Perspective

A press corps that seldom acknowledges the awful performance of transit in America (falling for a hundred years with a brief recovery during WWII gasoline rationing) gives the recent ridership uptick a lot of coverage.

But some perspective helps and Wendell Cox tracks these data best. Having drifted down to 1.8% of all person travel miles by 2000, it has bounced around that level ever since. It had gone down to 1.5% and is now back up to 1.8%.