Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Transportation experts who have pushed mass transit since the 1970s are getting their wish as soaring gas prices persuade Americans to abandon their cars for buses and trains in record numbers. But as the adage says, be careful what you wish for.

Mass transit ridership is at its highest point in 50 years, according to research by the American Public Transportation Association. For many riders, it just got too expensive to drive.

“I do it to save gas whenever I can,” said Cody Nunez, a student at Pasco High School in Kennewick, Wash. “I don’t want to be paying $50 every week.”

Shevette Porter of Palm Beach County, Fla., recently bought a bus pass for the local Tri-Rail network. Ridership for the system in March was up 20 percent over March 2007; in April it was up 28 percent year over year.

“It’s been costing $150 a week just in gas,” Porter said. “I’m losing time, but it’s well worth it.”

Not built for modern loads
The story is the same everywhere: In Seattle, commuter rail ridership recorded the biggest jump in the nation during the first quarter, with 28 percent more riders than during the same time last year. Ridership in Harrisburg, Pa., rose 17 percent. In Oakland, Calif., it rose 15.8 percent.

Nationwide, Americans took 2.6 billion bus, subway, commuter rail and light rail trips in the first three months of the year, 85 million more than in the same period in 2007, the American Public Transportation Association said. But it’s not clear that the nation’s transit systems are able to handle the load.

While many major cities cities have invested heavily in mass transit over the past 15 years, many more have not. Now that people are demanding service, there isn’t the infrastructure to provide it.

“We’re seeing it in a lot of other metropolitan areas where there just [aren’t] viable transit options — places like Indianapolis, Orlando or Raleigh,” said Robert Puentes, a transportation and urban planning scholar with the Brookings Institution, a public policy association in Washington. “They haven’t put the money into it. They haven’t put the resources into it.”

Even those big cities with robust systems are struggling, Puentes said.

“There are major challenges in most of the older, established transit systems, places like New York or Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston — places that are really starting to show their age,” he said.

No room on the bus
One of those places is Washington, D.C., where officials of the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, serving the nation’s capital and its suburbs in Maryland and Virginia, are studying contingency plans to deal with weekday ridership that is up during every part of the day over this time last year.

The authority’s subway system, already under pressure from riders to add a fifth line, recorded an 8.5 percent increase in ridership in April over last year. Transit officials project that a fifth line could swell ridership by another 40 percent in Maryland.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report The following NBC stations and affiliates contributed to this report: KING of Seattle; KNDU of Kennewick, Wash.; KNTV of San Francisco; KSNW of Wichita, Kan.; KXAN of Austin, Texas; WCSH of Portland, Maine; WRC of Washington; WTHR of Indianapolis; and WTVJ of Miami.

Washington-area bus riders, meanwhile, complain of standing-room-only buses at any time of the day or night, while buses are so full in Indianapolis that would-be riders are often refused entry, left to watch as buses drive off without them.

“I was standing there for about an hour,” said Ryan Taber, who rides the Fishers Express bus from his home in Hamilton County to his job in downtown Indianapolis.

“No buses ever came by, so finally we stopped a bus going to Carmel and said, ‘What’s the deal?’ And the driver said, ‘The buses were full, so they didn’t even come by this stop,’” Taber said.

Likewise in Austin, Texas, where “some of our operators are telling us that sometimes the buses are so full that they have to tell passengers to wait for the next bus,” said Misty Whited, a spokeswoman for Capital Metro Transit.

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