Don’t Blame Congress for Transit Cuts

“D.C. Metro faces service cuts due to Congress,” says a recent headline. The Metro board decided yesterday to cut both bus and rail service, but said it wouldn’t have needed to make those cuts if Congress had passed another bailout bill.

But don’t blame Congress for not spending money the federal government doesn’t have to rescue transit agencies that have already had a $25 billion bailout and more than six months to adjust to the new reality of much lower ridership. Instead, blame the fact that most DC transit riders are able to work at home, with the result that ridership is down 81 percent as of September. Blame the fact that, instead of cutting service in parallel with the drop of ridership and revenues, Metro cut service by only 42 percent as of September.

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Businesses all over the country have had to make these kinds of hard decisions. But transit agencies think they shouldn’t have to. They desperately want what they are now calling a “$32 billion or more” bailout so they won’t have to decide to make layoffs and service cuts in 2021. Instead of adapting to new conditions, they want to maintain the status quo at someone else’s expense.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

2 Responses to Don’t Blame Congress for Transit Cuts

  1. LazyReader says:

    Like I said before…..this isn’t about transit, it’s about retention of public sector jobs and maintaining a tax gobbling bureaucracy.

    The kinds of problems members of the public face when dealing with out-of-control government agencies that have nearly unlimited power to tax you (from various sources, including sales, retail, etc) and face little public oversight. Once again another reason the Federal government needs to get OUT of the transportation game. Transit agencies: WE WANT HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to refurbish infrastructure we allowed to decay.

    Streetsblog; the Antiplanners Ideological oppositeā€¦..Just put out an article about the Reagan era tax abatement. In other words they wanna end the 80/20 split. pft, Why are gas taxes going to transit at all. It just proves that revenues from actually riding transit are incapable of sustaining it’s operations. End the split indeed. Transit and Highways should be financed by user fees.
    Second Why fund transit at all, when they wanna lockdown all the places transit is supposed to serve?

    Since transit is viewed by most as an environmental, economical, social and moral public good, any attempt to decry it, curtail, shut it down is viewed as racist/bigoted/elitist, blah blah blah. No matter How miserable public services get; the incentive to keep it financed, NO MATTER WHAT, remains as long as the political stigma does. NO one wants to be that guy who slashed that service.

  2. JOHN1000 says:

    And NYC just issued a demand for a lot more $$$ threatening to cut 9,000 jobs if stimulus money don’t arrive soon.

    With millions out of work or losing their life-savings in shut down businesses, it takes a special type of arrogance to act like cutting transit jobs is immoral.

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