A major investment in transit would be pricey but would drastically improve access and quality. Improving transit quality in every urban area to, at minimum, conditions in the Dallas region would cost an additional $2.2 billion annually. This would be a 4.5 percent increase nationally in operating budgets but would expand per capita transit service by 30.3 percent for the average urban area. Improving minimum transit quality to Chicago’s level would cost $16.7 billion but would more than double average per capita transit service provided throughout the country.
What Would Providing Every City with High-Quality, Zero-Emissions Public Transportation Look Like? (Urban Institute) Nov 2020 https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/what-would-providing-every-city-high-quality-zero-emissions-public-transportation-look
During his presidential campaign, president-elect Joe Biden prioritized transportation investment, particularly in the form of projects to mitigate US carbon emissions and increase access to opportunity for people of color.
In his transition plan, Biden aims to “provide every American city with 100,000 or more residents with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation options.” The US House of Representatives-passed Moving Forward Act (PDF) promotes a similar ambition to significantly improve transit service across the country.
How effective is transit in American cities today, and how might the federal government facilitate high-quality, zero-emissions transit? A major transit improvement would require a major federal intervention, but it could make public transportation convenient and reliable for people throughout the country, thus reducing emissions, improving access, and increasing social equity.
Poor-quality transit is common, particularly in low-income and Black communities
American transit options are notoriously poor, less frequent, and less reliable than comparable systems abroad. That’s one reason only about 5 percent of US commuters use buses or trains.
But the quality of transit varies in different parts of the country. Buses and trains travel a modest 145 feet per resident per day in the typical American urban area, but they run almost five times as much per resident in the New York City region, where transit is frequent and convenient.
In the New York City region, the average urban resident takes 224 transit trips annually. In the Cincinnati region, where buses are infrequent and don’t serve many neighborhoods, the average resident takes fewer than 11 transit trips a year.
Using 2019 data from the National Transit Database, I examined transit quality in all 278 urban areas with at least 100,000 residents for which full data are available. These urban areas encompass cities and their suburbs, together housing more than 200 million people, about two-thirds of the US population. Biden’s proposal suggests that all “cities” with 100,000 residents or more receive transit improvements, but I used this more expansive definition. I measured transit quality by evaluating vehicle revenue miles per capita, a proxy for service availability.
For many low-income people and people of color, transit offerings are often subpar and access is unfairly distributed: the amount of transit service typically provided is 37 percent less comprehensive in the quartile of urban areas with the highest poverty rates, compared with their wealthiest counterparts, adjusted for population. Transit access is roughly 24 percent worse in the quartile of urban areas with the most Black residents, compared with those with the fewest.
Many urban areas are low-income, have large communities of color, and suffer from inadequate transit. Many regions along the Texas border and the Gulf Coast, in California’s Central Valley, and in the industrial Midwest are both impoverished and have poor-quality bus and rail services.
Consider the McAllen, Texas, urban area, where 93 percent of the population is Hispanic or Latino and 27 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty level. McAllen provides just one-fifth of the transit service provided in the median metropolitan region—and less than 1 percent of the service in the New York City region. Service ends at 9:00 p.m. on weekdays and 8:00 p.m. on Sundays, and buses come once an hour at most.
On the other hand, wealthier regions, like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC, often have higher-quality transit, largely because transit operations are funded via local and state revenues—not federal support distributed evenly across the nation.
A major investment in transit would be pricey but would drastically improve access and quality
What would a new federal transit investment designed to achieve high-quality service cost?
Using five urban areas’ current transit service as potential goal posts (Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC), I estimate the cost of increasing transit service quantity in all urban areas with 100,000 or more residents.
A major investment in transit would be pricey but would drastically improve access and quality. Improving transit quality in every urban area to, at minimum, conditions in the Dallas region would cost an additional $2.2 billion annually. This would be a 4.5 percent increase nationally in operating budgets but would expand per capita transit service by 30.3 percent for the average urban area. Improving minimum transit quality to Chicago’s level would cost $16.7 billion but would more than double average per capita transit service provided throughout the country.
What would these improvements mean for a place like McAllen? Improving service just to Dallas levels could mean doubling the number of bus routes, increasing service to midnight every day, and running buses every 15 minutes on all routes—which could make transit accessible and convenient to the region’s inhabitants.
Less time spent waiting for the next bus, for example, could make it possible for thousands of people to rely on affordable transit to get to school and employment—opening up opportunity for people who cannot afford the cost of owning and using a car, which is estimated to cost about $8,000 a year.
