Fuel costs strain U.S. mass transit, too

…”High gas prices are really a double-edge sword,” says Virginia Miller, spokeswoman for the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). “While they are bringing more people to ride buses and trains all across the country, public transit agencies are facing challenges to meet their costs.”

In many cases this means fare hikes and service cuts. So far this year, nearly half of metropolitan bus operators surveyed by the APTA said they had increased prices to address the strains of rising fuel costs; 19 percent said they had reduced service.


Such fare hikes are hurting the poor disproportionately. While more of the country’s suburbanites are choosing mass transit, many of the nation’s poorest urban dwellers, whose only option is often public transportation, aren’t riding at all because of fare hikes and the downturn in the economy, transportation experts say. Some no longer have a job to commute to, they add.

Los Angeles is in the thick of the quandary. While LA Metro’s subways saw a 7.13 percent increase in ridership from April to June compared with a year ago, bus ridership was down 1.9 percent in the same period. Mr. Littman, the Metro spokesman, blamed the drop on a fare hike that raised monthly passes by $10 to $62.

“That fare increase had a huge impact,” says Tom Rubin, a Los Angeles-area surface transportation consultant and critic of the LA Metro. “Los Angeles has one of the most transit-dependent riderships in the United States.”

Christian Science Monitor