I unfortunately didn't get much of a chance to listen to Bill Volk and George Friedman on the radio the other day. But I did catch two interesting comments, on one of which I'll comment today.
George Friedman criticized the opponents of mass transit and then suggested that we imagine what it would be like if we had 25% more cars on the road. This is not the first time I've heard an MTD backer use this figure. They claim this to be the figure of people who use alternate methods of transit to get to work. Sometimes, although not always, they add in the disclaimer that not all those people using alternate methods are using mass transit. But never, in all the times I've heard these two pontificate, have I heard one actually give the figure of percentage of workers using mass transit in this town.
The census has the figures and they are available with some work by going to their website. For 2000, the number of workers in the Champaign-Urbana urban area is 62,573. Of those, 4,242 are using mass transit. That's 6.8%. With their rhetoric about 25% more cars on the road the mass transit folks are taking claim for the 7,260 people who walk, the 1,579 who ride bikes, and the 2,138 who work at home.
A very small proportion of the work force is using mass transit. When we consider just what percentage of that 4,276 are students then the impact of mass transit taking cars off the road is reduced even more. Quite probably, a large percentage of those taking mass transit would walk or ride a bike instead of drive (as I did when I was in college.)
The MTD is able to get away with this type of obfuscation because no one seems to care. These types of figures never show up in the local news and only recently are showing up in the blogging world.
Hopefully the misrepresentations of the MTD will now be caught before they gain credence in the public at large.
Good catch - stay on 'em!
Wow. Great catch, RoW.
I am so glad RoW points this (of many distortions) out . And that 10 million riders thing. Please! Someone on Penny for your Thoughts calculated it to the daily numbers it breaks down to (someone do the math), what a distortion.
George Friedman keeps using the 25% figure and then mumbles something about walkers and bikers too. A perfect example of using fuzzy math statistics to prove any point.
Are students included in the workforce numbers or are those 4276 people taking the bus to their place of work joined by however many students are taking the bus to campus for class? What about people who ride the bus to go shopping or to a movie or something? Just from my observations, I would bet that students outnumber the non-student commuters much of the time.
Just curious...
Okay...there are a couple of difficulties with this. The Census is an extremely huge database, and it's easy for us to be using different sets of data -- leading to a lot of confusion. So, first let me clear up what set we're using:
We are using the Commuting To Work (16 years and over) data under Economic Characteristics for Champaign and Urbana ONLY. We use those two cities only, because that's what is in the District. The total number of commuting workers 16 and over in Champaign and Urbana is 51,724. We are concerned about the communities' continuing sprawl and increasing congestion. Therefore, we are advocates for public transit, biking, walking, etc as being tools that work together to help curb increasing congestion.
That is why we have used the 25% number, and have ALWAYS clearly articulated that biking and walking are included in that figure. Better public transportation is but ONE of the solutions to alleviating the growing problem. MTD's Mission Statement is: Leading the way to greater mobility. That very purposefully does not just take public transit into consideration. It means that it is our goal to improve mobility for EVERYONE regardless of your means of mobility -- public transit, biking, walking, or yes, even driving your car.
The 2000 Census shows that there are 4,024 individuals who use public transportation to commute to work (not students going to school, people going shopping, etc -- these are work trips only); 7,183 who walk to work; and 1,828 who bike to work. This comes out to 25% of the commuters are biking, walking, or taking public transit to work in the cities of Champaign and Urbana. If you're interested, the public transit percentage is 7.8% Roughly 4,000 cars added to the streets during commute times would have an impact though, don't you think (rhetorical -- you don't have to answer : ) ?)
As a side note, the reason MTD is pushing this figure so much is that in the 1990 Census, it was 28%. The trend is not a positive one.
