Mass Transit Serves a Need that No Longer Exists

So of course the people in mass transit want more money. Regional mass transit needs more public investment, RTA chief says - Chicago Sun-Times

This is a story from Chicago, about transit in the Greater Chicago area. The Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) includes Cook County and the 5 counties that surround Cook County and Chicago. I would hazard a guess that other cities with large (or small) transit systems are probably seeing similar ridership declines. And they are probably asking for similar bailouts.

“Prior to COVID, 70% of everybody that worked in the central business district took mass transit to work,” Dillard said. “If you want to revitalize the city ... you better help us revitalize mass transit.”

"If you build it, they will come" might be a good motto for a movie about baseball, but I'm not sure it really works as public policy around infrastructure.

Four times more Chicagoans work from home in 2023 than they did prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ridership numbers are still recovering, Dillard said.

Translation: "The ridership numbers are in the tank, and we want a bailout."

The central office in a major urban center is a 19th Century solution to a 19th and early 20th Century problem. By the end of the 20th Century, or maybe the start of the 21st, most people didn't need to work that way. Due to inertia it remained the standard model. The pandemic put an end to that practice, and employees do not want to turn the clock back to 1970. Plenty of people found new jobs when threatened with being "forced" to take up their commutes again. (Here is one example of the insanity.)

No matter how much the progressives want people in the cities, their soft-on-crime policies and their high taxes are driving people away. Chicago (and Illinois) has seen that in a big way, both for residents, and businesses with offices in the city.

The Chicago media rarely publishes articles that make the powers that be look bad. And those powers that be are Progressive. Here is a story from last year about crime on public transit in Chicago. From The Chicago Sun-Times: More CTA riders are getting attacked, with violence at a level not seen in over a decade. While the CTA and the RTA are separate, if you have to ride the CTA after coming into the city by commuter train, this will impact people who ride the commuter trains.

The number of violent crimes on the L and buses has jumped to a level not seen in over a decade, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found. Through July 19, 488 attacks had been reported on the transit system — the most since 533 during the same period in 2011.

The number of passengers has remained relatively low since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. That means riders are more likely to fall victim to a violent crime today than they were a few years ago, according to the analysis, based on city crime data.

Do we need transit? Probably on some level. Do we need transit on the scale we had it in 1995? Definitely not. Doesn't mean that the people in charge of spending won't waste taxpayer money on it.