An Opportunity to Reinvent an Obsolete Industry

As illustrated by the tweet from Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom, it’s beginning to sink in that transit ridership is not going to recover to more than about 65 percent of what it was before the pandemic. However, instead of raising “concerns over the survival of public transit systems,” we should see this as an opportunity to reinvent an industry that was already obsolete years before the pandemic.

The 2021 National Transit Database reveals that many transit agencies are spending as much per rider as it would cost to send those riders in taxis, Uber, or Lyft. Counting both operating and capital costs, the average cost per light-rail trip was more than $40. Even just counting operating costs, the average cost per light-rail rider in San Jose was more than $53 and in Pittsburgh was almost $49.

Hybrid rail (which is what the FTA calls Diesel-powered light rail) is even worse. Counting just operating costs, Portland spent more than $88 per rider, Austin more than $110, and Denton County (a suburb of Dallas) more than $120. San Francisco BART operating costs were more than $35 per rider and Maryland’s were more than $53 per rider on Baltimore’s subway line.

Twenty-seven different commuter-bus agencies spent between $104 and $665 per rider. Fourteen commuter-rail agencies spent between $106 and $639 per rider. More than 200 demand-response agencies spent between $100 and a whopping $4,425 per rider. More than 50 bus agencies spent between $100 and an even more ridiculous $6,100 per rider on conventional buses. Atlanta spent more than $50 per rider on its streetcar; El Paso $387; and Detroit more than $1,000. Again, all of these numbers count only operating costs.

These are just the extremes. All urban transit is far too expensive, especially when the service it provides is so bad that, according the 2021 American Community Survey, less than 25 percent of American workers who live in households without cars took transit to work. (More than 25 percent drove alone to work, probably in employer-supplied vehicles.)

What would reinvention look like? Most importantly, it would recognize that cities no longer consist of downtowns with all the jobs surrounded by dense residential areas. Fitting transit to modern cities with widely distributed jobs and low-density housing means smaller vehicles instead of bigger ones; more flexible routes instead of fixed routes; use of shared infrastructure instead of expensive dedicated infrastructure; express buses between major centers are some possible ideas. Not all of these ideas would make sense everywhere, but current transit systems make sense nowhere except possibly New York City.

Instead of reinventing transit, however, transit officials divide their time between beating the drums over a looming fiscal cliff when COVID relief funds run out and trying to figure out how they are going to spend the windfall that is coming from the 2021 infrastructure bill. For these officials, the obvious solution to every problem is more taxpayer subsidies.

Transit didn’t get as much money out of the infrastructure law as it hoped, but some members of Congress want to remedy that. St. Louis representative Cori Bush wants to spend another $12 billion on bus-rapid transit. BRT gets its main speed advantage from making fewer stops than conventional buses and it makes sense if agencies use existing buses (perhaps painted a distinctive color) on existing traffic lanes that are open to all vehicles. But Bush’s bill would fund exclusive bus lanes that would be a complete waste, especially considering buses in most cities are running nearly empty.

So long as members of Congress are willing to throw money at transit, transit agencies will have no incentive to reinvent themselves. And Congress will continue throwing money at transit so long as people continue to see transit as something that needs to be rescued rather than an obsolete system that should be reinvented or abandoned.