The urban, and wealthy take money from the rural and poor to build grandiose, but useless transit . . .

Transit’s Dim Future | The Antiplanner

. . . this is the real story.

"Despite a “growing population, a rebounding economy, growing total employment, and an aggressively argued hypothesis that the millennial generation is meaningfully different than their forefathers,” says transportation researcher Steven Polzin, “transit ridership has remained stubbornly modest.” That’s a generous view that takes into account slow ridership growth between 2012 and 2014 but ridership declines in 2015."

Outside of New York, transit is a bit part player in American transportation. Even in transit mecca's like Portland, all transit only carries about 2.3% of all daily trips, and in the metro area about 7.5% of commuters (in Portland proper it carries about 11.5% of all commuters). The rest of the state, however, has no substantial amount of transit, is much poorer than the Portland metro area, but still pays for Portland's transit through gas and other taxes.

It is inappropriate to force the poor to pay for the wealthy's transportation, but it is common.

"Polzin points to numerous factors that work against transit: lower fuel prices, increased auto sharing, increased cycling and walking, and diminishing returns on extensions of existing transit services. He also points out that, contrary to claims that Americans are substituting transit for driving in large numbers, recent data suggest that “the new normal for travel trends is looking more like the old normal.”

However, he misses a couple of key points. First, Polzin compares transit ridership over time with the population, concluding that per capita transit ridership “is a pretty straight horizontal line since about 1970.” In fact, he should have compared transit ridership with the urban population, as few rural residents are served by transit. Since the urban population is growing faster than the overall population, per capita urban transit ridership has declined by about 15 percent since 1970. This makes transit’s future appear even dimmer than Polzin suggests."

On top of all this, over time transit is dying. This is due to wealth. Over time, American's became wealthier. Americans bought cars, and shifted from the limitations of public transit based mobility to independent, personal mobility. This allowed them to become even wealthier, and continue this process. Today, Americans are incredibly wealthy, with most of the poor owning their own homes, and owning at least one automobile. In this environment, there is little chance of transit ever returning to its former glory. 

"Polzin points to numerous factors that work against transit: lower fuel prices, increased auto sharing, increased cycling and walking, and diminishing returns on extensions of existing transit services. He also points out that, contrary to claims that Americans are substituting transit for driving in large numbers, recent data suggest that “the new normal for travel trends is looking more like the old normal.”

However, he misses a couple of key points. First, Polzin compares transit ridership over time with the population, concluding that per capita transit ridership “is a pretty straight horizontal line since about 1970.” In fact, he should have compared transit ridership with the urban population, as few rural residents are served by transit. Since the urban population is growing faster than the overall population, per capita urban transit ridership has declined by about 15 percent since 1970. This makes transit’s future appear even dimmer than Polzin suggests."

Transit is in longterm decline due primarily to wealth.

"Second, transit agencies have been extraordinarily inept in making investments in transit service. Among the factors that transit agencies can control, ridership is most closely linked to vehicle miles of transit operations. Yet numerous agencies have sacrificed those vehicle miles in order to provide big-box transit like giant buses and various forms of rail transit. The result is higher spending but lower ridership in many urban areas.

Finally, despite all the billions of dollars spent on transit, the biggest factors influencing ridership are employment and fuel prices, both of which are beyond transit agencies’ control. Rather than try to get people to ride fixed transit systems by controlling land uses and subsidizing so-called transit-oriented development, agencies need to be flexible and respond to changes in demand as they happen, not after the years and decades it takes to build expensive rail lines."

But there is prestige in running a large choo-choo, and so bus declines, while rail increases. This is also due to wealth, we now have so much money we don't much care how it is spent.