Monthly Archives: May 2017

The triumph of American industry has come from increasing productivity, particularly worker productivity. Since local governments took over private transit companies, however, worker productivity in the transit industry has collapsed.

As the figure above shows, transit companies in the 1950s carried about 60,000 transit riders per worker each year. As of 1960, just 12 of the nation’s hundred largest cities had taken over their transit systems. But after passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, cities quickly municipalized transit. By 1980, only New Orleans and Greensboro, NC, still had private transit and the number of riders carried per transit worker had fallen 25 percent. It continued to fall until stabilizing at around 27,000 trips per worker in the late 1990s. Continue reading →

The American Public Transit Association (APTA) has a new report on the economic impact of President Trump’s proposal to stop wasting federal dollars on digging holes and filling them up. Actually, the report is about Trump’s proposal to stop wasting federal dollars building streetcars, light rail and other local rail transit projects, but the two have almost exactly the same effect.

The APTA report says that digging holes and filling them up would provide about 500,000 jobs (though it really means job-years, that is, 500,000 jobs for one year). Since APTA says it would take ten years to dig and fill the holes that Trump wants to stop funding, that’s 50,000 jobs a year.

However, nobody wants a job digging holes and filling them up. What they want is income. Since there is no market for refilled holes, the only source of income for digging and filling holes is tax dollars. So what APTA really wants Congress to do is take money away from workers and then give it back to them and call it jobs. That’s not very productive. Continue reading →

Until 1964, most transit in America was private. In that year, Congress responded to a “commuter crisis” that was limited to commuter rail in just four urban areas by offering federal subsidies to every transit mode and public transit agency in the country, leading to the rapid buy-out of almost all private transit. Yet there are still many examples of private transit today.

Flickr photo by Sean Davis

One of the most important is New York Waterway, which offers ferry service between New Jersey and Manhattan. Ferry service had disappeared with the opening of bridges and tunnels, but congestion led the owner of a trucking company, Arthur Imperatore, to test a ferry operation in 1986. It quickly expanded to numerous routes and offers its passengers bus service from its Manhattan terminals to various parts of the city at no extra charge. Continue reading →