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Trading buses for shared cars. Is that good for the climate?
More than a dozen municipalities opened ride-sharing programs last year to replace big buses on underused routes
CLIMATEWIRE — Some transit agencies, facing troubling declines in post-Covid ridership and massive budget deficits, are replacing bus routes with publicly funded ride-share programs using cars, similar to Uber and Lyft.
Last month alone, more than 15 regional transit authorities, including those in Syracuse, N.Y.; Denver; and Kalamazoo, Mich., announced plans to adopt or expand these public ride-share services as an alternative to bus routes with low ridership and long wait times. In December, 11 North Carolina municipalities received federal funding to build new on-demand transit networks as part of the Department of Transportation’s Rural Surface Transportation Grant Program.
The expectation is that this new type of “microtransit” could replace underused bus routes with smaller vehicles like vans and sedans, saving money for local transit agencies and increasing rider convenience. Some transit experts predict that the increased accessibility could lure people out of their private cars and reduce emissions as a result.
“That is one big hope of microtransit,” said James Fishelson, executive director of the California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. “A lot of folks are really hopeful that microtransit can encourage more people to give up their private vehicles for some rides.”
Many suburban municipalities hope that on-demand services accessed through mobile phones could be a solution to what transportation experts call the “first and last mile” problem — the difficulty in getting to a transit stop from home, or to a final destination from the bus or subway stop.
That complementary approach was used by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority when it redesigned its system, said Joshua Schank, a former LA Metro chief innovation officer and a senior fellow at UCLA.
“We looked at microtransit as part of a next generational bus reorganization, where the entire bus network was restructured,” Schank said. “We included a microtransit component as part of that restructuring.”
Antioch, Calif., runs an on-demand transit service designed to provide direct connections to Bay Area Rapid Transit rail stations in the San Franciso Bay Area. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, ridership has grown steadily since its launch in June 2020, with wait times averaging under 10 minutes, said Susan Shaheen, a shared mobility expert and a professor at UC Berkeley.
Such microtransit options could encourage would-be motorists to leave their cars at home, or to withhold from vehicle purchases in the first place, potentially reducing emissions, said Fishelson. Even when these new on-demand services emit more than traditional buses on a per-trip basis, he said, public ride-shares could be good for the climate if they induce changes in behavior.
“You can make an argument that occasional use of high-emitting features can actually have an overall positive impact in somebody’s individual emissions if it allows them to go car-free, or car-light,” Fishelson said. “Anything that allows you to not buy an extra car, or not buy a car, period, is going to have a really big environmental benefit.”
Yet research on microtransit emissions is limited. It's unclear exactly how much in reduced emissions, if any, can be expected by local authorities.
Some transportation experts say its climate benefits would be “marginal,” at best.
Annapolis, Md., has been running an on-demand transit program since May 2022. Within two months of launching, its public ride-share service, called Annapolis Go, provided 1,700 trips, Mayor Gavin Buckley wrote in Intelligent Transport. Those numbers “would be surely less than 1 percent” of total vehicle rides in the city, said Cinzia Cirillo, the interim director of the Maryland Transportation Institute at the University of Maryland.
“Less than a thousand trips per month won't have a large effect on the overall mobility or the greenhouse gas emissions of even a small place like Annapolis,” she said.
Experts agree that microtransit could be an effective strategy in communities where transit services would attract four to seven riders per hour. With such low demand, buses are more expensive to operate and could have higher emissions than ride-sharing.
“But there aren't that many bus routes that actually perform that badly,” said Jarrett Walker, a public transit planning and policy consultant.
On-demand services also often result in high per-trip costs.
On average, buses cost $160 to operate for one hour with 15.5 riders, according to a 2021 study published by the Federal Transit Administration. While microtransit costs less, at $101 to operate per hour, it only serves 1.6 passengers an hour on average. This means that in 2021, buses cost about $10 per passenger on average for transit authorities, while on-demand transit cost $63 per person.
The implication is that microtransit is affordable for transit agencies if it serves a small number of people.
If a municipality’s goal is to maximize ridership — and minimize emissions — it should expand fixed route bus services and increase their frequency, Walker said.
“There have been these tech pitches that have tried to imply that a big urban bus is obsolete,” Walker said. “And it’s not. It’s a fantastically efficient way to create liberty and opportunity for lots of people.”
On-demand transit might have a role in environmental justice, said Becky Steckler, a climate consultant and a project director at ECONorthwest. Moving people away from traditional buses to public ride-shares might not reduce their carbon footprint, she said, but it could “improve their quality of life."
“In a focus group, there was a woman who was lower-income, dependent on transit, who basically said, ’If I’ve had a good day and got an extra eight, 10 or 12 bucks, I’m not pampering myself with a nice coffee or lunch. I’m going to pay to go home earlier to have extra 20 or 30 minutes with my kids,’” Steckler said. “[It] is this concept of time as a luxury.”
Adie Tomer, an infrastructure expert and a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said that federal and local governments should have patience and be realistic because of these conflicting theories and cases on demand-responsive transit.
“There may not be a durable business model here,” Tomer said. “But I'm a believer in government taking more risks. We're not going to discover new things if we don't try.”
