TransitCenter

With so much transportation funding going toward highways, it's tempting to support any transit investment as a step in the right direction. But not all transit investments will produce service that helps people get where they need to go.

Today is the grand opening for the QLine, Detroit's 3.3-mile, mixed-traffic streetcar on Woodward Avenue. It's getting tons of local press attention, but TransitCenter reports that the Motor City's true transit renaissance is not due to the streetcar, but the city's successful, under-the-radar turnaround of its bus system.

Cutting in line is pretty much unacceptable behavior, but there's one exception to the rule: A bus carrying dozens people should go to the front of the line at traffic lights. That, as TransitCenter explains in a new video, is a "queue jump" - and NYC needs more of them.

What if I told you that in the past year, the 4 train had a weekday "wait assessment" of 70 percent, down 1 percent from the previous year? Unless you're a dyed in the wool transit geek, your eyes would probably glaze over.

For customers, the price of a trip on Access-A-Ride, the MTA's service for New Yorkers with disabilities, is the same as a subway fare. But for the MTA, the cost of providing the service is much higher. At $72.65 per trip (the cost has risen since 2014, when the figures for the above table were compiled), Access-A-Ride is the most expensive paratransit system to operate in the nation. The high costs of the program eat into the MTA's ability to provide subway and bus service.

Not a day goes by without a raft of stories about "new mobility" providers -- ride-hailing companies like Uber or car-share services like Car2Go that have tapped into recent technological advances to provide new ways to get around.

Bus service in New York is getting worse and losing riders, and unless policy makers step in and make systemwide improvements, those trends may accelerate in a vicious cycle. New York can turn things around, advocates say, with a suite of policies to get buses moving quickly and reliably again.

The conventional wisdom about transit often divides riders into two neat categories: "choice" riders -- higher-income people with cars -- and "captive" riders -- lower-income people who must use transit because they don't own cars.