URBAN TRANSIT, STUCK BEYOND THE SHOULDER

It was a nightmare. The band had to tour Greenland by bus. ~ Fred Schneider, a founder of the B-52s 

Have you ridden a bus, hopped on a subway or taken a train recently? Fewer folks than ever have been using public mass transportation to get places near and far. The resurgent Covid pandemic hasn’t helped. Local bus and rail systems – public mass transit – remain stuck, beyond the shoulder of thoroughfares that count, as both customers and transit drivers have abandoned them.

Mass transit is not a pedestrian matter; its status affects millions, can alter our environment and over time has been influenced by many factors. In econo-speak, mass transit has been considered an inferior good, one whose demand declines as consumers’ income rises. It wasn’t always inferior.

After my mother graduated from the University of Massachusetts during an early stage of the Great Depression, she boarded a Greyhound bus in Boston and over the next six months travelled around the country. To visit friends, she first headed to Florida and then across the deep south and south-western US to Los Angeles, where stayed nearly a month. From LA she took train rides on the Union Pacific, Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads during a 5-day jaunt back to Massachusetts.

At that time, trains and buses were the most popular means of travelling long distances. Greyhound had over 4,800 stations across the US. Railroads’ passenger carriage was more than five (5) times what Amtrak’s is now.

Public transit ridership has never since been higher than it was in 1926. Automobiles were certainly present then, but were not nearly as fast or convenient for a single person undertaking a long, cross-country trip. My mother saw first-hand the sights of America at ground-level, riding Greyhounds and the rails. The picture below shows the classic Scenicruiser bus, designed by Raymond Lowey, that Greyhound operated for about 20 years.

A great deal has changed in mass transit during the past 80 years, most of it unfavorable. Municipal transit systems have been owned and operated by city and regional governments since the 1950s. Greyhound remains the country’s largest inter-city motorcoach operator, but now operates in less than 60% of the cities it did at its peak before WWII.

 

The Greyhound Scenicruiser bus, used from 1954 to the mid-1970s.

Transit ridership essentially plateaued with subsequent gradual declines for decades, as the automobile gained dominance. President Eisenhower’s groundbreaking federal funding of the Interstate highway system in 1956 confirmed the government’s commitment that it needed to meet the increasing challenge of evermore cars on US highways. 

It wasn’t until eight years later that the government first began providing sizeable financial assistance to local transit systems with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act (UMTA) in 1964. The UMTA funding paid for two-thirds of the costs of local transit systems’ equipment and facilities. By the 1970s this federal funding had allowed cities to build new, heavy-rail mass transit systems like the San Francisco Bay area’s BART, Washington DC’s Metro and MARTA (not our first president's wife; it's Atlanta's subway system).

During the 1980s and thereafter many cities built less capital-intensive light-rail transit systems, including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle and San Jose. Light-rail, surface systems operate on dedicated rights-of-way with power provided via overhead wires. These additions to cities’ transit coverage have been helpfully modernizing.

Despite this sizeable public investment, the share of US workers commuting by public transportation fell from 12.1% in 1960 to about 5% in 2019. Annual growth in public transit ridership is a minute 0.6% since 2000. Adding to urban transit’s miseries, current ridership now is less than one-half of what it was pre-Covid.

Transit advocates advise that the costs of urban driving are too low and need to increase if transit is to recover ridership. This could involve instituting congestion fees, increasing parking costs and pumping up state and local gasoline taxes.

Manhattan, NY now appears to be edging back onto the roadway for implementing substantial congestion fees. It may work in Manhattan, but it’s not clear there are many politicians willing to brave public resistance to elevating driving-related fees and taxes. Travelling that political pathway to change decades of commuting behavior is likely to be a fully pothole-filled trail.

In November, President Biden signed the $1.2 trillion (T) Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This legislation’s fiscal largesse will be spread wide and far. Confusingly, this trillion-dollar number is not the amount of actual new infrastructure spending. Nope. The large, legislative budget number also includes typical annual expenditures for public roads, bridges, ports, railroads and water infrastructure, such as filling potholes, replacing worn-out pipes and equipment and operations & maintenance expenses.

New expenditures in the bipartisan Infrastructure Act sum to about $550 billion (B). This hefty number represents only 46% of the Act’s total $1.2T sticker-price. It’s these new outlays, not pothole-filling, that the president and Dems proclaim will significantly improve America’s transit infrastructure and consequently its citizens’ lives.

Such efforts will hopefully benefit many folks in many ways, which is a good thing. But this confusing reporting of funding level is an example of how Congress swells the apparent significance of its legislative efforts. Dems believe bigger is clearly better, even though it’s misleadingly stated. So it goes.

Public transit is due to receive $39B, 7.1% of new infrastructure expenditures. This tidy sum will serve to upgrade our 2,200 public urban and rural transit systems nationwide. The Act will also provide money to create new bus routes, electrify bus fleets and assist in making public transit more accessible to seniors and disabled Americans. Interestingly, urban rail lines are already reported to be at least 90% handicap-accessible; buses are 99% accessible.

Berkeley has its own ideas for improving its bus system. The City Council is considering a program that will offer free AC Transit bus rides in a portion of the city. If the Council approves, if they find funding for it and if AC Transit (the bus operator) agrees, one bus route that travels through several low-income neighborhoods will be renewed and fare-free on Sundays for a year. That’s three very big “ifs,” especially the last one. The Council believes this program would remedy in part systemic inequalities that Berkeley, being Berkeley, is very attuned to.

Among several issues with the program, picking Sunday as the free-fare day is regrettable. Sunday has the lowest ridership of any day of the week, and excludes virtually all commuters and students, the bulk of bus riders in Berkeley. Sundays are not a representative day of transit usage for most systems, including Berkeley’s.

The number of Berkeleyans who use buses regularly to commute to work is quite small, less than 8%. It’s not because bus fares are too high. Transit takes much longer to get places and ridership does not depend that much on fare level.

AC Transit studies indicate that reducing bus fares will not produce a significant or proportionate increase in ridership. Factors that promote bus ridership include the lack of a car for personal use, a positive assessment of buses relative to autos and close proximity to the bus route from one’s residence.

Unfortunately for transit, folks have become increasingly wary of traveling where crime and Covid may occur. As elsewhere, Bay Area residents are voting with their steering wheels to lower these risks, opting to drive and not use buses. AC Transit’s ridership dropped precipitously, 70% during the year ending April 2020. Now, its ridership is down a mere 60%.

Free fares are not going to solve these significant issues. It’s hard to imagine how this program will produce worthwhile information that could be useful beyond the one bus route that’s involved. But that’s not likely the true purpose of the program.

The Berkeley City Council has few qualms about undertaking this program that it’s not going to directly pay for. It could follow the Council’s well-established predilection of hurling other organizations’ money at issues like those facing underprivileged people in the hope that something useful might happen eventually.

With enough time, effort and searching, money will likely be found for this interim program. Possible funding sources include the American Rescue Plan Act and the new infrastructure Act. California expects to receive nearly $9.5B from the new Act to improve public transit infrastructure across the state. Berkeley stands ready to claim some.

However, AC Transit, who would have to implement the program, does not favor it as currently proposed by the city. Being very aware of the surrounding politics, AC Transit is on record supporting the idea of a free-fare program, just not this one. So far, Berkeley’s free-fare transit program, like public urban transit itself, seems parked far beyond the shoulder of transportation priorities.