Why are college towns (relatively) good at Transit?
Thanks to Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who I do not have any opinions of at all, my ancestral homeland of South Bend, Indiana has gotten an unusual amount of attention in the past year and a half. One of the fun bits of discourse that has arrisen out of Pete’s run is the question of whether South Bend is a “college town”.
The answer to this question is “no”. South Bend is not a college town, and it’s not particularly close. South Bend is one of many smaller rust belt cities, like Erie, Gary and Youngstown, that line the great lakes region and offer a strong industrial history. It just so happens to border a somewhat prestigious University.
Notre Dame and its sister school, St. Mary’s, combine to have about 10k undergrads. Most of them live on campus, which is not technically located in South Bend. But if South Bend was to annex that land, then South Bend’s total population would be around 112k, and students would make up around 9% of its population. If you zoom out and look at the South Bend — Mishawaka “urbanized area” (similar to a Metropolitan Statistical Area, but less inclusive of exurbs), that area had a population of about 277k in 2012, making the student population share a negligible 3.6%. Like most private schools, Notre Dame simply does not have enough students to really define a town, unless it’s a really small town like Ithaca or Hanover.
An example of a true college town is Bloomington, Indiana. Its urbanized area has a population of around 110k, and enrollment at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus is over 40k, so almost 40% of the areas’ population is made up of students. When you take a large state school and put it in the sparsely populated, rolling hills of Southern Indiana, that’s a recipe for a college town. Here’s a dozen examples of places where the student population of a single university comprises more than 15% of the urbanized area’s overall population:
College towns like Bloomington, State College, Morgantown and Blacksburg are interesting for a number of reasons, but here I’ll focus on just one of them: transit use. In a country that’s been infamously terrible at getting people to use public transportation over the past 50 years, one type of town that’s been surprisingly decent at this is college towns. All of the above urbanized areas averaged at least 31 annual transit trips per capita in 2013, and a few were in the 80s and 90s:
To be clear, these numbers aren’t earth-shattering, especially near the bottom of the list. But we’re talking about some relatively sparse areas with 100k–300k residents, in a country that’s terrible at public transportation. For reference, here are the top 10 best transit metros in America that aren’t college towns:
Some quick observations:
- Athens, Georgia had the 4th highest per-capita transit use in America, behind only New York, San Francisco,* and Washington!
- Champaign, Illinois had higher transit use than Chicago!
- Iowa City had higher transit use than Seattle!
- Gainesville, Florida had higher transit use than Los Angeles!
*San Francisco’s numbers do not include the much-worse-at-transit San Jose MSA
What’s even more stark is comparing the college town numbers to other major US metros like these:
So why is it that Gainesville residents use transit at 3 times the rate of Orlando? Why is Ann Arbor’s rate 4 times that of Detroit? And why is Bloomington’s 5 times that of Indianapolis? Why do college towns get better ridership than major metros with millions of people?
The obvious surface-level answer is “it’s the students”. The large Universities that anchor these college towns tend to have tens of thousands of students living off campus, too far to comfortably walk to class. And since undergrads typically aren’t allowed to park on campus during the school day, they’re left without much choice but to use the bus or bike (or scooter, if it’s 2018 or later). College students use transit because they have to. And since college students are as much as 46% of the overall population in these areas, high student ridership translates into noticeable ridership for the region as a whole.
What can other cities learn from this?
The basic dynamics that cause college towns to post respectable-for-American-standards rates of transit use seem relatively straightforward. The real question is, what can non-college towns take away from this? What can a city like Indianapolis, which has plenty of people and jobs but almost no transit usage, learn from Athens or Champaign? What about smaller cities that aren’t college towns, like South Bend (which recorded 8.3 trips per capita)?
I would say there’s two main takeaways: job centralization and parking.
Job Centralization is Key
One thing that makes it super difficult for a region to maintain high ridership is job sprawl. When jobs become scattered about in suburban office parks, it becomes almost impossible for transit to rival driving for commuting purposes. Thus, cities that want decent transit mode share need a significant percentage of jobs to be concentrated in a relatively small geographic area. Universities naturally achieve this for college towns, but other cities have to work harder to create job concentration in their downtowns.
Many of the largest US cities could stand to substantially boost their job concentration. Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Diego and Los Angeles are all metros where a majority of jobs are located more than 10 miles from the Central Bussiness District. Detroit has the most job sprawl of all, with only 7% of jobs within 3 miles of the CBD, and 75% of jobs more than 10 miles away. This job sprawl has not only killed ridership in metro Detroit, it’s a big part of why the city has lost over a million residents from its peak population.
One way to fight job sprawl is to consolidate local government as much as possible. A Brooking’s Institution study found that among large metros, those with a greater number of political jurisdictions tended to have greater job sprawl:
The presumed mechanism here is when you have a metro with dozens and dozens of jurisdictions, it becomes more likely that employers will spread out to take advantage of different tax incentives offered by various suburbs. Chicago is a prominent example of this: its CBD is strong, but not nearly as strong as New York’s, and almost all offices that aren’t in the CBD are located in far-flung office parks in tiny suburbs like Rosemont and Deerfield.
One major city that has demonstrated the benefits of consolidated local government is Calgary. The City of Calgary has a population of 1.3 million, with a relatively low density of about 3,900 people per square mile. But Calgary is extremely politically consolidated — about 95% of people who live in the Calgary metro area live in the actual City of Calgary (the metro population is about 1.4 million). This is unheard of in America, where the suburbs of a major city usually have way more residents than the central city itself.
This political consolidation has helped Calgary build a strong, jobs-rich downtown, and allowed their lightrail system to achieve an annual ridership of 91 million. That’s the second most of any North American light rail system, ahead of Toronto’s streetcar system and LA’s Metro Rail. Add in bus service, and Calgary ends up clocking in around 170 million unlinked transit trips (102 million linked), which is a higher per-capita rate than every US metro except New York and San Francisco. That’s right Americans, if you don’t live in New York or San Francisco, Calgary’s riding transit more than you. And once again, we’re doing SF a solid here by not lumping it in with the San Jose MSA.
Ban Parking Minimums
One goal every city should work towards to boost its transit ridership is to ban parking minimums downtown. Parking is the car’s achilles heel: without parking, driving becomes an unviable method of transportation (except via taxi services, which are expensive, unless Venture Capitalists subsidize them for you). This is another key to college towns’ success: undergrads can’t park on campus during business hours. If they could, many of them would, but they can’t.
Some examples of American cities that have reasonably high downtown job concentration, but little transit ridership are Salt Lake City, Louisville, New Orleans and Jacksonville. A combination of good light rail infrastructure and parking restrictions could potentially spur some ridership in these metros via the Calgary model.
Portland has high job concentration, higher than Boston, but lags behind Boston and several other major cities in transit use. Portland has made some good parking reforms lately, but they should go further and ban parking minimums all together, like Buffalo.
Ultimately, building ridership is about making driving suck
Driving is the default mode of transportation almost everywhere in America, because it’s easy to drive almost everywhere in America. Over the course of the last 80 years, we’ve done amost everything we could to make driving easy, and have done little to make drivers pay for the incredibly high externalities they create, especially the externalities imposed upon future generations via climate change. To get people out of their cars, you need to provide good transit infrastructure, but you also need to make driving suck. That means high gas taxes, it means scarce parking supply, and it means job concentration in dense downtowns. New York City should envy Paris and Tokyo, but most US cities should start by envying a college town in east Georgia, and Canada’s 4th largest metro area.
