Buying Buses, Firing Drivers: California’s Mixed-Up Take on Transit

If it isn’t clear to everyone by now, public transit is key to California’s future.  In a trend starting well before the current recession and persisting through declining gas prices, Californians are driving less.  At the same time, transit ridership is up on the overwhelming majority of California transit systems. This is great for the environment, clearly, but transit is also safer than car travel and oftentimes cheaper per mile.  And in a recession, transit service is absolutely essential for people searching for jobs and accessing vital social services.

Despite these trends, transit agencies are taking it on the chin.  As Transportation for American is chronicling in an increasingly depressing Google map, fare increases, service cuts and layoffs are spreading across the country just when we need transit most.  And while there was a glimmer of hope with the billions in the pipeline under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), environmentalists and transit advocates were rightly disappointed when transit only received $8 billion nationwide, while highways got $27 billion.

And that $8 billion is limited:  stimulus money can only be used for one-time capital expenditures.  In other words, you can buy busses and trains, build stations and maintenance facilities, and install bus benches and new signage; but when it comes to actually paying people to drive those busses and trains, or paying mechanics to fix them in your new maintenance facilities, or even buying the gas you put in the busses, ARRA offers you nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, when we build a new bus or train here in the USA, there is a positive economic impact.  But the real benefits of transit—including its substantial environmental benefits—comes from actually having transit run, not just manufacturing transit hardware. 

And the job numbers on the operating side are good, too, if not better.  While a $1 billion investment gets you 30,000 infrastructure jobs, the same investment in operations gets you 41,000 jobs.  More than 85% of the transit workforce is unionized, meaning solid wages and good benefits.  Bus drivers can be trained quickly and do not require years of formal education to qualify.  When everyone seems to be talking about Green Jobs, showing bus drivers and mechanics the door is just the wrong way to go.  This is a class of jobs we should be investing in and expanding.

Already, over 80% of transit operating funds come from localities, either from fares, property tax assessments or local and county sales taxes.  With Federal and State government out of the picture, the main alternative in the current system is to increase local taxes.  Not only is this politically infeasible, but most of these taxes are regressive and not sustainable sources of funding.   The other avenue, of course, is what we're getting: service cuts, fare hikes and layoffs.

And these same localities are absorbing increased social services costs while property and sales tax revenues are down.  Finding new money to keep the busses running is just another burden in hard times.   In any case, pushing the responsibility down to localities is simply unfair and misguided: transit is essential for the efficient operation of the entire transportation network, regardless of whether you take the bus or not.  And we know that public transit’s benefits for reducing global warming pollution are shared across California, if not around the world.

In 1998, the Federal government decided to end its support for transit operations.  Earlier this year, the State of California did the same thing, cutting transit operations funding from $600 million to $0.  State and Federal governments must come back to the table on the question of funding transit operations.  At the very least, transit agencies should be given the flexibility to use the remaining funding they do get in the way that works best for them—whether that’s building a new rail yard, or making sure they don’t cut a route taking kids to and from school.  

Fortunately, there are some lights on the horizon:

• California President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg has repeatedly expressed publically his desire to find a lasting and sustainable source of operations funding for California’s transit agencies.  He’s setting up a working group to tackle the issue.  NRDC looks forward to being active in that process.

• The upcoming reauthorization of the Federal Transportation Bill gives us the chance to reverse Washington’s Decade of Abandonment of funding the operations of transit.  NRDC, and all our partners in Transportation for America, are pushing in the right direction.

• Upcoming climate legislation could give transit operators the opportunity to cash-in on their role in fighting global warming pollution.

Here in California, public transit agencies, environmentalists and social justice advocates are working together like never before on this important issue.  Stay tuned.

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