One of the unique features of the American transit funding system is that the federal government chips in significant sums each year for capital expenses, such as for the purchase of new buses or the construction of new rail lines, but the law forbids significant involvement in subsidizing operating expenses. This means that local and state governments must find the means to pay for service day-in and day-out.

This could offer the benefit of a considerable range of local political decision-making: Some cities may choose to prioritize transit, while others don’t — people can choose to move between cities based on whether or not they want to take advantage of such transportation offerings. Yet the provision of transit for impoverished people is a redistributive service, and there is considerable theoretical support for the argument that redistributive public functions should not be funded by local governments. Cities that choose to aid their poor, scholars like Paul Peterson have argued, will simply attract more of the needy into their city limits; other municipalities without such aid will be able to escape with lower taxes and no aid to the poor.

A review of evidence from American cities on transit operations funding suggests that neither of these arguments is substantiated. Rather, the current funding system results in highly inequitable results that result in worse transit service in places with higher poverty rates and lower median household incomes. Differences in metropolitan wealth are highly positively correlated with levels of funding for transit service. In other words, the places where residents need transit service most are those that are providing the least of it. Median household incomes, at least based on the regions reviewed here, are prime determinants for the level of public services offered.

To conduct this quick study, I considered data from 15 American cities. I selected all central cities with populations of between 600,000 and 1,000,000 in the 2010 U.S. Census, producing a broad sample of cities throughout the country with varying demographic profiles.* I assembled data at the metropolitan (MSA) level (from 800,000 to 5.6 million in population) from local transit systems (for operating funding data), the Brookings Institution (for 0-vehicle households, metropolitan area poverty rates and median household income), the American Public Transportation Association (for ridership in July 2011), and the U.S. Census (for central city population, poverty rates, and median incomes).

Comparing statistics across this group of cities indicates that by requiring operating funding to be assembled at the local level, people living in poorer metropolitan areas are likely to be denied the quantity of transit services that their peers in wealthier regions are offered. This will only increase the transportation costs faced by people living there. This indicates that there is a strong equity argument to shift operating funding of transit services away from the local level and towards the federal government, which would be more likely to spread resources equally across metropolitan areas, regardless of local incomes.

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The most devastating data, as shown in the charts above, demonstrate that metropolitan areas with higher poverty rates and lower median incomes are likely to spend less on operating their public transportation networks than peer cities with lower poverty rates and higher median incomes (R-squared correlations of positive 0.72 and negative 0.49, respectively). A 50% increase in the poverty rate is associated with a 49% decline in per-person transit operations funding. The differences in transit funding are even more significant when compared with differences in income. The regression shows that a 50% increase in regional median income is associated with a 220% increase in per-person transit funding.

This suggests not only that less-wealthy metropolitan areas do not have the funding capacity to ensure good transit for their populations, but that they are providing disproportionally less public transit than their wealthier peers.** Local funding results in considerably varied service provision, based almost directly on the wealth of each respective region.

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This is not to suggest that people in poor areas are not able to get around at all. The evidence in the chart above shows that there is no correlation between the poverty of metropolitan areas and the rate of zero-household vehicles (R-squared correlation of 0.07). People who live in areas with poor transit offerings will simply find the means to drive. This comes with a grave consequence: Driving costs the average person more than using transit, so impoverished people in transit-poor areas are in effect forced to spend more for transportation than their peers in transit-rich areas.

On the other hand, there is a strong relationship between the number of zero-vehicle households in a region and the ridership on transit there (R-squared correlation of 0.66). The regression implies that a 50% increase in the rate of zero-vehicle households in a metropolitan area is associated with a more than five-fold increase in transit ridership. This suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that people are more likely to abandon their private vehicles when good transit is offered. Giving up on using personal cars lessens personal transportation costs, but ironically the evidence shows that this is more feasible in regions with lower poverty and higher median incomes. Regions that are already well-off are making themselves better off, while those that are poorer are reinforcing their economic problems.

