20-year anniversary

Calling attention to the bad fit between rail transit and modern cities gets tiring. But the Los Angeles MTA has now been in the rail transit business for 20 years and has nothing to show in the way of net transit ridership gains. But they can show that they have spent about $8-billion trying. Here is an update.

Note that the only way to add this much rail capacity without any net gain in ridership (while the county grew in population by more than one-million, mostly at the low-income immigrant end) is to reduce bus capacity. But rail offers a higher quality of service. Not exactly. If it were so, there would have been ridership growth.

How deep will the hole be in another ten, twenty years?