I'll close with one other thing -- ridership. Yes, we provided 10,138,188 passenger trips last fiscal year. Is that 10.1 million individual people? Of course not! Why do we report passenger trips rather than individuals? Well, for one thing...that's the standard. That's what every other transit system in the world counts, including Chicago, LA, New York, etc. And that's what the Federal Transit Administration and IDOT require. By the way, when they do street capacity counts, they do it the same way. The postal truck, police car, UPS truck and everyone else gets counted every. single. time. it goes through the intersection. Sheesh, that's how everything is counted. At work, if you're trying to decide if you need to order a new phone line, you check the volume of calls on your existing line -- you don't count the individuals who call, you count the number of calls! Another reason is...um...what's the alternative? We don't require that every person boarding the bus to give us their ss#, address, and blood type so that we can count individuals. And thank goodness for that.
People are interested in knowing the breakdown of U of I rides versus community rides (as if the U of I rides somehow don't count), so here it is. Of the 10,138,188 rides, 6,454,261 were U of I rides. Please note that includes all student, faculty, and staff rides -- not just students.
Here are the links to the Census pages (they're long, so I'm not sure how they'll show up):
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=16000US1712385&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_DP3&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-_lang=en&-_sse=on
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/QTTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_DP3&-geo_id=16000US1777005&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-_sse=on
Very long. Sorry. Thanks.
“We are using the Commuting To Work (16 years and over) data under Economic Characteristics for Champaign and Urbana ONLY. “
You are correct”¦the numbers used in the guest commentary are “Workers 16 years and over for Champaign and Urbana””¦URL for Census Bureau data is below:
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/CTTable?_bm=y&-context=ct&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U&-mt_name=DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030&-tree_id=403&-all_geo_types=N&-geo_id=40000US15211&-dataitem=DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030001|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030002|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030005|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030012|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030013|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030014|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030015|DEC_2000_SF3_U_P030.P030016&-search_results=40000US15211&-format=&-subj_treenode_id=10076991&-_lang=en
“We use those two cities only, because that's what is in the District. The total number of commuting workers 16 and over in Champaign and Urbana is 51,724. We are concerned about the communities' continuing sprawl and increasing congestion. Therefore, we are advocates for public transit, biking, walking, etc as being tools that work together to help curb increasing congestion.
That is why we have used the 25% number, and have ALWAYS clearly articulated that biking and walking are included in that figure.”ÂÂ
I think the real reason the MTD uses walkers and bikers in their figures is that 25% sounds a lot better than 7%. I'm sorry but I just don't understand how the MTD and its empty buses can take credit for keeping walkers and bikers from getting into cars and adding to traffic congestion.
“Roughly 4,000 cars added to the streets during commute times would have an impact though, don't you think (rhetorical ”†you don't have to answer : ) ?)”ÂÂ
You are correct that adding 4,000 cars to daily traffic would have an impact, but it wouldn't cause the crisis the MTD implies with their 25% figure. Since not all car trips in C-U are made by commuters going to work, putting 4,000 more cars on our roads would equate to an increase in traffic much smaller than 7% (not 25%).
“As a side note, the reason MTD pushes this figure so much is ”¦”ÂÂ
”¦that 25% sounds much better than 7%.
“Yes, we provided 10,138,188 passenger trips last fiscal year”¦ Of the 10,138,188 rides, 6,454,261 were U of I rides. Please note that includes all student, faculty, and staff rides ”†not just students.”ÂÂ
I think everyone understands how riders are counted. But it is nice to see someone from the MTD admit what everyone suspected”â€Âthat 60% of the riders are U of I students (I'm making the assumption that 90% of the 6.45 million are students, not faculty, staff, etc.). The Unit 4 contract accounts for another 1.5-2 million annual riders. The remaining 2 million riders puts the CUMTD right in-line with the other districts for which Volk and Friedman listed ridership stats at their news conference last Tuesday.
It's not that the U of I riders don't count for anything. But U of I students (and bikers and walkers) can't justifiably be used by the MTD to show that S.W. Champaign residents benefit from the MTD and should have to pay for it.
That was the whole point of our guest commentary”â€ÂS.W. Champaign doesn't benefit from MTD and doesn't need MTD service. I don't believe anything in MTD's post contradicted anything we said in our article.
No response from MTD?
