The Only Thing More Expensive Than Saving Transit is Not Saving Transit
Public transit is taking a beating from the coronavirus outbreak. A new article by Laura Bliss at CityLab, titled, "A Post-Pandemic Reality Check for Transit Boosters," attempts to take stock of the damage and predict the way forward. Unfortunately, it ends up just reflecting the myopia with which Americans think about transit.
Bliss’s article reaches a conclusion about transit—that it may only be viable going forward as a subsidized social service for those who need it as a lifeline—that the article pretends is a new adjustment in our thinking in response to the pandemic. But that is actually just the same tiresome conclusion that has guided most U.S. cities’ transit policy for the last 70 years: we already mostly treat it as a safety-net program. This already results in transit systems that are unpredictable, unpleasant, and have huge gaps in service, and only patronized by riders of last resort.
Americans reach this conclusion over and over again—transit is a basket case, it’s important to society but it can’t support itself, it’s perpetually facing existential risk from external threats ranging from underfunding to ride-sharing services to a viral pandemic—because we adopt the same blind spot over and over again. We presume the automobile orientation of our communities as a default and treat its costs as baked into the system, and then say, "My god, look how expensive public transit is!" In reality, the only thing more expensive than saving transit in the coming years would be not saving transit.
The Coronavirus Won't Kill Transit Systems—But Being Starved of Resources Might
The least persuasive part of Bliss's article is the suggestion that fear of contagion will drive a huge, long-term wave of people abandoning public transit in favor of cars. There's always a market, after an earth-shaking societal event, for punditry about how Everything Is Different Now, and Bliss succumbs to this trope right off the bat with an ominous introduction:
In 1918, streetcars were the top urban transportation mode in the United States. And they were packed: Americans made about 140 trips per capita, about 15 billion trips total, that year.
Then came the Spanish flu.
... only to shortly thereafter give up the game:
Still, the popularity of mass transit did not suffer dramatically in the succeeding years — at least not until the Great Depression put a quarter of the country out of work and, later, when the private automobile began to displace it.
The reality is that the Spanish Flu did little to affect the trajectory of public transit (or urbanism) in the U.S., and it's likely that COVID-19 in and of itself will also do little. People adapt. After 9/11, I recall no shortage of prognostications that fear of terrorism would permanently deter many Americans from flying, but air travel rebounded. As an emotionally salient threat recedes in the rearview, people go back to routines that make sense for them in the present tense. For every American who makes the switch to driving because of fear of COVID-19, there may well be another who switches to transit because their economic circumstances have taken a turn for the worse and the cost of car ownership—loan payments, insurance, maintenance—is now an unsupportable luxury. Or a second or third car for the household is.
As far as the threat of disease goes, once the truly staggering pandemic spikes are out of the way, the way forward is modeled for us by very transit-dependent cities in East Asia such as Seoul and Singapore: a culture of mask-wearing and an emphasis on good sanitation in the stations should do the job fine. (It’s worth nothing here that I’m positing that social distancing is a temporary phenomenon: we're not all going to be standing at 6 foot distance from each other ten years from now. We just aren't. Humans won’t make that concession at the cost of permanently abandoning thousands of years of ingrained social behavior.)
What is plausible from Bliss's piece, though, is the suggestion that transit may be the victim of a death spiral where declining revenue leads to worse service leads to declining revenue, and so on:
Third, assuming rider demand and revenue remain low, transit agencies may have to keep service cuts even after lockdowns lift, despite the fact that more vehicles, not fewer, are needed to allow for social distancing. Academic literature shows that such cuts themselves can be rider-deterrents. “There’s an elasticity that shows if you cut service by 10%, you can generally expect ridership goes down 3-6%,” said Greg Erhardt, a civil engineering professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in travel behavior and transportation planning.
….
