Philadelphia Transportation Thread

[Jayfar]

Article at Governing.com by former PlanPhilly writer Jake Blumgart:

Transit-Commuting Workers in Steady Decline: Study | Governing.com

While wealthy cities have managed to grow transit ridership, overall numbers have dropped by nearly 50 percent since 1970. The decrease in riders makes it harder for officials to support future transit investments.

Excerpt:
Boggan’s experience highlights one of the findings in a new report from the Urban Institute that shows over the last 50 years the percentage of workers commuting by transit fell from nine percent to five percent. That overall decline obscures some regions that have seen increased ridership, including places as disparate as New York and Salt Lake City. Others have seen sharp falls, including Philadelphia.

The City of Brotherly Love has lost the most transit riders of any American metropolitan area since 1970. It is the only region that lost over 100,000 riders in that time period. The Philadelphia metropolitan area actually added 900,000 workers in that time, as many as the Boston region, where transit ridership grew by over 120,000 over the same period.

The difference is that more of Boston's new jobs, and population, have settled in the city center or one of the transit-oriented small cities — like Cambridge and Somerville — that border it.

“Boston has been able to attract a white-collar, tech-focused base of workers in their downtown in a way that Philadelphia has not,” says Yonah Freemark, senior research associate in Metropolitan Housing and Communities at the Urban Institute. “You can see that Philadelphia's GDP per capita is much lower than Boston's. The types of jobs that are available in any individual metropolitan area influence how many people use public transportation, because tech jobs are more likely to be focused downtown.”