The average annual transit rides taken by every man, woman and child is probably the best estimate of the transit usage in a city.
The following table lists this statistic for an area I define as "Central Los Angeles." This is essentially the local transit service area as of 1930, minus some odd lines that ran out further into outlying suburbs. This consists mainly of the areas that had been built up around streetcars plus some adjacent areas served by buses in the '20s. The Los Angeles streetcar system did not expand to any significant degree after about 1917. Major expansion of the transit system in the '20s was through the addition of bus lines.
This area runs from Eagle Rock and Garvanza to Hyde Park and Watts, from Maywood and Bell it extends westward to about Crenshaw but then it extends out Adams and Washington to around Fairfax Avenue, and includes West Hollywood. The northern edge is the area just north of Franklin Avenue. The northern edge includes Atwater Village and Eagle Rock, and to the east it runs to City Terrace, El Sereno, and the part of East L.A. west of the cemetaries. It's not a circular area because the city didn't develop evenly in all directions.
My definition of "Central Los Angeles" is similar to, but differs somewhat from, the definition of Central Los Angeles in the MTA's new Long Range Transportation Plan. In that MTA document, they define "Central Los Angeles" as including all of East Los Angeles and running west to La Cienega but only as far south as Florence, and including all of Baldwin Hills. but without West Hollywood. My definition differs because Baldwin Hills is not included because of its later (auto-oriented) development. Also, I include Belvidere Heights (the area near Rowan Ave in East L.A.) because it was developed with streetcar service (around 1907) but I do not include the part of East L.A. east of the cemetaries because it was not historically served by the central Los Angeles transit system and was developed around automobiles in the early '20s. My definition of Central Los Angeles also goes somewhat further south, generally to about Manchester, but a bit further along the Vermont, South Broadway and Pacific Electric (present-day Blue Line) corridors because these corridors had streetcar service by 1910 and thus developed a bit earlier.
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You can see readily the effect of differences in the land use pattern on ridership by comparing the central Los Angeles ridership to the San Fernando Valley ridership.
Note that the historic all time high occurred in 1946. The main collapse in ridership occurred during the decade of the 1950s.
In 1938 the auto ownership rate differed between various areas of Los Angeles County mainly by income. Only about 35 percent of driving age residents didn't have a motor vehicle in Beverly Hills and vicinity at that time but almost 70 percent of the driving age residents lacked a motor vehicle in the blue collar area running from Watts to Walnut Park and Huntington Park.
Today, however, the pattern of auto ownership varies not only by income but by the land use pattern of the area. Areas that are denser and older tend to have more people without cars. Although fewer than 30 percent of the driving age residents of the county lack a motor vehicle (as of the 2000 census), a slight majority (51 percent) of residents of driving age in central Los Angeles do not have motor vehicles. This area includes some more affluent areas like Silverlake and Hancock Park. In those neighborhoods, a very small percentage of the driving age residents (less than a fourth) do not have a motor vehicle. If we subtract those areas and only consider working class neighborhoods of central Los Angeles, the majority without cars is larger. This tells us that both income and the characteristics of the urban area — lots of shops and jobs nearby, frequent bus service — determine how many people are likely to not have cars, and this is a good indication of how high the usage of public transit will be.
Auto ownership clearly affects the likely usage of public transit. But auto ownership varies tremendously by area. Within the area i have defined as "central Los Angeles", 51 percent of the driving age residents didn't have a motor vehicle in 2000. In 1938 57 percent of the driving age residents of central Los Angeles didn't have motor vehicles. Thus the increase in ownership of motor vehicles in central Los Angeles hasn't been great enough to explain the drop in transit usage in central Los Angeles since the late '30s.
Auto ownership isn't the only thing that affects use of public transit. In San Francisco 46 percent of the driving age residents don't have cars -- a somewhat higher auto ownership rate than central Los Angeles.