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Nonetheless, the relatively strong correlation between transit operating dollars spent per person in the metropolitan area and voting share in the relevant county for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race (see above; R-squared correlation of 0.66) suggests that through political action, people have the ability to alter the level of service offered by transit services in their area. More strongly Democratic-voting populations appear to benefit from better transit offerings.

There is a direct correlation between investing in improved transit and the rate of ridership in the regions evaluated (R-squared correlation of 0.85), suggesting that higher funding for public transportation services is associated with more users. This is hardly a surprising result (one would hope that transit funding is roughly proportional to the number of riders!), but it reinforces the contention that transit ridership levels are not simply a result of socio-economic conditions and land uses, but also a consequence of direct political decision-making about how much to spend on transit.

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I also considered another possibility: That transit funding in regions is to some degree dependent on differences between central city and suburban populations within each metropolitan region. This question seems particularly relevant considering the recent situation in Detroit, in which suburban reluctance may have led at least in part to the canceling of a light rail line down Woodward Avenue. But a comparison between the central city share of zero-vehicle households (when weighed in terms of the city’s share of the metropolitan area population) and transit funding — where a larger share of zero-vehicle households in the city should theoretically indicate less funding — shows a weak positive correlation (R-squared of 0.34), which is unexpected. An increasing divergence between central city and suburban poverty rates and transit funding shows the expected negative correlation (R-squared of 0.33), indicating that a significant difference in poverty rates within the metropolitan area is associated with somewhat of a decline in transit funding, though it cannot account for most of the differences between regions.

This evidence is purely correlative, not causative. This means that I cannot conclusively show from these data that the lower level of transit funding in poorer metropolitan regions results from those regions’ economic difficulties.

Even so, these data suggest strongly that people living in cities with high poverty rates and low median household incomes are likely to suffer from inadequately funded public transportation systems compared to their peers in low poverty rate and high median household income metropolitan areas. This produces an inequitable funding distribution that further disadvantages lower-income households in lower-income regions by forcing them to resort to the use of expensive private automobiles rather than cheaper transit. This certainly should put in question the assumption that it is in the best interests of residents for funding decisions about public services to be made at the local level.

We should reevaluate whether it is reasonable for metropolitan areas to take responsibility for funding transit, or whether such funding concerns would be better placed in the hands of national government decision-makers, who might be more likely to prioritize equal spending on transit across regions.

* This list includes Austin, Boston, Charlotte, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Memphis, Nashville, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington. I did not include Baltimore because I could not find funding data for Baltimore’s transit services apart from those of Maryland in general, since the state has a unified transit system. I did not include Fort Worth because it shares its MSA with larger Dallas.

** One could also argue that the lack of transit provision is strongly correlated with a reduced median income in the regions studied.

People are armed with powerful tools that often determine quite directly the future of our society: Their wallets. With the flick of a credit card or the passing over of a wad of cash, an individual aids the society as a whole in determining which products are most desired and which services are most needed. This is an incredible tool of the market economy which — though seriously skewed by the influence of powerful economic interests whose primary goal is increasing personal wealth accumulation — allows for the modern world to be pretty efficient in offering people the things they need to survive.

The market’s power to determine what sorts of things to produce and what sorts of things to discard is an important element of a transportation practitioner’s toolkit, as the value individuals confer on mobility as compared to other aspects of their lives should play a role in deciding how much services to provide and where to do so. It would be nonsensical to promote the construction of busways no one wanted to use or buy trains no one needed to ride in, thus we estimate demand and then alter provision of transport based on use.

If the market can and should be used to determine what transportation offerings to provide, why not charge the full cost to provide those offerings to the person demanding mobility and adjust services to adapt to need, instead of subsidizing trains and buses as we have come to do in almost every city around the world? This, in essence, is the argument transportation economists frequently make and it is one that David Levinson of the University of Minnesota repeated this week. “Maybe you want transit,” Levinson writes. “But maybe you would rather have the cash I am spending to provide you subsidized transit service so you can do something else with it. The only way to know what the best allocation of resources is, is to charge for things what they cost.”

