Sixty years ago, America had the finest transportation system in the world, and it was almost all unsubsidized. Congress had subsidized the construction of some railroads, but that included only about 7 percent of the nation’s rail mileage. Congress had also subsidized the construction of some airports, but by 1960 that was near an end. Most of America’s highways had been built and maintained out of highway user fees such as gasoline taxes and tolls. The nation’s transit systems were mostly private and even the public ones funded their operating costs and many of their capital costs exclusively out of transit fares.

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That began to change in the 1960s. In 1964, Congress promised capital grants to cities and states that took over transit companies. Most of the government-owned transit agencies also used tax dollars to cover part of their operating costs. In 1970, Congress took over the nation’s intercity passenger trains and subsidies to Amtrak exceeded $1 billion a year. In 1981, Congress began diverting highway user fees to pay for transit. This led to such a political demand for those funds that, in 1998, Congress gave up on the idea that expenditures out of the highway transit fund should be limited to user fees paid into that fund. Today, Congress is transferring $10 billion per year of general funds into the highway trust fund to keep the money flowing without raising gas taxes. Continue reading →

Transit ridership in April 2020 was 84 percent less than it had been in April 2019, according to data released last week by the Federal Transit Administration. The media has reported falling ridership due to the coronavirus and resulting quarantines, but these data reveal exactly how much it has fallen for each mode and urban area.

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For example, ridership is down 92 percent in the New York urban area and 93 percent in Philadelphia but only 58 percent in Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas. The Bay Area Rapid Transit District saw a 94 percent decline, but ridership in Tucson fell by just 44 percent. Continue reading →

Most people living through this pandemic have wondered, “What will change after COVID-19?” The transit industry in particular is worried about whether it will get back its lost riders, while airlines are just hoping to survive long enough to recover. While a lot of uncertainties remain, some things are less uncertain than others. This paper will focus on what is likely to happen in the first year or two after the various stay-at-home orders are lifted and the economy begins to recover.

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1. More People Will Work at Home

The most profound change will be number of people working at home. The American Community Survey reported that more than 8.2 million people, or 5.3 percent of the nation’s workforce, worked exclusively at home in 2018. The share was much greater in some areas: 8.6 percent of Colorado workers and 15.4 percent of Marin County, California workers worked at home. Continue reading →

What do you think of when you hear the word “city”? Most people envision a downtown filled with skyscrapers surrounded by lower-rise developments. At least, that’s what appears in most photographs, and the first two dozen of them, in a Google image search for “city.” Some even argue that cities such as Phoenix that don’t have big, skyscraper-filled downtowns aren’t “real cities.”

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However, as Joel Garreau pointed out nearly thirty years ago in his great book, Edge City, cities like that are “abberations. We built cities that way for less than a century.” Before about 1840, cities had no defined central business districts as we know them today. The first skyscrapers weren’t built until the 1880s. Since 1920, the economic forces that led to the construction of dense downtowns have been largely replaced by decentralizing forces. Continue reading →