Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Mass transit still a tough sell to South Floridians
We complain about traffic. We swear it’s getting worse. But still we won’t get out of our cars.
Census data show that the number of people who drive alone in their cars in South Florida hasn’t budged since 2000.
An average of 79 percent of South Florida’s commuters drive alone, the census shows. About 3 percent use public transportation.
And recent attempts to sway commuters have been ineffective.
On Thursday, transit agencies across the country joined the 12th annual Dump the Pump Day, urging motorists to spend their money on fares instead of gas.
In May, the Florida Department of Transportation and South Florida Commuter Services, a commuter assistance program, challenged drivers to try transit or carpooling in six Southeast Florida counties from Monroe to St. Lucie.
Participants downloaded an app that tracked 33,551 transit trips over 452,938 miles in carpools, buses and trains — for the entire month. In comparison: Tri-Rail’s average daily ridership hovers around 15,000 people. Bus ridership tops 410,000 in South Florida each day.
That’s nowhere near the number of people driving. FDOT’s daily traffic counts show that as many as 795,000 vehicles traveled on Interstate 95 through South Florida every day last year.
That is expected to increase to more than 1.3 million each day by 2040 when South Florida’s population is forecast to grow from 5.8 million to 7.3 million.
Historically, efforts to nudge drivers onto buses and trains or into carpools have not made a dent in commuting habits, said Greg Stuart, executive director of Broward County’s Metropolitan Planning Organization.
“The trend for ridership, nationally, for transit is going down,” said Greg Stuart, executive director of Broward County’s Metropolitan Planning Organization.
“So, that dent is not happening as everyone had hoped.”
PalmTran Executive Director Clinton Forbes says everyone in the transit business knows what boosts ridership.
“When people hit that pain point of traffic congestion and higher gas prices, they usually go to the cheaper alternative, which is transit,” he said. Database editor John Maines contributed to this report.