These circumstances point to a potential shift in the way transit is used, viewed, and potentially funded, experts said. Traditionally, a successful transit system is one with a lot of riders, with packed buses and cars and a large share of revenue derived from passenger fares. But.... said [McGill urban planning professor Ahmed] El-Geneidy, “We have to accept that public transport is an essential service. We can’t think about it as a for-profit organization that can make money from ridership.”
This isn’t really a shift, is the thing, and the “traditional” wisdom isn’t that at all on this side of the Pacific (or Atlantic). Virtually no transit system comes close to funding itself through the farebox, or has for decades. In most American cities, especially in the relatively car-centric Midwest and the South, fares provide something on the order of 20% of the system’s budget.
This isn’t because transit is too costly; it’s because our cities are designed at automobile scale. Destinations are spread far apart from each other, and different uses are strictly separated from each other. You could hardly design a landscape more costly to attempt to serve effectively with public transit than the standard American landscape.
Pointing out the unprofitability of transit thus begs the question. When the argument is that cities will find they can’t afford anything more than transit as a last-resort social service, the unspoken assumption is that our cities will continue to be able to afford the alternative: universal car usage as a minimum ante to participate productively in society.
We can’t even afford that now. We just pretend we can.
In reality, the costs of our auto-oriented system are staggering. Let me quote from a piece we published in January (itself recapping some excellent data analysis by transit researcher Yonah Freemark):
Over the past decade, the average American consumer contributed just $14.50 in tax dollars per year to transit expansion, but spent $8,427 on automobile transportation in 2016. Americans spend more on transportation than our peers in other wealthy countries with higher transit ridership. And that’s just private costs. The amount that we, collectively, spend on our motor-vehicle transportation system is off the charts. Consider the sheer amount of resources—energy, money, and space—required to transport each of us in our own 3,000 pound metal box, and to maintain a city that makes room to move and store all those boxes.
We haven’t even talked about parking. Back in 2002, Donald Shoup estimated the annual subsidy for free parking in the U.S. at between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product.
Cities are going broke from coast to coast. Long before the pandemic struck, cities from coast to coast could not maintain their pavement and sewer lines.
You’ve likely seen this image before, but it’s still the definitive illustration of how much more costly it is—in land and energy consumption—to transport everyone in private vehicles.
If the economic fallout from the pandemic is prolonged—if it’s more like a new Great Depression—it seems ridiculous to suggest the fear of the virus is going to be the tipping point that causes those who hadn’t already to buy cars and exurban homes. Far more likely is that the Suburban Experiment itself faces a profound reckoning, as the debt-fueled financial systems that keep it propped up are unable to do so.
When that happens, we’ll see a renewed focus on compact, 15-minute communities where people can meet their needs near home, from smaller businesses with more decentralized supply chains. We’ll see more adaptation in housing forms, as people live together to save and pool resources. We’ll see more work-from-home businesses and thus de facto mixed-use neighborhoods. All of these things will be more conducive to transit than present-day suburban living arrangements are.
At the end of the day, it is far less expensive to provide a city where people get around on public transit (supplemented by walking / biking / rolling) then it is to provide a city where everyone drives and all of their highway construction and parking desires are accommodated. Nothing about COVID-19 changes this fundamental math. Nor does it change the fundamental geometry problem that renders some of America's most productive and dynamic cities literally incapable of functioning if everyone drove and parked.
Transit systems will face a very real budget crunch, and we’ll need to be smart and resourceful about prioritizing our investments. The days of exorbitantly expensive transit as ineffective economic development (looking at you, Almost Every Streetcar Project) may—and should—be over.
But the need for transit isn’t going anywhere, and the basic financial case for it—we can’t afford the alternative—remains strong.
More from Strong Towns on how to fund public transit in a fiscally resilient way: Transit’s Chicken-Egg Fallacy
American bus stops often leave people exposed to the elements without even a place to sit as they wait for their buses to arrive. Here’s how advocates around the country are tackling this problem — and how their cities are responding.