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Seeing a little less traffic on your morning commute? It's not your imagination.
For the first time in decades, the Utah Department of Transportation says there are fewer drivers on the road over the past couple of months. The decline is only about 3 percent, but when you consider that Utah's growth rate hasn't really slowed, that's really saying something. UDOT doesn't have hard data as to why, but the price of gas appears to be the culprit. "I think we've definitely, finally reached that point," said UDOT's Nile Easton. "Apparently it's $4-a-gallon gas."
Less traffic, less funding A little less traffic is good for drivers and saves wear and tear on the roads. But it also means less funding for UDOT, which gets its revenue from a 24.5-cent-per-gallon gas tax that hasn't changed in more than 10 years. Less revenue comes at a tough time as the price of asphalt -- an oil-based derivative -- is skyrocketing. UDOT spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on asphalt. Easton said there are no new numbers on whether more people are using the carpool lanes, as counting involves putting people on overpasses to try and count the number of people in cars as they zoom by.
Public transportation Where are all those drivers going? Some of them are riding the bus. The Utah Transit Authority reports that ridership is up 20 percent over last year. While transit officials across the country lack hard data about why, gas prices are suspected. "People are starting to realize the value of having more than one travel option," said Virginia Miller of the American Public Transportation Association. The transit authorities themselves are subject to ebbs and flows in gas prices. "In truth, high gas prices are a double-edged sword," Miller said. "Because of the high fuel costs you simply cannot run the systems everywhere you used to run them." It also means increasing fares. UTA specifies how much you'll be paying in fuel surcharges as the price continues to climb, which is roughly 10 percent of the cost of the ticket.
The riders So who are the people crowding buses? Blanch Williams, for one. She was at the University Mall transit center on Wednesday waiting for her connector as the wind picked up and droplets started coming down. "Even though it's $2 per ticket, it's $4 for gas," she said. The drawback is that what takes 10 minutes in her car takes almost an hour by bus. It's not all bad, she said, as she takes the time to relax in the air-conditioned bus. Williams started riding the bus just a few weeks ago after her gas budget ran dry. "When gas prices went up again, I asked myself, 'How am I going to do it?' " ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How much do you save? According to the American Public Transportation Association, commuting daily from Provo to Salt Lake City in a car that gets 20 mpg, at $4.15 a gallon of gas, would cost around $5,000 a year. Taking the bus on a monthly pass would cost around $1,800 a year. That's a $3,200 savings (though that doesn't include the taxes you pay to finance public transit.) Figure out your own costs at publictransportation.org. |
