Bus service in Frederick, Maryland and Bonita Springs, Florida

Frederick, MD
Originally uploaded by quest4pix

(TransIT bus, Frederick Maryland, Flickr photo by quest4pix.)

This article in the Frederick News-Post, Transit: Little improvements, big demand includes a table of survey data on bus riders in Frederick County, Maryland. They skew lower income. This makes sense to me, because the County is quite car-centric and the development pattern is very dispersed. Interesting that by increasing frequency on one day's run in the morning, ridership increased by 40%.

On the other hand, a City Councilman in Florida suggests that lower income people could be best helped by buying them cars, rather than the city continuing to subsidize a particular bus. See "Guest Commentary: Helping poor buy cars more efficient than transit" from the Naples Daily News. (I wrote about this a few years ago, when a very similar article ran, sadly, in Washington Monthly.)

Is it really a surprise that the author relies on information from the Reason Foundation? Although, again the issue is really dispersed origins and dispersed destinations, and transit efficiency.

While development patterns are concentrated in cities, they are not in suburbs. So programs designed to move inner city residents to suburban jobs via transit tend to not be all that successful, because why the origin points of riders are concentrated, destinations are not.

Naples is 14 miles from Bonita Springs, but likely the region has a similar modal split.