In theory, this seems like a valid line of thought. Here’s an example. You have two choices: Take a ride to your city’s most beautiful park for a fare of $2 on your local bus (with the aid of a $2 subsidy chipped in by your local government), or walk to the nearest, less exciting park and buy an ice cream on the way for $3.00. Thinking about the relative merits of the two possibilities, you might determine that the trip to the better park is actually the best deal (since it is cheaper for you), but for the society at large, it’s more expensive. If you were charged the full $4 cost of providing the bus ride to the park, you might think twice and pick the ice cream option instead — which is cheaper for the society as a whole. But the mobility subsidy is providing an inappropriate incentive to do just the opposite and is causing people, as Levinson writes, “To behave inefficiently.”

But we provide subsidies nonetheless, generally because we believe it is important to provide affordable mobility. This is a political and welfare goal shared by most modern societies. Is this a mistaken policy? Would it make more sense to encourage transit providers to be fiscally independent, so that they do not have to rely on limited allocations of public funds?

The answer comes down to two questions — whether or not the subsidy provided to transit is appropriate considering other transportation offerings; and whether a situation in which there were no subsidies would produce the appropriate social environment from the perspective of social equity.

Jarrett Walker tackled the first issue yesterday, noting that there are significant subsidies provided to highways and local roadways and their users, so eliminating aid to public transportation alone would be poor policy. In addition, he noted that there are significant positive externalities generated by transit — like more efficient land-use patterns, lessened pollution, freer-flowing roads, and decreased traffic fatality rates — that deserve to be compensated by subsidies.

While a surface-level analysis might suggest that the fares for transit should simply equal the cost to provide a ride, a more serious discussion would recognize that moving people away from transit and into automobiles would have negative side effects. This suggests that we either tax the alternatives to transit — the automobile, primarily — at their full cost to society, or we do not have an economic rationale to eliminate subsidies to public transportation. There are few if, ands, or buts around that.

The second question — whether a situation without subsidies would be acceptable — is an ideological one. Levinson describes transit providers as “Transportation organizations first, not welfare organizations. They should be considered public utilities rather than departments of government, which provide a useful service for a price to their users.” Instead of forcing bus and rail operators to run services that are less-than-efficient from a profit-maximizing perspective, politicians should be forced to directly vote and choose to subsidize those services that they consider most important. “This would entirely change public and political perception of transit services,” Levinson writes. ”It might also result in fewer bad routes being funded, since it would be crystal clear where the subsidies lay.”

In my mind, this is an appealing solution in some ways, since it would take advantage of the democratic processes we already have to make what are important societal decisions about mobility. If people want better, subsidized transit services, they can vote in politicians who support such offerings in addition to the routes that are profitable.

On the other hand, isn’t that what we have done already? There is a constant battle over funding for transit, and it is because of political differences over whether and how much bus and rail routes should be subsidized. Our current situation — as topsy-turvy as it may be — is reflective of democratic conflict over transportation funding. What is the alternative? Removing transportation from the democratic sphere and simply providing those services that are directly profitable?

This would be disastrous, both for the reasons cited above by Jarrett Walker but also, and even more importantly, because the fundamental logic that underpins Levinson’s argument is flawed. While it might be nice to imagine a world in which every individual has the ability to act as a rational actor in a fair marketplace full of decisions that reflect efficiency and true costs, we do not inhabit it. Whether we like it or not, social inequality in American society has increased significantly over the past forty years, and poverty is a real problem.

Why bring up these issues? Because Levinson describes a situation in which everyone has the option to pay the true cost of transportation services, but in fact many do not. A more efficient approach to ensure that people make the most cost-effective decisions might be one in which everyone got a reasonable amount of money to begin with, but we do not live in a particularly redistribution-inclined society.

