“Transit is resilient,” claims transit industry consultant Paul Comfort, who is also executive director of the North American Transit Alliance, an association of private companies that earn money providing service to transit agencies. Comfort made this claim after visiting several transit agencies to see how they were spending the billions of dollars Congress gave them to compensate for the loss of ridership during the pandemic.
I don’t think that word means what Comfort wants us to think it means. The dictionary defines “resilient” as tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. The panicky press releases sent out a year ago by transit agencies and advocates do not suggest that an industry that adjusts easily to change. Comfort’s examples of agency “resilience” are mostly about how they are spending the money Congress gave them on masks, sanitizers, and, for some reason, complete streets. He says nothing about actual ridership or other real performance measures. Here are a few tests that can be used to tell if an industry or institution is resilient.
1. Does the industry need a big bailout every time there is a downturn in the economy?
In response to the pandemic in 2020, the transit industry demanded and received $37 billion in extra subsidies on top of the subsidies it normally receives, plus $30 billion more so far in 2021. Highways received a little additional money but would have worked just fine without any new subsidies.
2. How fast can the industry recover from disaster?
After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed part of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, it took the state of California just 30 days to do the repairs and open the bridge to normal traffic. By comparison, it took nearly two years for New York-New Jersey PATH trains to be fully restored after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Recovery of some transit services took much longer.
3. Do industry leaders believe the only way to get back customers is to give away the product for free?
Public officials in San Francisco, Boston, Connecticut, and other places are talking about or implementing free transit services to get people back after the pandemic. No one is talking about eliminating gas taxes to get auto drivers back on the road.
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As the growth of ride hailing ate into transit ridership, transit agencies sought taxes on ride-hailing companies to compensate transit for the riders it “lost.” As a result, in some cities, ride-hailing customers pay more money to the transit agency than actual transit riders.
5. Does anyone seriously expect the industry to fully recover after the pandemic?
One transit agency admits that its “best-case scenario” after the pandemic is a 25 percent drop in ridership from pre-pandemic levels. Some experts are a little more optimistic, thinking transit might recover 90 percent of its pre-pandemic riders. But if recover is measured by outputs such as ridership rather than inputs such as the number of masks given out, no one seriously thinks transit will fully recover.
Public transit’s problem is that, far from being resilient, it hasn’t changed much since 1920 despite huge changes in transportation patterns. Most transit routes today follow the same routes they did in 1920 (though with buses instead of streetcars). This despite the fact that those transit routes were designed to serve cities most of whose jobs were downtown, while today more than 90 percent of jobs are no longer located downtown. As a result, despite the nation’s huge population growth, ridership in 1920 was much higher than it is today.
The best that can be said is that transit is politically resilient. Lost more than half your customers after World War II? Here’s some subsidies. Continued to lose customers even after getting subsidized? Here’s some more subsidies. Lost more customers because people don’t want to be crowded in poorly ventilated vehicles during a pandemic? Here’s some more subsidies. We’ll quickly learn just how resilient transit really is when taxpayers refuse to provide any more subsidies.
Highways are resilient; transit is not. But “transit is resilient” can be added to the other false claims spread by the transit-industrial complex to justify the subsidies it receives. These include “transit helps the poor” when in fact it does more harm than good to low-income people; and “transit saves energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions” when in fact transit is an energy hog and in most places emits far more greenhouse gases than the cars it takes off the road.
There’s an incorrect belief, an urban myth, that the less you charge for something, the more you will sell. There’s something to that but it’s far from accurate.
The common perception of transit by regular folk, not the urbanistas, is that transit is bad, cheap crappy product. Charge nothing for the service signals that it ain’t worth paying for. That’ll do nothing but further increase that perception.
The transit subsidies received in 2020-2021 are greater than the ENTIRE US government budget for every year through 1942 (which is during WWII).
1943-1945 spending was greater than transit subsidies (let’s hope so!) but once the war ended, the next several years spending was approximately the same as transit gets today.
I know the $$$ are not adjusted for inflation, but it still gives you the sense of the enormity of what transit gets from the taxpayers—and provides so little in return.
The big transit advocates are the very same people who want to move the central command and control-based electrical power grid to a subsidized network of “microgrids” of solar panels, batteries, and windmills in the name of resiliency, economy, and stability. Perhaps if the word automobile was changed to microtransit there would not be so much car-hating going on.