The State of U.S. Transit in 5 Observations

Yonah Freemark, an MIT researcher and author of the blog The Transport Politic, has put together an amazing analysis of just where America has been spending its transit dollars over the past decade. It's called "Too Little, Too Late? A Decade of Transit Investment in the U.S." and if you’re interested, you should go read the whole thing. It has pretty charts and more detail than this recap.

The post uses data from Transit Explorer, available in this spreadsheet, to document all 1,200 miles of brand new "quality" transit lines, and extensions of existing lines, completed in the U.S. from 2010 to 2019. By "quality" Freemark means transit that involves some physical infrastructure, not just a bus line. This runs the gamut from bus rapid transit to all forms of urban rail.

I found a couple of the findings startling and counterintuitive, while others I was nodding along with. Here are 5 thoughts on Freemark’s analysis:

1. We're still building roads like there's no tomorrow.

Freemark begins by noting that transit ridership is on the decline across the U.S., even as it increases in most of our peer countries. He attributes this decline, in part, to the simple fact that our governments at all levels are pouring vastly more money into expanding road networks than improving transit.

How much more?

Even as the country was adding 1,200 miles of expanded transit service, it added an estimated 28,500 new lane-miles of arterials—roadways like Interstates, highways, and the four-plus-lane “stroads” that constitute many of our cities and suburban areas. This is infrastructure hostile to pedestrians and transit users—and likely to reinforce patterns of automobile dependency and sprawl.

That’s roughly 24 times as many new roadway miles as improved transit miles. Who can blame Americans for continuing to drive? Transit offerings simply have not kept up.

1b. Corollary: We're still barely building transit at all.

Much is made by transit opponents of the supposed wastefulness of public transit spending. But how much does it all actually add up to? It turns out the average American consumer contributed just $14.50 in tax dollars per year to transit expansion, the cost of about three lattes. Obviously, more money than that went to operating and maintenance costs for transit, funded both through taxes / fees and direct rider fares. But let’s put these numbers in perspective, as Freemark does:

The average American consumer spent $8,427 on automobile transportation in 2016.

Americans spend more on transportation than our peers in other wealthy countries with higher transit ridership. And that’s just private costs. The amount that we, collectively, spend on our motor-vehicle transportation system is off the charts. Consider the sheer amount of resources—energy, money, and space—required to transport each of us in our own 3,000 pound metal box, and to maintain a city that makes room to move and store all those boxes.

Most drivers have no accurate sense of the costs of different ways of organizing a city, because the amount we spend making driving convenient and appealing is so wildly out of proportion to the amount we spend doing the same for transit or active transportation. In light of that, we’re glad to see Freemark echo the idea of #NoNewRoads—our call to cease expanding America’s roadways—given the clear fiscal and ecological hole we’re digging ourselves into by doing so:

Every reasonably sized city in the country should be identifying corridors for bus rapid transit, reallocating street space for that purpose, and ceasing roadway expansion. The speed of implementing such improvements has been far too slow given the poor quality of most bus service throughout the country and the relatively low cost of making such changes.

But that requires cities to take seriously their responsibility to find the means to get people out of their cars. It requires activists to make the case that the era of automobile dominance must come to an end.

2.  Buses offer major bang for the buck—when we treat them a bit more like rail.

Just over half of new “quality” transit miles added this past decade were through bus lines: both proper Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) which has dedicated lanes and boarding platforms, and “Arterial Bus Rapid Transit” (aBRT), a growing, inexpensive stepping-stone option which provides bus riders some of the conveniences of rail like level boarding, less frequent stops, and off-board ticket purchases—but without the separate lane.

The expansion in miles of enhanced bus service, however, is not matched by the expenditure, which comes to only 8 percent of transit-expansion funds ($3.6 billion in total). The other 92 percent have gone to various forms of rail.

Buses alone wouldn’t cut it in New York or Chicago, but in most contexts they are a much more cost-effective way to build dedicated transit lines. And the gap between what we were able to achieve in a decade (not nearly enough) with the relatively small share of expenses makes a compelling case that many of America’s cities should take more seriously the prospect of forgoing one glitzy light rail line to build several highly functional bus lines that deliver many, though not all, of the same benefits. (Funding agencies also need to adjust their priorities to make it easier and more appealing to do so.)

View fullsize

Data via Yonah Freemark / Transit Explorer. Click to view larger.

3. Streetcars were... an awfully small factor for the amount of hype and controversy that follows them.

The 2010s in transit journalism and opinion writing were the decade of the streetcar think-piece. We’re certainly guilty of participating. If you read transit or urbanist sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the love-it-or-hate-it modern streetcar was the most significant trend in urban transportation after maybe ride-sharing.

We've observed that streetcars are often more of an economic development tool than an actual useful means of transportation. And as economic development, they're mostly misguided—our time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.

What they aren't, apparently, is very relevant in the real world. American cities only added 37 miles of streetcar lines in the 2010s. The cost per mile for streetcars was middle-of-the-road: higher than above-ground heavy rail and buses, but less than light rail or subways. We won’t say they’re never a good investment, but just maybe we can stop talking about these things so much in 2020?

4. Location, Location, Location.

Freemark is dead-on about one crucial reason that American transit does an underwhelming job of attracting riders or reducing car usage:

One explanation is that many new American transit routes are poorly designed, typically remain inadequately integrated into urban development projects, and focus more on low-density suburban areas than urban neighborhoods likely to attract more riders.

This is what happens when investments are undertaken at a huge, go-big-or-go-home scale, and driven by politics and funding priorities rather than by clear existing needs or unmet demand. It seems likely that light rail systems—the single biggest category of new transit spending in the 2010s, and the second costliest on a per-mile basis—are the most susceptible to the problem of terrible route selection and resulting low return on investment. This is because light rail often ends up shoehorned into car-dependent suburban settings, where the kind of dense, walkable environment that would drive ridership doesn’t exist around the stations. (See these examples from the Raleigh-Durham and Portland areas of how to do rail wrong.)

5. Remember what really matters.

The lowest hanging fruit in improving most cities’ transit systems might not involve any new steel or concrete at all. Freemark offers an important caveat: his analysis, for reasons of practicality and data availability, does not consider "perhaps the most important element of transit effectiveness: the frequency and speed of service." Most changes to these factors will only appear on a budget as operating expenditures, not capital projects.

There are endless good opportunities in every American city to expand transit infrastructure, like the projects documented here. If we prioritize them by return on investment, it seems likely that we should be emphasizing bus lines much more than we do, and rail—especially suburban light rail—a lot less. But if we also think beyond physical infrastructure, we can do wonders at a low cost and high relative return, just by retooling service to better meet the needs of those who ride. Consider one of the biggest transit success stories of the decade: Houston’s bus system redesign in 2016.

The key is to stay focused. The goal of transit advocates in the 2020s shouldn’t be to get ambitious projects built, but to connect productive places and give people more quality options to get where they’re going. To do that at a scale that even remotely matches what we’ve done with highways and stroads, we’re going to need a kind of momentum that wasn’t there in the 2010s. I would suggest the best way to build that momentum is through a rapid succession of small victories—the kind you get when you take the dollar signs out of your eyes and do the unglamorous but high-returning stuff.

(Cover photo via Wikimedia Commons)

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