A transit renaissance?
Ross, Benjamin
A transit renaissance? BENJAMIN ROSS In transportation, as in so many areas, the Obama administration is playing catch-up. But few other fields of policy offer such opportunities for...
...they are a drug on the market and in some places threaten to decay into slums...
...There were, to be sure, plenty of hidden subsidies for driving, but the gas tax was what paid for the interstate highways and other major roadways...
...The last-minute addition of $8 billion to the stimulus package for inter-city high speed rail-although it will not directly help the budgets of city transit providers-is a strong sign of a new policy direction...
...In Washington, D.C., where the most successful of the Great Society transit projects has become the country's second-busiest subway system, the trend goes back a dozen years...
...Peter Rogoff, a Senate staffer who is said to deserve more credit than anyone else for keeping Amtrak alive through the Bush administration, will serve under Porcari in charge of urban transit programs...
...Still, they are more easily accepted when they fund well-liked, high-prestige activities, and driving used to be one of those...
...For many years, highway building was funded by a tax on gasoline and other user fees...
...and cities from Seattle and Honolulu to Baltimore and Charlotte are planning light rail lines...
...New York's Second Avenue subway is now funded only north of Sixty-Third Street...
...These neighborhoods attract increasing numbers of reverse commuters with a taste for urban living...
...Fortunately, early signs are that the Obama administration recognizes this need...
...Louis recently eliminated more than a quarter of its transit service despite rising passenger counts...
...Changing preferences are reflected in real estate values-demand for housing in these areas remains strong despite the bad economy, while prices plunge in automobile-oriented outer suburbs...
...But few other fields of policy offer such opportunities for innovation...
...Average weekday ridership rose 42 percent in ten years, far outpacing population growth...
...BENJAMIN ROSS In transportation, as in so many areas, the Obama administration is playing catch-up...
...Money continues to pour into highway projects of marginal value while transit is starved of resources...
...they have dropped...
...Benjamin Ross is president of the Action Committee for Transit, a Maryland advocacy group, and writes frequently in Dissent...
...The shift in public preferences can be seen both in travel choices and in voters' resistance to new automobile user fees, but it has not been reflected on the expenditure side of transportation budgets...
...For decades, environmentalists and urbanists seeking aid for mass transit have had to push against a powerful highway lobby and a public infatuated with the romance of the open road...
...it is simply the sales tax applied to gasoline...
...Beneath the policy stasis of the last sixteen years, deep-rooted changes in transportation preferences have altered the landscape...
...And when this subsidy is taken into account, we find that the user fees paid by drivers are dropping much more steeply than is generally recognized...
...The direct impact of construction dollars will be followed by the redevelopment that transit brings...
...They drive to office-park jobs on weekdays and are on the subway Saturday night...
...Where is the pentup demand that could revive housing construction...
...General tax revenues have been tapped repeatedly to fill urgent holes in transportation budgets...
...The conventional wisdom that roads are paid for by drivers while transit is subsidized turns out to be grievously wrong...
...Nonwork use of these systems is rising much faster than commuting...
...What can still be sold-or more likely rented-are apartments and townhouses in the new transitoriented urban centers...
...When we do drive-and we still drive a lot-it's a way to get where we want to go, not something we value for its own sake...
...When gas passes $4, the gas tax is no longer a user fee at all...
...money that would otherwise appear in general tax revenues goes instead to fund transportation...
...Gasoline taxes have not gone up, on the federal level or in many states, since the early 1990s...
...But either way, it opens the way to a sound response to these global crises...
...Two key appointments offer more encouragement...
...The new administration's first steps in urban transportation may seem more like opening the floodgates than taking the initiative...
...There is a backlog of proposed urban rail projects-sought by Republican mayors and downtown business interests as well as urban Democrats-that far exceeds current budgets...
...The combination of continued roadbuilding alongside shrinking user fee revenues has put transportation budgets in a vise...
...In few cities, however, is the existing transit network strong enough to fully support this kind of development...
...Gasoline is taxed by the gallon, and consumption is falling with improvements in fuel economy and less driving...
...Robert Moses built New York's parkways for a now-forgotten activity called "pleasure driving...
...But ridership increased 47 percent on Saturdays and 57 percent on Sundays...
...Breaking out of the vise that now grips transportation budgets requires new approaches to transportation and land use that respond to changing public preferences...
...Another piece of common wisdom is all too true, however...
...Major highway construction projects continue, and many states are using federal stimulus money to build additional roads rather than catch up on backlogged maintenance...
...The public has spoken for a shift from autos to transit-indeed, it has spoken twice, with its feet and with its votes...
...The burden of paying for highways is taken off the shoulders of drivers and placed on the general public...
