Going over the fiscal cliff
The big threat to American public transport is that it is seen as welfare
(A note, before I get to the main topic. You can now buy my book in the UK, and everywhere. It is out on Kindle. You can download it right this minute. I have replaced all of the instances of “gasoline” with petrol. There are no hoods of cars, only bonnets. I am also working on a UK print release but I don’t want it to suck, and I have a job, so that may take a little longer. It will happen though. In the meantime, the American imported version is increasingly available - not just from Amazon. Backstory in Balham has it. Ask your bookshop!)
A little while ago, when I first joined TikTok, a persistent “life hack” form of video kept coming into my feed showing viewers how to dodge expensive Uber fares at American airports. Invariably, it involved the narrator dragging their bags across some giant expanse of tarmac to order their cab from a hotel or something half a mile away from the airport, and so be spared from price discrimination and taxes. Invariably, this would cut the cost of a $90 taxi to something more like $40.
It is funny because there is usually a far cheaper alternative than schlepping a mile to order a cab from some spot just outside the airport. Airports are among the few places in America that almost always are served by public transport. Even if you ultimately still need a taxi to get you to your final destination, taking a bus or train part of the way and then ordering your cab is a far easier way to reduce the fare than the Tiktokers’ on-foot schlep. It is often quicker too. I know, I’ve done it.
And yet Americans often simply do not realise the option exists. A while ago at the drinks at the end of a conference in downtown Chicago, an attendee I was chatting to apologised for leaving early: he said he wanted to allow 90 minutes for his cab to get to O’Hare, because traffic was bad on the Kennedy freeway. We were literally a five minute walk from a station where he could have got a train that would have taken 45 minutes, and cost $2.50. He did not have lots of bags, or a deep aversion to sharing a train with other people. It just simply hadn’t occurred to him.
That is why I worry about the future of public transport in this country. This week’s piece in The Economist is about the “fiscal cliff” facing lots of transit agencies, because ridership has not recovered. From the story:
Compared with other countries, public-transport use in America has been slow to recover from the pandemic. The number of bus and train passengers in May was still at only 69% of the pre-pandemic level, according to data from the American Public Transportation Association, an industry group. In May New York’s subway was carrying a mere 71% of the passenger total in 2019. Ridership on bart, in the San Francisco Bay Area, was at just 37% of the 2019 figure. In London in May, travel on the Underground system was already back to around 87% of pre-pandemic levels.
If it persists, lower ridership means less revenue from fares. For example, the ticket take on the Chicago Transit Authority was almost $300m lower last year than in 2019. Awkwardly, those agencies which were considered to be doing the best job pre-pandemic—because they raised lots of fare revenue, and so were subsidised less—are now the ones most in trouble, notes Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC.
The states of New York and California, and a few smaller ones, have already agreed bailouts. They are needed. Without them, cuts to service and fare hikes are inevitable. I hope politicians in Illinois realise.
But in the longer run, I do have to ask, why shouldn’t public transport fund itself from fares? After all, most of these “legacy” systems that are now in trouble were built in the first place to make a profit. The problem is that in America, cars are now so subsidised, and the urban form so spread out, that a lot of public transport is simply not that viable any more. And because so few people rely on it, the result is it is now seen as essentially, welfare, rather than as crucial infrastructure. As long as that is the perception, it will always be fighting for resources.
Public transport should not need bailouts to survive. It should be sustainable on its own. And in fact, the best way to make it sustainable is not just to subsidise it. It is to stop subsidising cars. Make motorists pay for their parking, and their road space, and then let’s see what happens to public transport use. In Japan, where free parking is almost unheard of and expressways all have tolls, public transport makes a profit.
Anyway, one offcut from the reporting I did - for the piece, I interviewed Kam Buckner, an Illinois state representative who ran for mayor of Chicago on a pro-transport platform. Here something he said I couldn’t get into the piece:
The CTA needs to be a catalyst for growth in Chicago. Chicago has a longstanding legacy of pension debt. We can’t continue to just raise taxes. The best way to get Chicago on a sound fiscal footing is to have a larger tax base. Not just taxing people more but having more people to tax. We live in a world where people can work wherever they want. Instead of that being a disadvantage, that should be an advantage. People should have a quality of life that’s higher and where they can move around without a car"
Chicago, he said, can offer that - or could, if the CTA were better. It is practically the same argument I made on this blog a few weeks ago. And it is completely right.
Anyway. now for some shameless book promotion. I have been on three different podcasts this week to discuss the book. WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station; The Bunker, and The Centre for Cities podcast here. Check them out.
I think it's completely justifiable to subsidise public transport if we believe that it delivers wider economic benefits that make it worthwhile (e.g. access to jobs + productivity). Indeed the UK is somewhat unusual in comparison to the rest of the Europe in the level of funding it expects rail (and the underground) to receive from farepayers as distinct from taxpayers (which as noted means that ridership falls have bigger financial impacts - e.g. the delay/cancellation of big chunks of capital investment by TfL). Provided you have evidence of the wider benefits of public transport (e.g. watch what happens to land values when you open a station in a town with a regular 45 minute train to central London) then I think public subsidy can be VfM.
While Japan's public transport is sometimes said to be 'profitable' plenty of people more knowledgeable than I have suggested this masks opaque interactions between state and private entities and conglomerations of rail companies with property & retail developers. Indeed I would generally be sceptical as to whether any mass transit system could be profitable once all capital, maintenance and operation costs are properly accounted for (assuming only fares offsetting them and not other sources of revenue such as e.g. station retail/oversite rents).