Transit Irony

don’t own a dog, but I’ve heard all the stories that dog-owners tell. The kids beg for a puppy, go wild when it arrives and become deeply attached to it. But they don’t have much desire to take care of it when it grows up. That’s the way cities are with transit systems. Or at least, it’s the way they seem to behave. I don’t know how else to explain the odd combination of headlines about public transportation that has been appearing around the country these past few weeks.

On Election Day in November, Denver and Phoenix voted to spend billions of dollars on sleek new rail systems they hope will eventually lead them away from traffic gridlock and endless sprawl. San Diego approved a new rail line and massive expansion of its bus system.

At the same time, the oldest and most heavily used transit systems in urban America are begging for the cash they need just to provide existing service. Chicago’s CTA is warning that if it doesn’t get an infusion of at least $80 million from the state legislature, it will have to cut service 20 percent and lay off 1,250 workers. Atlanta’s MARTA system is looking at doubling some of its fares. In Philadelphia, SEPTA may have to cancel train service on weekends. “There’s not a groundswell of public support,” the system’s chairman admitted a few weeks ago.

All of this is pretty depressing when you reflect that each of these systems has been integral to an urban revival in recent years, generating infusions of downtown residential population that range from modest in Atlanta to nothing short of spectacular in Chicago. If you ride the CTA Brown Line home from the Loop at night on a weekday evening, your problem is not bad service. Your problem is squeezing onto the train.

If you want to, you can use statistics to prove almost any point about mass transit that you wish to prove. On the one hand, nobody disputes that the number of transit trips has declined over the past quarter-century: If you compare the big-city rail systems in 1980 and in 2005, you get a ridership decrease of about 30 percent. On the other hand, most of that decrease was in the first half of the period. Between 1995 and 2002, transit use in America actually went up by about 3 percent a year. It fell back slightly in the recession that began in 2001. But SEPTA and the CTA both saw increased ridership in the first half of 2004. So a lot depends on what year you choose to look at.

The one number that’s declined steadily and inexorably for most systems is the amount of government assistance. A decade ago, the federal government provided 5 percent of the operating budgets of the 35 largest transit agencies. These days, it’s 1 percent. States still cover about a quarter of the budgets, but that is aid vulnerable to economic conditions. Much of it comes from sales tax revenue, and when sales tax collections are down, as they have been for the past several years, transit systems are big losers.

But even when times are flush, public transportation is still victimized by funding rules that don’t usually protect it against inflation. If the CTA were getting its state money in 1985 dollars instead of 2004 dollars, it would have an extra $100 million this year — more than enough to solve its most urgent budget problems.

he list of relevant numbers goes on forever. In the end, though, the numbers are only a symptom of the disease. The real problem is political fragmentation that makes cities, suburbs and states into competitors in the transportation game instead of allies.

In Chicago, the CTA has to struggle not only against general budget austerity but also against METRA, the network of suburban train lines that brings 150,000 commuters in and out of the city every weekday. During the past two decades, METRA has enjoyed funding increases above the level of inflation, has held its fares down, added service and grown substantially in ridership.

In part, that’s because the communities that METRA serves have themselves been growing. But it’s also because METRA has more powerful friends than the CTA does. One of those friends is the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, whose constituents in suburban towns such as Elgin and Aurora ride METRA and not CTA.

A few weeks ago, when the Illinois legislature was considering whether to give the CTA the budget help it was seeking, Hastert weighed in with a vow that if CTA got any of METRA’s dollars, Congress would simply transfer an equivalent amount of federal money out of the CTA account. In view of that threat, it was no surprise that state legislative leaders, even though many of them are inner-city Chicago Democrats, gave up any interest in a CTA bailout.

The politics of transit for Philadelphia are, at the moment, even more acrimonious than those in Chicago. That’s in large part because they are based not only on demographics but also on partisanship. The financial future of SEPTA has become entangled in the bitter disputes between Democratic Governor Edward Rendell and the Republicans who control both of Pennsylvania’s legislative chambers.