But transit rides per person in San Francisco is about 2 and a half times higher than central Los Angeles, despite the fact that average incomes are higher in San Francisco than in central Los Angeles. Other things that affect transit usage include the concentration of uses (shopping, culture, jobs) in the downtown, how compact the land use pattern is, the availability and price of parking, as well as speed and convenience of getting around by different types of transport. A city that extends over a broader area is more in need of rapid transit to sustain a higher level of transit usage. San Francisco sustains basically the same level of transit usage as New York City based mainly on a conventional surface bus network (75 percent of the transit rides in San Francisco are on the buses). It can do that because of its small size and squeezed-together land use pattern.
Transit planners are taught to use a statistic available from the census which is "households without a motor vehicle." But this is now an outdated way of looking at how auto ownership is relevant to transportation needs. That's because households today do not typically have just one person working. And kids may be traveling a longer distance to their school. A more relevant statistic, then, is "driving age residents without a motor vehicle." If you look only at the number of households without a car, you may be under-estimating the need for public transit. Thus there are only about 27 percent of households in central Los Angeles without a motor vehicle, but a majority of driving age persons don't have a vehicle.
Piecing together this study of the history of transit ridership in Los Angeles was not easy. The various reports over the years do not use the same terminology to tally ridership. Since the 1970s transit reports are governed by the standards of the National Transit Administration. These reports tally what is called a "boarding" (or "unlinked trip" in the NTA's arcane lingo). A boarding is any occasion someone gets on a transit vehicle, whether they pay with cash or have a transfer or a pass.
In the era of private ownership, the regulatory agency in California after 1914 was the California Railroad Commission (renamed the Public Utilities Commission in 1948). The CRC reports use several different categories, such as "revenue passengers", "transfer passengers", "free passengers" and "total passengers." A "revenue passenger" refers to a situation where someone gets on a vehicle and pays the fare with cash or a pass or ticket. A "transfer passenger" is someone getting on with a transfer. Some people in that era were entitled to ride for free (such as letter carriers). They are tallied as "free passengers."
One problem with the CRC reports is that they don't always define "total passengers" the same. Sometimes they include just "fare" and "transfer" rides, but at other times they include "fare", "transfer" and "free" rides. For example, this problem mislead Spencer Crump when he wrote Ride the Big Red Cars. His tally of "total passengers" over the years on the Pacific Electric includes transfer and fare passengers, but leaves out the category of "free passengers." It therefore isn't quite equivalent to the present-day category of "boardings", which includes all rides.
To take an example of the problem, the history of the city's transit ridership in the 1925 Kelker report is a tally only of "revenue passengers." To get an estimate of total boardings, in the modern sense, I had to look at the ratio of fare passengers to total passengers for the Los Angeles Railway in the '30s, as indicated in a 1939 CRC report. I then used this ratio to get the estimate for the 1923 ridership.
Similarly, Scott Bottles was apparently completely confused by these different reporting categories when he wrote Los Angeles and the Automobile. His book incoherently combines "total passengers" and "revenue passengers" indiscriminately in his various graphs of ridership. Also, Bottles fails to differentiate the history of ridership in the older central area, built up around streetcars, from the newer areas built up around cars. This leads him to present statistics that puportedly show a huge collapse of transit ridership in the '30s. He uses this to defend his thesis that poor service explains the shift to a high level of auto usage. But the only area served by the Los Angeles Railway streetcar network was the central area. To make his claim, he'd need to disaggregate ridership for the central area from ridership for the county as a whole (as I have done here). If he had done this, he'd have seen that there wasn't a huge drop off of ridership in the central area til after World War 2. I agree with Bottles that service was abysmal but this wasn't historically the main factor affecting decline in transit usage. The drop in ridership in the central area in the '30s can be mainly explained by the depression. In 1939 nearly a fourth of the Los Angeles area workforce was unemployed. The auto ownership rate in Los Angeles actually declined in the early '30s, and declined again during World War 2.