Public Transit: More Jobs Bang for the Stimulus Buck!

Now, we already know that taking public transit is good for the environment, safer than car travel and even better for your health.  But now we know something else: as far as putting people to work, investing in transit easily beats spending more on roads.

To wit: today, our friends at Smart Growth America, USPIRG and the Center for Neighborhood Technology released a new report,  What We Learned from the Stimulus.  The report looks at job numbers from the House’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for the first 10 months after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) was signed, comparing jobs from transit to those from road building. 

The main finding is this: Every billion invested in transit produced 16,419 job-months, while every billion spent on more roads got us just 8,781 job-months.  In other words, transit produces nearly twice the jobs per billion spent. 

Why is this so?  Well, the report lists three primary reasons why transit investment ends up creating jobs so much more efficiently: 1) far less money is spent on the acquisition of land than in road building; 2) transit jobs tend to be more complex, requiring varied expertise; and 3) transit investments goes towards the purchase and maintenance of vehicles.  Or, as the report says, “public transportation creates more jobs by spending less on land and more on people.”

For any upcoming jobs bill in DC, this report provides great guidance.  Do you want to create more jobs, quickly, while investing in the transportation system we need for the future?  If so, the authors say, divide the investment equally between public transportation and road projects.  You could see as much as 71,000 more job-months, the equivalent of year-round employment for more than 5,000 people. 

And on top of all this, we know that transit investment creates jobs for just those sectors of the workforce that are being hit the hardest by the economy. 

That’s right: more jobs for less money; building the transportation system of the future; putting the unemployed back to work.  Oh, and we can help the planet, too.  Not bad, if you ask me.  Hopefully, DC will get the message.