Mr. Needham, 29, a website developer for nonprofits and small businesses, lives a five-minute walk from a new light-rail system that runs every 10 minutes and takes him into downtown Minneapolis in about 30 minutes for a fare of about $2.
“When we moved here to St. Paul, we realized that we lived on the route of a new light-rail system and a major bus thoroughfare, and we really didn’t need a vehicle,” Mr. Needham said. He said he, his wife Alyscia, and their 18-month-old daughter have been without a car for about a year.
Mr. Needham rides the 11-mile Green Line, which since opening in June has attracted around 36,000 riders on a typical weekday, a number that is already approaching the 41,000 projected for the line by 2030, said Drew Kerr, a spokesman for Metro Transit, the city’s transportation agency. The line cost $957 million to build, half of which was funded by the federal government, Mr. Kerr said.
Riders like Mr. Needham get a lot of value from public transportation, as do people in many other cities where investment in transit is leading to record-high ridership rates and persuading more people to leave their cars at home despite the latest plunge in gasoline prices.
The American Public Transportation Association said Wednesday that about 2.7 billion passenger trips were taken on transit systems in the third quarter of 2014 — an increase of 1.8 percent, or about 48 million trips, over the year-ago period — the highest third-quarter number since the trade group’s records began in 1974.
