As Uber grows, SEPTA to rethink bus service (New York, its your turn)

 

...Riders like Yan are contributing to a significant shift in the region away from public transit, particularly buses, to Uber and Lyft. SEPTA’s 123 bus and trolley routes lost about 4.4 million ride trips from fiscal years 2014 to 2016, the agency reported, which mirrors shrinking bus ridership nationwide, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The region’s bus ridership by linked trips in fiscal year 2016 was 114 million, the lowest it had been since 2003. 

 

Compared with 2013, the last full year SEPTA operated without ride sharing in the city, the 2016 ridership loss is even more significant. Last year’s more than 161 million ride trips on both buses and trolleys was about 14 million shy of the ridership three years earlier. 

 

Construction and traffic congestion also depress bus ridership, but ride sharing is definitely contributing.

 

“The combination of gas prices and Uber and Lyft give us so much external explanation for what we’re seeing,” Jarrett Walker, a Portland, Ore.-based transit expert who contributed to a redesign of Houston’s bus service, said in a recent interview. “What we’re really talking about is the future of cities,” said Erik Johanson, SEPTA’s director of business innovation. “Public transit is the lifeblood of cities. It’s the only thing that feeds that density.”The ridership drop contributed to SEPTA’s decision to commission Walker’s firm to evaluate the region’s bus system, a comprehensive review unlike any undertaken since buses largely supplanted trolleys in the 1950s, SEPTA officials said. The findings, expected to be available later this year, will likely feed a two-year plan to reinvent SEPTA’s bus network. SEPTA didn’t want to say what those changes would entail until Walker’s review was complete, but anything from redesigning routes to working with the city to reallocate street space to make bus travel more efficient will be considered.