Express buses going in and out of Charlotte are experiencing a huge upswing in popularity, according to an article in Tuesday’s Charlotte Observer. Annual ridership was 60 percent higher last year than it was in 2000. Commuters are enthusiastically flocking to the express bus as a relaxing alternative to sitting in some of North Carolina’s worst traffic jams, the paper reported.
Well, before the state’s mass-transit advocates work themselves into a lather in exultation about this, they might want to take a closer look at the underlying numbers. As the classic Russell Langley textbook Practical Statistics Simply Explained put it back in the 1960s, “Beware of percentages unaccompanied by the actual numbers.” It turns out that lots of people get taken in by lots of statistical abuses of this sort. It’s one reason why so many of us are terrified of “chemicals” inserted in the environment around us by evil corporate interests, because experiments have demonstrated that these substances may increase the risk of cancer in laboratory animals by 50 percent. That cancer risk is usually so tiny to start with that any such change, even if statistically significant, has no practical significance.
Langley provides the example of a test of a product called “Dumpties,” presumably having something to do with the human digestive tract, though precisely what was left to the imagination. “In a special experiment,” promoters of the product stated, “we found that 83.3 percent people got relief from Dumpties within 60 seconds.” But the promoters neglected to mention that the experiment in question included only six text subjects, five of whom got the stated relief. “If you test enough small groups,” Langley wrote, “sooner or later you’re almost certain to get one group to suit your purpose, purely by chance.”
Speaking of small groups, let’s return to the case of Charlotte’s express-bus riders. While I’m sure the newspaper accurately quoted the commuters in question, who surely appreciate their (heavily subsidized) bus experience, it failed to convey how few people were involved in the “60 percent increase” touted in its front-page story. After the end of the online version of the piece, it did provide the gross ridership numbers, but I’m guessing that many readers didn’t see them and even those who did had no way of interpreting them.
The Observer reported that there were 634,335 express-bus riders in 2003, up from 390,666 in 2000. But these data don’t really refer to riders. They refer to rides, usually by the same relatively small number of daily riders. Assuming that the express buses didn’t run on weekends or holidays, that would mean an average of approximately 2,500 rides per day, which must then be halved to reflect the fact that most riders would be taking the bus once a day in each direction. That leaves something in the neighborhood of 1,250 riders a day, on average. Just to put this in perspective, there are stretches of highway in the Charlotte area, not including the big ones like I-77 and I-85, that have an equivalent number of rush-hour motorists drive through in one half-hour.
In other words, the fact that a few hundred more people may be riding express buses into Charlotte each weekday than there was three years ago has little practical significance, at least from the standpoint of how the vast majority of Charlotte-area residents get around the Queen City. Moreover, even this gain can’t necessarily be extrapolated to imply that huge investments in the region’s proposed rail system would yield a reasonable rate of return. Rail, for example, typically pulls much of its initial ridership from preexisting bus lines. So if there is a (small) market for express service into Charlotte, the completion of a rail line would result in a lot of cannibalizing from the bus ridership before the system actually started diverting people from automobile commuting.
I’m actually not a foe of bus systems. As transportation analyst Wendell Cox observed in a cogent analysis of Charlotte’s grandiose transit plans, there are consumers for whom bus transportation will always be attractive, including those too poor to own cars, those too frail or disabled to drive cars, those who have no business driving and parking their cars (think Chapel Hill), and those looking for easier alternatives in particular routes and circumstances (such as traveling to a major sporting event). And at least with buses, the operators can adjust their routes and services over time to fit a dynamic, ever-changing marketplace — unlike that trendy technology of the 19th century, the railroad.
You know, on second thought perhaps I shouldn’t be so dismissive about the possibility of tax-subsidized transit playing a significant role in the traffic patterns of Charlotte, the Triangle, the Triad, and other North Carolina communities. After all, the chance of success is probably about 40 percent to 60 percent higher than it was 20 years ago.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.
p.s. If you’d like to learn more about the real economics of bus and rail transit in North Carolina, it just so happens that Cox and a number of other nationally known experts — including Randal O’Toole, Ted Balaker, John Charles, and Dave Hartgen — will be in our state this weekend to speak at the annual conference of the Center for Local Innovation. CLI, a special project of the John Locke Foundation, will host the event on Saturday, Jan. 10 starting at 8 am at the Radisson Governor’s Inn in the Research Triangle Park. Tickets are a bargain at $10, including lunch and materials. For more information or to make reservations for the event, visit here or email Kory Swanson at [email protected].