GOP leaders have viewed SEPTA’s requests mostly as special pleading on the part of Rendell, who was mayor of Philadelphia for two terms before he became governor. Suburban Republicans, whose constituents ride the urban transit system, unlike most suburbanites in Illinois, have been relatively sympathetic toward helping SEPTA. But Republicans from other parts of the state, who hold the balance of power in the legislature, have been adamantly against it.

Then there is the case of Atlanta’s MARTA, whose difficulties are due less to current political rivalry than to decisions made decades ago. When MARTA was planned in the 1960s, the leadership in the fast-growing suburban territory northeast and northwest of Atlanta chose not to be included, arguing privately that a transit line presented too many opportunities for the inner-city poor to move out beyond urban boundaries. Cobb and Gwinnett counties, with a combined population of well over a million, have no MARTA lines and hardly any voters who express a desire to help pay MARTA’s bills.

With a sales-tax funding base restricted to Atlanta itself and two inner-suburban counties, the system doesn’t have the political constituency to meet its current costs and can’t afford to build the new lines that would broaden the constituency. That’s a pretty succinct summary of the Catch-22 that afflicts aging transit systems in many different parts of the country.

If there’s an overriding lesson in the transit-budget crisis that’s afflicting the older cities right now, it’s that in order to remain stable over the long run, a transit system has to be an octopus. It has to stretch its tentacles into every corner of a metropolitan area, giving the residents of the entire region a stake in its future. If you look at urban transit referendums around the country over the last decade, you find that most of the “no” votes aren’t cast by people who don’t want the service; they’re cast by people who are afraid the service won’t reach them. Building an octopus is politically and financially very difficult. But building a slithering snake is a recipe for permanent inadequacy, as Atlanta has learned with MARTA time and time again.

More than just an octopus, though, a successful transit system needs to be a creature with a single brain. Metropolitan Chicago has more than enough resources to maintain a network that provides excellent service to the distant suburbs without short-changing the city’s revival. But as long as there are dueling agencies with different management, different constituencies and different funding sources, that’s unlikely to happen.

or the MARTAs, SEPTAs and CTAs of the world, it may simply be too late. That’s the bad news. Very bad, in fact. But there’s a little bit of good news: The cities now embarking on major transit projects seem to have done a pretty good job of figuring out what does and doesn’t work.

In Denver, for example, the $4.7 billion FASTRACKS proposal that passed in November drew on a region-wide coalition that included mayors of all 31 of the area’s cities, nearly all the chambers of commerce, and virtually all of the important newspapers in the area. The system itself will include six new lines and 57 stations spreading out from Denver in every direction, all the way to Boulder in the northwest and the international airport in the northeast. Supporters offered the vision of a network that would eventually connect 31 village centers, each less than a half-mile from one of the stations. Citizens could oppose the project on the basis of cost, or argue that it wouldn’t solve traffic congestion. But not many could complain that it would never reach them.

When opponents, led by Colorado Governor Bill Owens, argued for starting small, with shorter pilot projects in a couple of busy corridors, the pro-transit coalition responded that this would be about the same as doing nothing. The political support would be insufficient. When you need an octopus, you don’t start by designing a snake. FASTRACKS ended up getting 57 percent of the vote.

Proposition 400 in Arizona got almost exactly the same vote following a campaign that enlisted a similar coalition of elected officials, business leaders, legislators, the state transportation board and the media. It wasn’t Phoenix against the suburbs; it was Phoenix and the suburbs together. Along with 27 miles of light rail, the plan included significant commitments to highway improvement and new arterial streets. Critics called the light rail component a waste of money, but they never got anywhere. Proposition 400 gave so many diverse and far-flung communities a piece of the action that it became impossible to stop.

The moral of this story is clear: Public transportation is a political winner when it unites communities and interests instead of dividing them. The time to do that is right at the start. If you have any doubts about the cost of moving too slowly, consider this: Just last month, after decades of planning and delay, Washington, D.C.’s Metro system finally opened a rail station in suburban Largo, Maryland, at the site of the Capital Centre, an arena built in the early 1970s for basketball and hockey. It’s a nice station, but it won’t help sports fans much: The Capital Centre was demolished in 2002.

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