A skeptic's look: does free transit reduce cars on the road (and pollution)? Sonnenberg tosses his hat in for CD4 (where I live). He has my vote and I'll tell you why.
Does free transit reduce the number of cars on the road in Colorado?
The "evidence" cited in the article below is sketchy at best, and certainly needs more context than CPR's Nathaniel Minor has it (as per normal for his reporting).
Hiding behind the usual reporter's trick, I want you to note that both in the title and in the article, Mr. Minor is careful to couch the claim of our state's subsidized (not free, remember that someone has to pay!) transit is reducing both pollution and driving with the language of "RTD report says" and "according to an analysis commissioned by the district".
Careful and skeptical readers (or just those that know Mr. Minor's proclivities, something I've written about before), however, know to actually read the studies. To help you with that I put a link to the study below the CPR story link below.
I won't go through the whole thing, but there are some salient things to note about RTD's findings. Note that in the screenshots below (and in my writing) ZFBA refers to "Zero Fare for Better Air" the program where taxpayers subsidize transit fares.
Turn with me to screenshot 1 attached. This is from the report (page number noted on the screenshot). Read that paragraph. Then consider what was NOT in the article.
In looking at CPR's reporting, at the people quoted, at what Mr. Minor wrote, do you get the sense that, to use RTD's own words, "... drawing conclusions on thesuccess of the two-month pilot is difficult"?
Looking to screenshot 2 attached, you can see perhaps in a deeper sense of why it's hard to tease out the impact of ZFBA. As alluded to in screenshot 1, in order to see a change you need to have a comparison. The comparison RTD is making here is not even apples to apples. It's "apples to an assumed ridership".
As I have written before, data is not modeling, and the results you get from modeling depend on the assumptions you used in your model.
The claim that more people used transit when it free is, to me, a reasonable one. I say this because out of all the things in the report, this is easily to directly measure and I have no reason to think that RTD would misstate it.
But, of just as much importance, is the question of whether or not that increase in transit use came at the expense of cars on the road. As I covered in a previous post making that connection is tough. Anyone speaking with anything approaching definitive answers is not being forthright.
RTD for their part attempts to answer this question by surveying some of its riders. Details of their survey method** are in screenshot 3. Putting aside what might be some legitimate questions about the "randomness" of their survey method, let's look at the actual results.
Those results are in screenshot 4.
As you can see by the portion highlighted on the left, yes indeedy, when it's free, it influences whether people take transit. Little surprise there. Sure, the fact that it's free and that it might help the environment make me feel good about using the bus.
But look at the box on the right. By my count, taxpayer subsidized transit results in 24% of the riders being there in lieu of driving a single-occupancy vehicle, 76% of the riders surveyed are on the bus but wouldn't have been in a single-occupancy vehicle.
NOTE: there is some legitimate ambiguity here because the term "would have gotten a ride" could be taken to mean a couple different things: one, that you had someone drive you when they otherwise weren't going out in their car, or, two, that you had a friend headed where you wanted to go and you hopped in their car.
How sure can RTD be that we've got less cars on the road and that we have the lower pollution amounts they estimated if this is the case?
To quote hyper-progressive State Senator Winters from the article, "This report continues to show that when we invest in public transit and make it easier to use, the number of people riding increases."
Yes, that's true. If we subsidize it, more people will be using transit.
A more pertinent question, one that any reporter who was interested in doing more than lazily writing something up and moving on with his day, would be whether or not this increase in ridership means anything other than that taxpayers got to pay for someone to sit on a bus instead of taking an Uber or walking.
The answer to the latter is less clear and thus not something the mainstream media are going to put out there. Takes too long to dive into and doesn't fit the paradigm or narrative the reporter and paper want to write about.
**I'm sorry, but I just, I just cannot use the word methodology. Call me a fussy little old man, but I cannot. It's method and will be method til I'm in my grave!
https://www.cpr.org/2023/12/04/quest-to-reduce-transportation-pollution-a-long-road/
https://cdn.rtd-denver.com/image/upload/v1701363542/2023_ZFBA_Evaluation_Report_2023.11.27_54_mukmbl.pdf
Sonnenberg has my vote.
If you live in CD4 with me, you will soon get to pick a new congressman because Rep Ken Buck is resigning presumably to begin his career at CNN--former Republican now reformed is the character he'll play I think. We'll see.
At any rate, his vacancy has got quite a few candidates tossing their hats in the ring and Jerry Sonnenberg (my former state senator and current county commissioner) recently added his name to the list. See the Journal Advocate article below.
I do not, and have not ever, expected to agree entirely with every position taken by my elected officials and thus when I evaluate their positions, I look for a close but not perfect alignment (and, yes, Sonnenberg and I align on many things).
Much more important to me than exact agreement is whether or not an elected official is accessible. Do they return calls? Do they return emails? Do they listen?
On this score Mr. Sonnenberg has done well, especially compared with Rep Buck who I don't think bothered to respond to any emails or calls to his office.
I told Mr. Sonnenberg the other day that if he continues to be as open as he has in the past, that he has my vote. I don't have reason to doubt that he will be (he was the same when he was in Colorado State Senate as he is now as Logan County Commissioner).
Thus I will be voting for him in the primary, and, I hope, the general election. I urge you to give thoughtful consideration to the same.
https://www.journal-advocate.com/2023/12/07/sonnenberg-announces-bid-for-congress/