APTA Tinkers with the Deck Chairs

Your largest member has just quit, complaining that your organization doesn’t do enough to help it and other large members and that they are underrepresented on your organization’s executive committee. And, oh, by the way, you’re paying your chief executive officer too much.

So what do you do? If you are the American Public Transportation Association, you fire the CEO. That’s not really going to solve any problems, but after 4-1/2 years of getting paid nearly $900,000 per year (see page 17), he probably has enough to retire on. There’s no word yet on whether his replacement will get a similar salary.

A salary and benefits of close to a million dollars a year might make sense for a company that earns billions of dollars in annual revenues. It makes a little less sense for APTA, which uses its $20 million in annual revenues to lobby Congress to get billions of federal dollars funneled to its members. It makes even less sense since the federal funds going to APTA members did not significantly increase during the reign of the newly retired CEO, part of whose qualifications are that he once drove the bus for the Indiana University basketball team coached by Bobby Knight. It is particularly galling to outsiders since taxpayers are the ultimate source of the funds used to pay him.

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Those other sources include transit manufacturers and suppliers, consultants, contractors, and land developers, among others. Such members actually have better representation on APTA’s executive committee than the “legacy” transit agencies (i.e., those that had rail transit before 1980) in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington that together carry more than 60 percent of the nation’s transit riders. Combine this with the fact that 40 or 50 of APTA’s regular, non-legacy members are eager to get federal funds to build new rail lines, and APTA’s real motivations seem clear: new construction trumps operations and maintenance.

To be fair, APTA is a creature of the political environment, which favors new construction but is indifferent to the maintenance that is the main concern of the legacy systems. But APTA claims to be an educational organization, yet it hasn’t done much to educate Congress or the public about the long-term costs of rail transit and the need to almost completely and expensively rebuild those rail lines every 30 years or so. After all, this message could undermine support for building new rail transit lines in cities that don’t need them.

The turmoil within APTA comes soon after APTA had to report a decline in national transit ridership and Washington Metro rail’s heavily publicized service problems. Meanwhile, agencies such as San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority that have recently built new rail lines are seeing severe ridership declines due to their inability to fund both new construction and operations. People who support the needs of actual transit riders, rather than rail snobs (people who say they’ll ride a train but not a bus) or contractors, should use these facts to persuade Congress to stop funding obsolete transportation systems.