17 minutes.
That's how long Americans had to wait on average to
get on public transit in 2020.
To transit in the U.S.
is awful, with few exceptions and a few
places it's infrequent.
It's not all day.
It's unreliable.
Meanwhile, 45% of Americans have no access
to public transportation at all.
The real problem in the U.S. is what I would call
transit deserts.
I mean, these are just places where it is just
complete and total nightmare to try to get
anywhere on transit, whether to work or to
play, to pick up your kids. You just can't
depend on it.
The U.S. spent $79 billion on public transit in 2019,
yet most public transit across the nation is
finding itself in a fiscal crisis.
In 2021, the U.S.
was $176 billion behind in updating the poor
conditions of public transit.
That backlog is expected to grow to $250 billion by
the year 2029.
Ultimately, it's the riders who are paying for
the deficit.
The pandemic money is going to run out.
And so there will be, I think there will be fare
increases. But even more, I think because of the
politics of it, there will be service reduction
and many places have predicted that.
So just how did public transit in the U.S.
get so awful and can it be improved?
The U.S. government has long favored cars over
public transportation.
When we talk about money for transit, we talk about
funding. But when we talk about the same public
money for roads, we often hear the word
'investment.'
We're spending far more, hundreds of billions more
on road improvement and infrastructure than we are
on transit.
For example. U.S.
railways combining commuter heavy and light
rail grew by 945 miles between 2010 and 2020.
During the same period, highways were expanded by
over 100,000 miles.
In transportation, we very often have no choices.
If we're talking about local or area
transportation, it's very often only driving.
History plays a big role in this discrepancy.
There was a time when the U.S.
boasted a public transit system that was the envy
of the world.
Prior to 1920s, we had a very good streetcar system
in our cities.
These were trams that were running typically in the
middle of the street. You would board them at your
convenience. They were often so frequent that you
didn't have to plan ahead.
During its peak in the 1920s, Americans living in
cities averaged more than 250 streetcar trips per
year, but the electric streetcar business was far
from profitable.
Inflation drove up the operating costs, but
businesses were unable to raise fares accordingly
and services quickly began to deteriorate as a
result.
When the streetcar companies, which were
private, went to the government and so forth
and said, 'Please help us,' city governments,
state governments and of course the federal
government wasn't involved at all in this
period, basically turned a blind eye.
By the end of World War I, a third of transit
companies were already in bankruptcy, and America
had found its newest obsession: cars.
People who wanted to sell more cars reframed the car
as an all-purpose transport necessity
instead of a special purpose mobility tool.
And when they turned it into that, they really
convinced a lot of people that you need this to go
everywhere and that you're not living in a
modern, progressive city until it's a city that
lets you drive everywhere.
And with the influx of money and aid from
policies, cities began to quickly transform around
cars.
They forced private transit companies,
whenever possible, to strip out the streetcar
lines. They they created all these one way streets
to speed up automobiles.
They built parkways, they built highways.
And when people said, 'Wait a minute, is this
really the right way to do it?,' the answer was,
'Oh, it's just supply and demand.
It's a free market.
Drivers are voting with their gas pedals and we
need to build the roads and streets for the people
who are paying for them.'
There is a kind of a time lag between public
investment in highway infrastructure versus
transit infrastructure in our nation.
There was at least 40 to 50 years of lag and the
federal government did not get into public
transportation funding programs until late 1960s.
Today, that disparity is more evident through
partizan differences.
The ratio in which funding is distributed
between highways and public transit became the
main point of contention over the 2021
infrastructure bill.
Democrats wanted just 20% of the budget to go
towards mass transit, while Republicans pushed
for less. Democrats eventually compromised to
pass the bill through the Senate.
We have identified the automobile with personal,
individual liberty.
We also associate driving, particularly,
with suburban and rural America, while public
transit, we associate with urban America.
Those correlations then bleed into political
correlations of similar kinds, where fostering
more driving tends to be something that's favored
in more conservative, more Republican, more
rural areas.
A study from 2021 revealed that 77% of liberal
respondents believe that transport policy should
shift more trips towards public transit, walking
and bicycling.
While 53% of conservatives believe that
transport policy should make it easier for most
people to drive.
The discrepancy was even higher with very liberal
or conservative respondents.
It's very hard politically to get that kind of
momentum. Cities are a little bit easier, but
states, very hard to get that suburban voter who is
very powerful in almost every state legislature,
very hard to get federal officials behind this,
because, again, the payoff politically,
because it's a relatively small number of users,
very small. It can be 1%, 2%, 3% in most cities.
