Brookings study finds Philadelphia mediocre on public transit

The Philadelphia region is mediocre when it comes to getting to work on public transit, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution.

The Philadelphia metro area - designated as 11 counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland - was ranked 49th among the 100 largest metro areas in its ability to connect workers and jobs by transit.

The study released Thursday by the Washington think tank measured the percentage of jobs in a region that could be reached within 90 minutes by transit.

Not surprisingly, the areas that did best were smaller cities with relatively robust bus networks. Honolulu was ranked first, followed by San Jose, Calif., Salt Lake City, Tucson, Ariz., and Fresno, Calif.

Like Philadelphia, many big metro areas with large urban cores and sprawling suburbs were deemed less effective at getting people to work quickly on transit: New York was ranked 12th, Washington 17th, Los Angeles 24th, Boston 34th, Phoenix 43d, Chicago 46th, Houston 72d, Dallas 89th, and Atlanta 91st.

The study found that 24 percent of all jobs in the Philadelphia metro area could be reached by transit in 90 minutes, compared with an average for metro areas of 30 percent. In the Philadelphia region, 77 percent of working-age residents live near a transit stop (compared with 69 percent nationwide), and the median wait for a rush-hour transit ride was 9.8 minutes, compared with the metro average of 10.1 minutes.

Alan Berube, a senior fellow at Brookings and one of the authors of the study, said Philadelphia was challenged by its sprawl of job locations across the metro region, and because its biggest transit agencies - SEPTA, NJ Transit, and PATCO - were designed to bring workers to Center City.

"Sixty-four percent of the jobs are more than 10 miles from downtown," Berube said. "The vast majority are quite a distance from Center City."

Census data show that the most jobs are in Philadelphia (22.9 percent) and Montgomery County (17.6 percent), followed by Bucks County (10.3 percent) and New Castle County, Del. (9.9 percent).

SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney agreed that "our challenge is suburban-to-suburban work areas."

"We are still basically a hub-and-spoke operation," Maloney said. "Density is the key. We have to have a certain mass of ridership to justify the cost of providing service."

The Brookings study found that the growing trend of suburban sprawl was likely to make it harder for many workers to get to work on public transit.

"As metropolitan areas decentralize in low-density forms of development - where residential and commercial uses are kept separate - it becomes increasingly difficult to connect people to jobs with public transit in a cost-effective manner," the study said. "From 2002 to 2007, the amount of developed land in the United States increased by 8.4 percent, nearly twice the rate of population growth (4.5 percent)."

Berube said the study authors hoped the report would prod government leaders and regional planners to "make access to jobs an explicit factor" in decisions about development, housing, environment, and transportation. Too often, he said, those decisions are made independently of each other.

The report, "Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America," is available at the Brookings website: www.brookings.edu.