All options would require large federal matches, but even increasing the quality of transit service in all large urban areas to New York City levels would cost less annually ($45.6 billion) than the $48 billion the federal government distributed to highway programs in 2019 (PDF).
Transitioning to electric vehicles is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions
The second major transit-related element of Biden’s transition plan is ensuring zero-emission options, essential for moving the US toward a more climate-friendly future. Electric vehicles also reduce local air pollution, a major problem in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
US data show roughly 62,000 buses run on fossil fuels. If the federal government replaced 6,000 of those buses annually with electric vehicles, it would need to allocate a relatively modest $3 billion for the purpose, assuming bus purchase costs of about $500,000.
A realistic and just transportation transition
The federal government has historically not invested much in funding transit operations; these costs are typically covered by state and local governments. Federal expenditures mostly go to capital investments, like new lines, buses, and maintenance. But the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act allocated $25 billion to transit, including for operating needs, potentially setting a precedent for a new initiative in the Biden administration.
Widespread, high-quality public transportation service is financially possible, given current federal transportation outlays, and a federal investment could speed the shift to low-emissions transport nationwide.
**
- The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) last week released its first Pedestrian Safety Action Plan in an effort to reduce pedestrian fatalities and injuries on America’s roads. The plan is overseen by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
- Under the plan, federal agencies will swiftly implement a number of initiatives by the end of this year to enhance public education around street safety; help governments improve the location of pedestrian crossings; and produce a guide on how streetlights can be designed to promote safety for pedestrians. Agencies will also identify ways to set appropriate speed limits and reduce speed-related fatalities, and investigate the effect of the use of electronic devices on pedestrian safety.
- The plan said various federal agencies intend to do more in the coming years to enhance safety through the study and use of automated driving technologies; training law enforcement on bicycle and pedestrian safety; examining how new bike and pedestrian infrastructure is designed; and supporting state and local governments’ efforts to adopt Vision Zero policies. In a statement, FHWA Administrator Nicole Nason said reducing pedestrian fatalities is a “team effort.”
Dive Insight:
The action plan comes as the U.S. continues to wrestle with a growth in pedestrian fatalities on its streets, especially in cities. NHTSA said 17% of all traffic fatalities in 2019 were pedestrians; that year, the administration said 6,205 people were killed, an increase of 44% from 2010. The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) projected a similar number of pedestrian fatalities earlier this year and has raised concerns about the continued growth of deaths on local roads, at night and outside of intersections.
Russ Martin, GHSA’s senior director of policy and government relations, said in an email that the association is “encouraged” by USDOT’s focus on pedestrian safety and said the action plan provides many ways for the federal and state governments “to gather better data and bring more attention to this crisis.”
The U.S. came under fire earlier this year for declining to sign a pledge at the Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in Stockholm, instead issuing an uncredited statement on behalf of its delegation. That statement pledged to continue studying the relationship between road safety and street design, and the action plan released last week focuses much of its attention on the design of pedestrian crossings.
In its only explicit nod to street infrastructure, NHTSA pledges in the action plan to “[identify] discrepancies in how new pedestrian and bicycle facilities are designed to be used versus how they are actually used by pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists by examining knowledge of proper facility use, enforcement efforts, and documentation of available educational resources and initiatives.”
While the plan acknowledges that some stakeholders called for greater support for Complete Streets policies, it does not explicitly call for implementing those policies nationwide, even as the movement has gathered steam among local governments and received support in Congress. A spokesperson for the National Complete Streets Coalition did not respond to requests for comment.
But the plan said it intends to “[identify], develop and promote speed management noteworthy practices that are carried out by States and localities to reduce speed-related fatalities and cover topics such as setting appropriate speed limits for all roadway users and countermeasures that slow traffic down.”
That follows calls from the likes of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) to reassess how governments design speed limits, as well as setting slow zones in a bid to reduce crashes, especially with speeding under further scrutiny during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Martin agreed with that assessment, noting that GHSA has also urged a renewed focus on speeding, which Martin said is “one of the leading crash contributors nationwide and itself poses an outsized threat to pedestrians and other nonmotorized road users.”
Recommended Reading:
SMART CITIES DIVEThe US didn’t sign a global road safety pact. Now advocates are fighting back
SMART CITIES DIVEPedestrian deaths reach highest rate in 30 years: GHSA
SMART CITIES DIVENACTO urges shift from ‘outdated’ speed-limit planning