...A wave of subway construction triggered by the Great Society largely petered out by the eighties...
...The trend toward transit is a qualitative change, not just a quantitative increase...
...Suburban McMansions have been overbuilt...
...The era of sprawl development fueled by evermore highways has ended...
...Changing circumstances make attainable what once was visionary...
...In 1993, when the gas tax was last increased in my state of Maryland, gas sold for $1.10 per gallon, and only 4.3 cents out of the 23.5-cent gasoline tax was lost from the state's general fund by the sales tax exemption...
...Gasoline taxes were raised regularly to match roadbuilding schedules...
...Transit ridership, meanwhile, is shooting up...
...Taxes are never popular with the electorate...
...Beyond that, there is a sales tax exemption in most states for gasoline and automobiles...
...The U Street neighborhood favored by young Obama administration staffers is already passing the peak of trendiness, succeeded by a rapidly gentrifying Columbia Heights where subway ridership has risen 70 percent in four years...
...Similar trends are seen in other cities...
...Building new urban rail lines will stimulate the economy twice...
...New York's subway system, its ridership at a fifty-year peak, is threatened with service cuts as drivers in the outer boroughs resist proposals to impose tolls or "congestion charges" on streets and bridges they now use for free...
...As new policies take shape, an area to watch is the intersection of transportation and land use with economic recovery...
...But the political system has been hard of hearing...
...The consequences of this shift can be seen by comparing the current budget of the Washington Metro to the Maryland state automobile transportation system...
...When gasoline peaked at $4 per gallon last year, the gas tax was nearly equal to the sales tax-a 6 percent sales tax would have been 22.6 cents per gallon, nearly equal to the 23.5 cent-gas tax...
...Rail ridership started to go up in 1998 and now is growing at breakneck speed...
...These neighborhoods attract a younger generation that felt trapped growing up in the suburbs...
...Maryland transportation secretary John Porcari, who has bucked powerful opponents to advance controversial rail projects, will manage the federal Department of Transportation day to day as deputy secretary...
...Los Angeles wants to build a subway to the sea beneath Wilshire Avenue...
...This is far less than the 32 percent that users pay Metro through fares and parking fees...
...The process is most advanced in Washington, with its high concentration of well-paid jobs for young professionals, a well-developed subway system, and a busy downtown...
...In the nineties, a light rail renaissance began in Portland, Sacramento, and other western cities, but federal funding was scarce as Clintonian centrists went along with a Republican infatuation with asphalt and then were succeeded by the privatizers of the Bush administration...
...Revenues from automobile user fees have not merely failed to keep up with inflation...
...Less glamorous, but probably more important as the harbinger of a national trend, is the growth of transit-oriented centers around suburban subway stations...
...Despite a worsening economy and falling gas prices, recent months have seen ridership continuing to increase...
...The crisis in transportation funding is only a symptom of a deeper rooted problem...
...New transit-oriented neighborhoods-places that might seem ordinary in New York but are an innovation in sunbelt cities-are springing up around subway and light rail stations...
...The newer transit systems, built largely to bring suburban commuters downtown, are altering land use and living habits so that people no longer need to organize their lives around the automobile...
...On occasion, general taxes were disguised as dedicated funding for highways so that they would go down more easily...
...And transportation's unusual status in today's polarized politics, as a field of legislation in which local interests trump partisanship, offers hope that Congress will be a partner in policy making rather than an obstacle to be overcome...
...Whether the public's loss of taste for suburban housing and suburban transportation is a consequence of the imperatives of global warming and the coming exhaustion of oil reserves or merely a fortunate coincidence is impossible to say...
...Only 20 percent of Maryland's automobile transportation program is funded by user fees...
...No one today thinks of driving on crowded urban expressways as a pleasure...
...The decline in highway user fees is placing a severe stress on transportation budgets...
...The trend toward more and more driving slowed in the nineties, reversed with the spike in gasoline prices of 2006-2008, and has not resumed despite the fall in gas prices...
...The cause of this budget stress can be traced back to the lessened popularity of automobile travel...
...Driving is not a prestige activity, and voters don't like to be taxed for it any more than they like to be taxed for anything else...
...Between 1999 and 2007, the number of people entering the Washington Metro during the morning rush hour-a good measure of travel to jobs-increased 33.5 percent...
...Just to bring transportation policy up to date would be almost a revolution...
...The new public outlook on transportation has ended this comfortable pattern...
...The exemption is an indirect subsidy for transportation...
...The shift in travel preferences has not been well reflected in government spending priorities, but it had a much swifter effect on the revenues that fund transportation...
...The stress is most severe in states with industrial economies-St...
...But they could represent no less of a change...
...The American love affair with the automobile is over...
Vol. 56 • July 2009 • No. 3
