Basic Transportation Becoming Unaffordable, Unsafe, or Both
July 19 2021 - 11:20AM
Dow Jones News
By Dan Molinski
The task of grabbing transportation to get from Point A to Point
B has quickly become either too expensive, too unsafe or both, and
those who must travel are mostly choosing the pricey but
less-dangerous option, while many of the rest are just staying at
home.
The U.S. was long known around the world for cheap, safe travel,
with rental-car deals that shocked foreign visitors, low gasoline
prices about half that of Europe and Latin America, and relatively
safe subways that allowed tourists and daily commuters in popular
cities like Chicago and New York to easily buzz around town.
That's no longer the case. Ground travel in the U.S. has
suddenly become a pick-your-poison type of deal.
Gasoline prices are 45% higher from a year ago, at a
seven-year-high of $3.17 a gallon, while the price of buying a car,
new or used, has also increased sharply. Fares for ride-hailing
firms such as Uber and Lyft, though hard to calculate due to
dynamic pricing, have generally gone through the roof with many
riders posting receipts on social media that show a short trip from
their home to the airport costing several hundred dollars, even
more than the cost of their subsequent airplane flight. It's the
same story for rental cars, with many companies reporting rates
well more than double what they were pre-pandemic.
Those lofty, car-centric prices might in other times result in
travelers switching en masse to public transportation, which
wouldn't be such a bad thing as the world tries to become greener
and emit fewer carbons.
But worries about rising crime rates and reduced police
protection, especially in major cities, have made travel by public
transportation a non-starter for many people. An April report from
the Wall Street Journal cited a survey by New York's Metropolitan
Transportation Authority that found riders are more concerned about
crime and harassment on trains and in stations now than six months
ago, and it also found that fear of crime is an impediment to
people returning to the system.
Ridership data bears out those concerns over crime. About 2.4
million people a day rode New York subways last week, which is
still down 55% from pre-pandemic days, while bus ridership was
almost as low, down about 44%, the MTA said.
That drop in public transportation demand is often attributed to
pandemic-related factors such as an increase in work-from-home
employees and fears of contracting or spreading coronavirus in
close quarters. But if that were the case, one would think gasoline
demand, vehicle traffic and air travel--with its unmatched close
quarters--would also still be struggling. They're not.
The four-week-average for gasoline demand in the U.S. stood at
9.5 million barrels a day at the end of last week, virtually
identical to the same, pre-pandemic time period in 2019, the U.S.
government's Energy Information Administration reported last week.
And New York's MTA said the latest data for Thursday showed traffic
into and over the city's bridges and tunnels was less than 1% below
pre-pandemic levels.
As for air travel, the Transportation Security Administration
said Monday the number of airline passengers being screened at
security checkpoints nationwide Sunday reached 2.23 million, the
highest since February 2020 and just 18% below pre-pandemic
levels.
Write to Dan Molinski at dan.molinski@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 19, 2021 11:15 ET (15:15 GMT)
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