The Rapid – Myths vs. Facts
1. MYTH: Using the Rapid is cleaner for the environment.
FACT: The reality is that the average transit bus only gets 3.65 miles to the gallon. In addition, exhaust-spewing diesel engines, such as the transit buses the Rapid uses, spew 50 times more smog and 279 more soot into the atmosphere than a typical passenger car. Rapid buses carry and average of 6.3 passengers. This means that the average RAPID passenger spews out almost 8 times more pollution by riding a bus than by riding a car.
2. MYTH: The RAPID is a cost-effective way to offer public transit.
FACT: The Rapid’s web site does not include the annual capital (equipment and facility) costs in its calculations of what it costs to operate Rapid buses. In fact, the RAPID underreports its annual expenses by over $18 million a year. When the true cost of the RAPID is calculated, we find that the typical Rapid bus costs $9.40 per mile to operate (compared to $0.36 per mile for a passenger car), and that for each passenger who rides a Rapid bus, the taxpayers get a bill for $5.82. That’s per passenger! The total cost of the Rapid is over $45 million per year. Only about 8.9% of the Rapid’s budget is covered by fares.
- The Rapid will never achieve a high level of usage because the typical, outdated, hub-and-spoke method of shuttling people around is inefficient, time-consuming, and inconvenient. Taking a bus downtown to get on another bus to go someplace just a couple of miles away from your starting point is a poor way to handle transit. In addition, the Rapid is talking about adding a light-rail system to Grand Rapids, which is even more expensive, ineffective, and inconvenient than bus transit.
3. MYTH: Using the Rapid is the only way for some people to get to work.
FACT: The Rapid is miserably inefficient, expensive, and increases pollution. The amount taxpayers spend on the Rapid each year could be used to buy each and every Rapid passenger a taxi ride, and money would be left over. Alternative forms of public transit have been shown to be far more efficient, pollute less, and provide superior service.One such example is shuttle buses, which allow passengers to share rides, have a much more flexible schedule, reduce transit time, and the buses themselves are used far more efficiently and effectively. Studies have shown that shuttle bus services (such as jitneys) only cost a few cents more per passenger, and require no subsidy from taxpayers, making them dramatically less expensive that the Rapid’s transit buses.
However, as long as van services are heavily regulated by the state and city governments and the RAPID service is massively susidized by taxpayers, there will never be an opportunity to operate these vans in Grand Rapids.
We understand the importance that transportation has to a lot of poor people in Kent County. What we’re saying is that the Rapid is a huge money loser, inefficient, and polluting. Wouldn’t it make more sense to address the problem directly with better, cheaper, and more effective alternatives? We think so, that why we’re advocating a no vote and look for other alternatives to transporting people to work.
4. MYTH: The Rapid is reducing congestion on our roads.
FACT: According to the American Community Survey, a report released by the US Census Bureau, only 1.1% of workers in the Grand Rapids area use public transit to get to work. That’s fewer than 3,000 people out of 263,000 workers. As a comparison, 9.6% of workers, about 25,000, carpool to work each day.In addition, only about 0.3% of all passenger miles ridden in the Grand Rapids area are via public transit. One can hardly make the argument that the RAPID reduces congestion in any meaningful way.
5. MYTH: The Rapid is increasing its number of passengers. That means it’s doing a great job!
FACT: While the absolute numbers of passengers trips is increasing, so is the cost of the Rapid. In other words, instead of taking advantage of economies of scale and reducing the cost of the Rapid on a per-passenger basis, costs are actually increasing, both per passenger mile and per trip! See the chart below:
As you can see, the trend of the cost per passenger mile and cost per trip are increasing with time, instead of decreasing. If the Rapid were improving its level of efficiency in adding users, the graph would show a downward trend. In other words, the Rapid has already reached a point of diminishing returns. As more money is spent, the rate of efficiency decreases.
The Rapid's Cost Per Passenger Continues to Rise
(Please note that the above chart is a graph of the net cost to taxpayers. The income generated from fares is removed from the above calculations to show how much we, the taxpayers, are fleeced for on a per passenger mile and per trip basis. Basically, the above cost per trip ($4.31 in 2007) is the cost that taxpayers bear. This above data is from the National Transit Database).
6. MYTH: The Rapid is doing a good job for its size.
FACT: We must compare how the Rapid is doing compared to other transit agencies in America:
- In 2005, bus fares in Grand Rapids covered less than 15 percent of operating costs (and, of course, none of the capital costs). By comparison, the average transit agency recovered 27.6 percent of its bus costs in bus fares.
- Buses carried an average 6.3 people over the course of a day (i.e., passenger miles divided by vehicle revenue miles is 6.3). By comparison, the average transit bus in the U.S. carried 10.3 people.
- The operating cost per trip is $3.33 while the average fare per trip is only 50 cents. Nationally, bus operating costs averaged $2.88 and fares averaged 80 cents.
The Rapid seems to spend a lot on capital expenses. Nationally, transit agencies spent only about 20 cents on bus capital costs for every dollar spent on bus operating costs in 2005. Here is the Rapid’s record in millions of dollars:
Operating Capital 2005 20 10 2004 17 16 2003 17 7 2002 16 3 2001 16 4 2000 10 4 1998 9 7 1997 9 1 1996 10 7
That averages about 50 cents spent on capital for every dollar spent on operating costs. We don’t know what they are spending all those capital dollars on, but they aren’t getting much of a return for it.
We conclude that the Rapid is already spending a lot of money and not getting much of a return for it. The problem is not a shortage of money but TOO MUCH money — and spending it in the wrong places. The agency needs to focus more on serving riders and not on bilking taxpayers out of more money.
