Transit, the Stimulus and Jobs in California: Three Times the Jobs at Half the Price
Posted February 12, 2010 in Environmental Justice, Moving Beyond Oil, Solving Global Warming
In an earlier post, I discussed the recent “What We Learned from the Stimulus” report from Smart Growth America, USPIRG and the Center for Neighborhood Technology that examined stimulus spending on roads and transit with respect to job creation. The short story: nationally, transit gives about twice as many jobs per billion spent when compared to roads.
This is clearly good news for transit advocates. Not only does transit spending give us more jobs bang for the buck, but those jobs are in occupations and industries particularly hard-hit by the recession.
This week, the California Legislature is once again tackling multi-billion dollar budget challenges, and once again, transit is on the chopping block. At the same time, the Legislature is making moves on a jobs bill.
Hopefully, they can put two-and-two together when they take a look, like I did, at the numbers from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on job creation from stimulus spending in California. To wit:
- From $1,167,779,789 in road spending, California got 5,305 jobs. That’s about $220,128 per job.
- From $585,852,101 in transit spending, we got 15,107 jobs. That’s about $38,780 per job.
So, investments in transit resulted in almost three times the number of jobs for half the price. Or, if you took a look at the rate of job creation per billion dollars, that’s 4,543 road jobs per billion versus 25,786 transit jobs per billion.
Anyway you look at it, investment in transit is a good deal: for the economy and for the environment.
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Comments
Tom Rubin — Feb 17 2010 06:06 PM
First, the ARRA jobs data base is rather poor; this is what the Governor's office relied upon for their famous press release that stimulus funding created/saved more than half the jobs in the entire CSU system.
Second, the "What We Learned" report is also not very good, in part because it utilizes the ARRA jobs data, in part because the authors appear to have known the data didn't make sense, and decided to publish anyway, coming up with a nutty statistic ("job-months per $billion), evidently in the hope that no one would do the calculation that it took $731,000 of ARRA funds to create one transit job. This WAS lower than their calculation for road jobs ($1,367,000), but, who in their right mind would put out a publication promoting spending on transit as a good way to create jobs because it ONLY took $731,000 to creat one (not including, of course, the state, local, and private funding necessary to create each one of those jobs)?
However, the argument that spending stimulus money on transit creates more jobs than on roads is almost certainly true, even with all the data and reporting problems I describe. The reason is, you can spend 10% of the transit money on operating subsidies, which has been done a lot in California, and this SAVES a lot of jobs that were going to be eliminated, and do it RIGHT NOW.
This does, however, make the jobs creation comparison between transit and roads a lot less meaningful. You are comparing spending money to employ someone for a year -- doing something very important, at least in most cases -- to creating an asset that will likely be used for decades, and is likely to have job and other benefits for a long period. Both types of spending are important, but doing the evaluation on the basis of jobs created ONLY is not a very good public policy decision methodology.