Because it stinks.
Because it stinks.
P ublic-transit advocates often scratch their heads, wondering why more people don’t ride public transit. Of course, for many Americans, public transit isn’t an option, but even among those for whom it is, many choose not to ride it.
Looking at the entire country, only 5 percent of workers commuted by public transit in 2019. Breaking it down by mode, 2.3 percent commuted by bus, 1.9 percent commuted by subway or elevated rail, 0.6 percent commuted by long-distance train or commuter train, and 0.2 percent commuted by light rail or streetcar. Those numbers are pre-pandemic, too, and we know that public-transit usage has plummeted since then. For perspective, the same Census survey found that 2.6 percent of Americans walk to work — more Americans walked to work in 2019 than used the most popular mode of public transit.
Pandemic aside, these numbers have been falling for years. The Census in 1960 found that 12.1 percent of workers commuted by public transit. It was 8.9 percent in 1970, 6.4 percent in 1980, and 5.3 percent in 1990, where it has roughly stayed ever since.
That steady decline comes despite huge influxes of government money. Take the bipartisan infrastructure law, for example: It gave $110 billion to roads and bridges, $66 billion to rail, and $39 billion to public transit. Roads, the mode of transportation that 85 percent of people actually use, got less than twice the amount of funding than rail, the mode of transportation that 0.6 percent of people use.
It’s not just the one-time investments, either. In fiscal years 2018 and 2019, the Federal Transit Administration had a budget of around $13.5 billion. The Federal Highway Administration was around $48 billion.
Of course, that’s only federal spending. The bulk of transportation spending is from state and local governments. In total, states spend about three times as much as the federal government on highways and about three times as much on public-transit and rail. In other words, they don’t rectify the difference between use and spending, either.
Making matters worse, highway spending at both the state and federal level comes, in large part, from gas taxes. This means that people who use the highways are paying for their upkeep. This is not true for public transit. According to 2019 data (again, pre-pandemic) from the Federal Transit Administration, even the most-used systems are largely reliant on non-users to pay for them. MTA New York City Transit only covered 54 percent of its operating costs with directly generated revenue. The Chicago Transit Authority only covered 43 percent. The Los Angeles Metro only covered 16 percent. The remainder is coming from taxpayers, the vast majority of whom don’t ride public transit at all.
The incentives here are pretty easy to grasp: If most of your money doesn’t come from paying customers, providing quality service isn’t going to be a top priority.
The best example of this phenomenon right now is the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which operates the bus and subway system in Washington, D.C. According to that 2019 FTA data, only 38 percent of the WMATA’s operating costs are covered by directly generated revenue. (The D.C. Council decriminalized fare evasion in 2018.) The rest comes from taxpayers in the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland, plus taxpayers nationwide through the federal government.
And the WMATA is sure taking them for a ride right now.
The authority bought hundreds of 7000 Series railcars that began to enter service in 2015. They replaced cars that were original to the system when it opened in 1976. The 7000 Series trains have been out of service due to a derailment that occurred on October 12 of last year.
One derailment shouldn’t be a cause for removing an entire class of railcars from service, except that the National Transportation Safety Board found that there was a defect in the wheel assemblies of the 7000 Series railcars that made them prone to derailment. Oh, and the WMATA had known about it since 2017. And these wheel problems had occurred 52 times between 2017 and the October 12 derailment.
The 7000 Series trains make up 60 percent of the WMATA’s rail fleet, and while they are out of service, train frequencies are way down. Thirty-minute headways are common, especially on weekends. The WMATA takes the “rapid” out of “rapid transit.”
So when are these relatively new trains going to pass inspections that prove they can reliably stay on the tracks? Maybe sometime this summer — the WMATA isn’t really sure.
In the meantime, you’d think the WMATA would be doing everything possible to make sure the trains it has left are operating as well as possible. But you’d be wrong. On Sunday, we learned that nearly half of the WMATA’s train operators are no longer certified to operate trains. It’ll take two to three months to recertify them, the authority claims. In the meantime, service will be reduced even further.
That comes despite three rounds of federal stimulus money that kept the WMATA afloat during the pandemic. Even Washington’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, said that “this is not a funding issue,” which is not something you often hear from the party of government.
Technology has actually regressed with respect to train operation. The system was built in the late ’70s to be automated. Instead of progressing to match other systems around the world with fully automated trains, every WMATA train is now manually operated. After a crash in 2009 that federal investigators found wasn’t caused by the automatic train-control system, but rather by a circuitry failure related to the WMATA’s poor maintenance performance, the WMATA went all-manual and hasn’t gone back. And, you guessed it, the train operators are unionized.
So why don’t more people ride public transit? Because it stinks. Government agencies gorge themselves on taxpayer dollars way out of proportion with how many people actually use public transit. They prove, over and over again, that they don’t care about providing high-quality (or even decent) transportation services to people who just want to get to work on time.