FTA Wants Your Comments

Last January, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced that he was replacing rules that required that federal transit grants had to be “cost effective” with rules promoting “livability.” Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration asked for your comments on this proposal.

The FTA doesn’t have new rules yet; it just wants to know what you think of the idea. Considering that the head of the FTA has revealed that he is skeptical of expensive rail projects, especially when cities can’t afford to maintain and operate the systems they have, they might genuinely be interested in some new ideas. After all, how livable can a city be where lots of people have given up their cars for transit only to find that the transit agency has stopped running for lack of funds?

Speaking of costly transit, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has just published a new paper on the cost of transit in that state. The paper also shows how Tennessee transit systems use more energy and emit more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than cars or even SUVs. The only really efficient transit system, the paper shows, is vanpooling, which is the closest thing most transit agencies have to actual automobiles.

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It is just possible that one reason why transit is so expensive is because so many transit employees are overpaid. The New York Times revealed yesterday that more than 8,000 employees of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority get paid more than $100,000 per year, including a train conductor who earned $239,000 last year.

A lot of these fat salaries are due to overtime. On one hand, it could be argued that the employees are truly earning their pay. On the other hand, a fiscally responsible employer would hire more workers so it wouldn’t have to pay so much overtime. But when the Los Angeles County transit agency proposed to do that a decade ago, bus and train drivers went on strike for a full month.