Newsletter | Get on the Bus
Jarrett Walker begins his excellent article, “Should We Let Public Transit Die,” with this lede:
“By the end of 2026, if things go on as they are, many US cities will have lost large parts of their public transit systems. Philadelphia is on track to lose almost half its transit service in the next year. The Chicago area could lose over a third.The Portland, Oregon, area could eventually lose a quarter of its bus service and a tenth of its rail service.”
Walker goes on to describe the history and the reasons behind why we, in the US, have let transit survive – but never thrive – over the years and makes the case for why we should support it. From our perspective, looking at the environmental contexts that shape health, public transit is really important. The benefits include greater physical activity and less obesity, more social interaction, and access to groceries and needed health and social services for its riders, and less pollution for all. (A comprehensive rundown of these benefits can be found in the Health Affairs policy brief Public Transportation In The US: A Driver Of Health And Equity.)
Walker cites two additional benefits that justify the investments in public transit: 1) the efficiency in moving people; and 2) providing freedom of movement for people without access to cars. Dense cities simply would not function if all public transit trips were replaced by car trips – the efficiency of subways, trains and buses is needed to avoid total gridlock, especially as cities grow. And many people, for a variety of reasons, including disability, but also, increasingly, financial considerations, cannot use personal automobiles. (Transportation costs are now the second largest household expenditure category – ahead of food – for Americans and these costs are overwhelmingly attributed to personal vehicle ownership and use.)
Walker notes that many transit opponents argue that new technologies will replace public transit, with an emphasis on robotaxis as a solution. These options, including the tunnels being promoted by Elon Musk’s Boring Company, promise freedom from the company of strangers (which is not something we advocate!), but, as Walker points out, cannot match the fare, capacity and travel time of public transit. Furthermore, Walker argues, even while robotaxis like Waymo don’t bear the costs of human labor, their fares are still far above transit fares. And they don’t scale. David Zipper, one of our favorite commentators on the transportation beat, makes this point forcefully in his article, “A self-driving car traffic jam is coming for US cities.” AVs cannot simply “plug and play” into our existing transportation networks. Cities would need to adapt their infrastructures dramatically – and especially deal with what would be a transition of cars needing to be parked to cars stopping temporarily to let people out. Moreover, the sheer volume of cars on the road, most of which would be driving around empty, waiting to pick up the next passengers, would create untold congestion. Zipper offers a set of policy prescriptions, including congestion pricing, a moratorium on new parking spaces (and market rates for existing spaces) and automating enforcement of traffic rules.
In analyzing the source of the current troubles, Walker describes the cost and subsidy structures in transportation, pointing out both the tensions between state, federal and regional support of transit within cities (and the all-important urban-rural divide). Cities struggle to obtain sufficient funding from their surrounding suburban governments and their states and many cities are even prohibited by their states from raising their own taxes to make up the shortfall. Key to the problem is the funding bias toward automobile infrastructure. For example, the federal government will subsidize 80% of a state’s costs for highway construction but only 50% for transit projects. The costs of public transportation are very visible and systems are often expected to pay for themselves while, Walker argues, the subsidies for automobile infrastructure and the costs of car dependency are quite hidden. We have designed many communities such that car access is required, creating financial burdens for many families and we never factor the health impacts of pollution into the real costs of automobile transportation. This problem is becoming more acute as the Trump Administration has recently been canceling grants deemed “hostile to cars.”
Stepping back from the current crisis, Henrietta Moore and Arthur Kay, authors of the book Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Relationship with Cars, propose a simple shift in frame in their commentary “Why we built cities for cars, not people, and how we can fix that.” Moore and Kay argue that we’re trapped in a vicious cycle of auto-centric development, political influence and government policy that doubles down on the status quo. Focusing first and foremost on people’s needs would require a series of policy changes:
reallocating space from driving lanes and parking spaces to sidewalks and bike lanes
investing in public transit
planning housing and mobility together
disincentivizing car ownership and use
creating people-oriented measures of success, such as whether it’s safe to walk your child to school
These changes might seem utopian, maybe even quaint in the current times. But they all get at a key principle – of moving beyond user-centric design and moving to something more along the lines of society-centered design. Rather than seeking the most convenient solution for a consumer (what could be easier than hailing a robotaxi?), they seek to create environments and infrastructure that have positive collective impact. Where the impact on the whole is truly greater than on the sum of the individuals.
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