, and so the question is how much that changes as the LA network continues to be built out over the next 15 years. And LA is planning on also making road driving significantly more annoying in many areas too ("road diets") which is a probably-good but obviously controversial plan. Unless, in the meantime, self-driving cars are the final nail in the coffin for non-NYC US mass-transit...

WildUtah 11y ago

In fact, studies have long shown that 98% of US commuters favor transit, but rather fewer are willing to use it.[0] [0]http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-commuters-favor-public-tra-1434 http://www.theonion.com/article/report-98-percent-of-us-comm...

_red 11y ago

One of the aspects rarely mentioned is: navigating public transit is hard. Have you ever tried to read a bus schedule? They are not the most user friendly documents and require some effort to parse correctly. Its certainly not something you stroll up and engage easily. I suspect that "not user friendly" and "publicly funded" are correlated.

dragonwriter 11y ago

Supporting tax increases to improve transit may indicate people think that transit, as it is, is inadequate because it is underfunded. Not being willing to ride it as it is may indicate that people think transit is inadequate, for whatever reason. These two things seem remarkably consistent, rather than the opposite.