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that I had a time limit! : )
"You are correct”¦the numbers used in the guest commentary are “Workers 16 years and over for Champaign and Urbana””¦URL for Census Bureau data is below:"
Actually, the numbers in the guest commentary are 67,573 -- but I'll grant you that was probably a typo. I'm sure it was meant to be 62,573 which is the number from your link. The problem with that link is that it is for the ENTIRE urbanized area, not just the parts in the transit district.
"I think the real reason the MTD uses walkers and bikers in their figures is that 25% sounds a lot better than 7%. I'm sorry but I just don't understand how the MTD and its empty buses can take credit for keeping walkers and bikers from getting into cars and adding to traffic congestion."
I never said the MTD "takes credit for keeping walkers and bikers from getting into cars..." I did say that MTD has always been an advocate for a broad selection of mobility choices, with public transit being our focus of course, but with walking and biking be huge contributors to congestion relief as well. We do this through various means, probably the main being working diligently with the planning departments of the cities to make new developments friendly to walking, biking, and public transit. And the reality is that those three segments do work hand in hand -- bikers often use transit, transit users often walk, walkers often use bikes, etc, etc...
"You are correct that adding 4,000 cars to daily traffic would have an impact, but it wouldn't cause the crisis the MTD implies with their 25% figure. Since not all car trips in C-U are made by commuters going to work, putting 4,000 more cars on our roads would equate to an increase in traffic much smaller than 7% (not 25%)."
Hard to respond to this one, because I think you misunderstood my original comment. The 4,024 users of public transit commuting to work (as reported in Champaign and Urbana proper in the 2000 Census) would in fact add that number of vehicles to the road during commute times. They are work trips, not just general car trips. If you took all riders, regardless of whether or not they were commuting to work, that number would be huge, and you would be one very frustrated driver tooling around town (and no, I'm not saying it would be 10 million cars). Back to work trips, in all likliehood the impact would be larger than 7% because some of those bikers and walkers would drive too if they didn't have the MTD to use as a back up on rainy and stormy days.
"“As a side note, the reason MTD pushes this figure so much is ”¦”ÂÂ
”¦that 25% sounds much better than 7%."
Please don't try to re-write what I say with your thoughts in place of mine. That's bad form. I don't have one problem with using 7.8% (if you want to get technical -- and if we're going to round, then let's use 8%) instead of 25%. It's simply a different message, and perhaps you're right -- maybe we should present the message differently to avoid confusion. You'll never know how much I regret the way we've handled our message of late. The responsiblity is ours.
"I think everyone understands how riders are counted. But it is nice to see someone from the MTD admit what everyone suspected”â€Âthat 60% of the riders are U of I students (I'm making the assumption that 90% of the 6.45 million are students, not faculty, staff, etc.). The Unit 4 contract accounts for another 1.5-2 million annual riders. The remaining 2 million riders puts the CUMTD right in-line with the other districts for which Volk and Friedman listed ridership stats at their news conference last Tuesday."
1) Please understand that our ridership data is broken out and categorized in every report that we do. Our board reports have it broken out and are available to the public and always have been. We've never tried to deceive the public about who's riding. 2) I'm not sure if the 90/10 break out that you use is correct, but it might be. That's not something I have easily avaiable to me right now. If you're truly interested, I can see if it's possible to get a tighter estimate -- though it will still be an estimate. Let me know if you're interested. 3) The school contracts actually only provide slightly over 500,000 rides.
"It's not that the U of I riders don't count for anything. But U of I students (and bikers and walkers) can't justifiably be used by the MTD to show that S.W. Champaign residents benefit from the MTD and should have to pay for it."
Really? No one from SW Champaign works on Campus? No one from SW Champaign owns or works at places of business that welcome students as customers (many of which are nowhere near Campus -- Market Place, North Prospect, etc...)? No one in SW Champaign has kids that need transportation to school?
"That was the whole point of our guest commentary”â€ÂS.W. Champaign doesn't benefit from MTD and doesn't need MTD service. I don't believe anything in MTD's post contradicted anything we said in our article."
And that's why I said in my introductory post on another thread that I didn't want to "debate" here. I'm more than willing to make myself available to the discussion as a resource. But look, I know how you feel, and I don't think for a second that I'm going to change your mind on the subject. That's cool. You don't have to agree with me on everything...