That's not the loud voices.
The loud voices are going to be the drivers.
Funding is one of the main reasons behind the poor
state of public transit in the U.S.
Right now, the federal money that goes to transit
services is largely limited to the capital
costs, that means building the
infrastructure or buying the vehicles.
But the operating costs are where the transit
services are really pinched.
Public transit relies heavily on subsidies
because it's still far from a profitable
business. Take the MTA, the nation's largest
public transit, for example.
In 2022, less than a quarter of the MTA's
revenue came from rider fares.
By comparison, revenue from dedicated taxes and
subsidies from local governments made up 40% of
its total revenue.
The cost of living, the cost of operations, the
cost of construction, all of that over the last 40,
50 years has far exceeded what is collected in
fares.
Current subsidies simply aren't enough to cover the
costs. The MTA's finances were hit hard by the
pandemic, resulting in temporary aid from the
federal government. Yet it still reported a budget
deficit of $1.9 billion in 2022.
This problem extends beyond New York City.
Philadelphia's SEPTA predicts it will see a
deficit of almost $269 million by 2027.
Chicago's RTA predicts a budget gap of $730 million
by 2026, while LA Metro's budget gap expects to
reach $1 billion by the end of 2026.
These financial deficits lead directly to
deteriorating services.
If a transit system doesn't have enough money,
we can limit the hours of service, we can limit the
frequency of service, we can limit the extent of
the network. But all of those things also deter
ridership and encourage people to depend on their
car.
In a 2022 survey on incentives around public
transit, Americans chose accurate and reliable
arrival times as the second biggest reason that
would encourage them to use public transit more
often, right behind lower fares.
Public transportation is so expensive to run in the
United States is because of the lack of usage.
Mass transit needs mass to be successful.
Ridership has continuously declined since 2015, and
after seeing a steep drop during the pandemic,
ridership has failed to recover to its previous
levels.
It's a vicious cycle, right?
If we have less users, less riders, it's
difficult to justify significant public
investment in that system and therefore it's become
more difficult to provide quality service.
And because you have a lack of quality of
service, you will continue to have a lack of
users and riders.
If the riders are either insufficient in number
and/or do not provide a fare that covers those
costs, you have to make up that money in public
subsidies. And in the United States, the
structure of funding for public transit is
insufficient to basically really make up for that
missing enormous chunk of money to fund operations
and capital.
But a thriving public transit system is
beneficial for all Americans.
The American Public Transportation Association
estimates that 87% of trips on transit directly
benefit the local economy, with nearly $42
billion in transit spending going directly to
the private sector.
A dollar invested in public transit is believed
to generate $5 in economic returns.
I mean, look what happened with Amazon.
Where did where did Amazon locate its new
second headquarters?
Right? Right where one of the better mass transit
systems operate.
Transit is really great for an employer because it
gives them more options in terms of labor.
We can connect people to employment opportunities,
including people who can't necessarily afford
an automobile, which is a very expensive thing both
to buy and to operate and maintain.
When you don't have transportation, everything
else becomes a domino effect.
You may end up with not able to connect with your
family and friends, not able to go to a doctor
appointments and not able to have a good income to
sustain your house.
And in the end, it can even benefit the drivers
themselves.
The more we attract people into rail or busses or
other forms of public transit, the fewer people
are driving on the roads.
And that makes driving better for people who want
to drive.
Ultimately, the future of public transit relies on
whether it can receive the proper investment
needed to improve services.
To break the vicious cycle, we need a
significant investment from the federal
government. I mean, I don't think just waste of
local innovation so we can solve this problem of
this magnitude.
We'd have to spend a lot of money upfront in order
to get systems that cost a lot less to operate
because you'd have more robust ridership.
Cities can also be reimagined and redesigned
to better serve public transit.
The kind of density levels that most American suburbs
have, very difficult to serve effectively by
transit, even busses.
You have to create more dense neighborhoods, and
particularly, this is really important, you have
to change the zoning and the density around
transit.
I conceptualize public transportation as a public
space. If you think about in a city how much space
we have really help people with different
backgrounds come together.
There is a diminishing number of places that we
have in our city.
If we have good public transportation system,
it's like the core spaces for people with different
backgrounds, different class, different gender,
race, ethnicity to interact and to encounter.
And I think that's very important for the future
of our society.