Further, this region’s designation as a “severe” ozone area by the Environmental Protection Agency makes it imperative that transit systems continue to attract growing ridership.  According to the American Public Transportation Association, each person who switches to transit from his or her private automobile saves 76 pounds of harmful pollutants in a single year.  Those 276,000 transit trips each workday in Northern Virginia are saving 5,244 tons of pollutants in a year.

Each person using transit instead of driving to work saves 273 gallons of gasoline a year, also according to APTA.  Those 276,000 daily transit trips are saving almost 38 million gallons of motor fuel each year.  NVTC estimates that per capita motor fuel consumption within its district is about 450 gallons per year, which is a third less than the total for Virginia reflecting Northern Virginia’s superior transit connections.[1]  Throughout the United States, transit users save one month’s oil imports from Saudi Arabia during the course of a year.  This is true even though only 4.3 percent of the road mileage in the US is served by transit.[2]

Transit use also provides relief from the costs of traffic congestion.  Auto drivers caught in congestion waste 100 gallons of gas for each peak period commuter in a year, or enough to fill 114 super tankers.  A Federal Highway Administration study of six urban corridors found the existence of rail transit saved 17,400 hours daily for users and 22,000 hours for those that continued to drive.[3]

Metropolitan Washington ranks fourth worst in the US in traffic congestion, but because it offers the choice of using transit and other alternatives to the automobile, the area ranks only 31^st in its burden of congestion.  In Metropolitan Washington, average automobile delay is 46 hours per person per year at a cost of $780.[4]  This should be viewed as a tax, paid in a way that does not produce any revenue for fixing the problem.  Transit users save $108 million per year in Northern Virginia.

APTA also scores transit high as an engine of economic activity.  Nationwide each dollar invested in public transit yields $6 in economic returns.  A billion dollar transit investment creates 47,500 jobs.  Analysis performed by KPMG Peat Marwick for NVTC found that the commonwealth of Virginia’s investment in Metrorail spurred transit-friendly development, created over 90,000 permanent professional jobs, yielded state tax revenues in excess of investments of $1.2 billion and generated an astounding 19.2 percent annual rate of return.[5]

Northern Virginia is served by one of the nation’s premier regional transit systems.  WMATA is the second largest rail transit operator in the U.S. (83 stations; 800 railcars; 103 miles; 615,000 average weekday riders).  It is the fifth largest bus operator (1,445 buses; 2,650 route miles; 14,112 weekday trips; 508,000 average weekday riders) and the 13^th largest paratransit operator (57,000 monthly trips; 234 vans).  It is the largest “vertical” operator in the US with 572 escalators and 220 elevators, providing over 2.5 million customer trips per weekday.  Metrorail has maximum people-moving capacity that is 13 times greater than a conventional highway lane.  A Northern Virginia freeway lane can accommodate about 2,000 people per direction per peak hour at the regional average auto occupancy.  Metrorail, with eight car trains, 26 trains per hour at 135-second headways and 120 passengers per car, can carry 26,000 people per hour.

Another factor accounting for transit’s success in attracting riders is the fact that transit fares provide solid value.  Costs of commuting by automobile are at least 50-cents per mile, while Metrorail costs the customer 26-cents per mile (based on an average eight-mile trip) and Metrobus costs 21-cents (for a 5.2 mile average trip).  Further, almost half of Metrorail riders receive employer-provided, tax-free benefits (Metrochek or SmartBenefits) which provide up to $100 per month to offset these fares.  Average Metrorail fares, including discounts resulting from transfers and passes, are only about $1.65 and Metrobus fares are $.51 (even lower then the fares used in the above comparisons).

Even if Metrorail operating costs (versus fares) are compared to auto costs (without external factors such as pollution, congestion and parking that would increase automobiles’ real costs), Metrorail remains 30 percent less costly.

Customers replied in an October, 2002 VRE survey that 72 percent believed VRE fares provide excellent or good value for the quality of service.  About 48 percent of VRE’s customers receive Metrochek.  But even without Metrochek, a VRE customer paying $200 a month for a 110-mile roundtrip commute pays three or four times less than driving alone in an automobile without even factoring in the cost of parking.

Finally, reduced availability of free parking is a factor contributing to transit success.  A WMATA survey report (October 5, 2001) showed that free parking declined from 40 percent of respondents at D.C. employment sites in 1997 to 32 percent in 2001.  Declines in other areas were similar, including Arlington (50 percent in 1997 versus 44 percent in 2001) and Fairfax County (85 and 78 percent, respectively).  Currently about 60 percent of the 400,000 parking spaces in the Washington Metropolitan area are free.

 Figure 6 highlights several of the factors reviewed above that contribute to public transit’s success.

Source:  Reference in text.

Rail Services

The figures in this section focus on the recent performance of rail systems operating in Northern Virginia (i.e. Metrorail and VRE).  For WMATA, ridership is shown daily (Figure 7) and annually (Figure 8) by station.  Because of the effects of September 11, 2001 (which was in FY 2002), comparisons of FY 2002 to FY 2001 show a slight drop overall, especially for Sunday ridership. 

Figure 9 contains monthly Metrorail ridership and Figure 10 shows the annual trend for Metrorail with FY 2002 down slightly from the record year of FY 2001, but still well above the previous record setting year of FY 2000.  Because transit ridership is still recovering, calendar year 2002 shows significant growth over calendar year 2001, even though the fiscal year comparisons show a slight decline.  For example, Metrorail ridership was up 3.6 percent in calendar year 2002.