So we are left with alternatives along the sidelines. We can crusade for the elimination of transportation services that cannot pay for themselves and in the process eliminate essential mobility for people who need to get around now, all the while hoping that the poor will at some point be handed adequate funds to make economically sound decisions. Or we can recognize reality and admit that transit services are at their core not just transportation organizations but also welfare providers.

This may be a disappointing conclusion, since it provides no insight as to how the state of funding for transit could be improved, but it does suggest that there is no way of getting around the fact that subsidies will continue to be needed in the running of public transportation unless some future technological advance reduces operations costs dramatically. There are plenty of ways to improve the performance and cost effectiveness of transit systems, but we cannot ignore the fact that transit plays an important redistributionist role.

Update, 21 September: David Levinson responds, writing that “I expect that the places that would see service dropped once you went to an appropriate funding model are not the poor inner-city areas, which are (or ought to be with appropriate management/regulation/etc.) profitable given the relatively high densities, but instead the suburban routes.” The problem, in my mind, is that those suburban places are increasingly impoverished themselves. We can no longer associate density with poverty as we have in the past.

Detroit has staked its development hopes on the creation of a light rail line down Woodward Avenue in the heart of the city. For the past few years, public and private groups there have banded together to suggest that this project, more than any other, would provide the kind of spark necessary to spur economic growth in this city that is losing population so quickly. Thanks to government grants and private donations, the project is mostly financed and may enter construction this year.

Yet the city’s budget situation is so bad that the mayor has suggested that if the city council moves ahead with cuts it approved this week, he will have to shut off bus service at nights and on Sundays — and eliminate service on the People Mover, a semi-functional one-way automated rail loop. This is in a city where a third of people are impoverished.

Detroit’s example is only the most extreme of what is becoming a meme in the American transport discussion, that we continue to engage in the construction of expensive new projects even as we are incapable of paying for the appropriate service on and maintenance of the system we already have. Why is this? And how can we fight the pernicious effects of these policies?

Writing recently in Environment and Planning A, Sociologist Stephanie Farmer argues that the rise of neoliberal ideology in local and national politics has encouraged a “retreat from social redistribution and integrated social welfare policies in favor of bolstering business activity.”* This, she writes in reference to Chicago, has specifically affected public transportation, which “is increasingly deployed as a means to attract global capital as well as enhance affluent residents’ and tourists’ rights to the city.”

This trend, she states, stands in opposition to the mid-century “Fordist strategy of territorial redistribution mobilizing public transportation to enhance economically disadvantaged groups’ access to the city.”**

Farmer’s approach provides something of an explanation for Detroit’s experience: Rather than concentrate on the needs of its most impoverished denizens through the assurance of basic bus service, the city’s business and political elite has instead put its resources into the construction of a light rail line whose primary purpose is to stimulate economic development by creating “place-based advantages for capital.”

Similarly, Farmer is very critical of Chicago’s approach, arguing that that city’s investments have repeatedly favored “business elites over everyday users by excluding public transit investment in areas outside of Chicago’s global city downtown showcase zone.” Her evidence for this trend is primary in former Mayor Richard Daley’s obsession in constructing a premium-fare, limited-stop express rail link to the airport (including his willingness to construct a station for said service without providing the funds to actually operate the trains) and the transit authority’s Circle Line plan, which she argued would “effectively redraw [and expand] the downtown boundary,” with little benefit for the city’s most transit dependent.

The repeated delays in extending the Red Line south of 95th Street into some of Chicago’s least prosperous neighborhoods suggest that there is no political will to invest outside of the wealthiest areas.

Farmer’s argument is revealing of the one of the peculiarities of transit promotion: Those who engage in it simultaneously argue for the social welfare benefits of providing affordable mobility for as many people as possible while also suggesting that good public transportation can play an essential role in city-building — essentially for the elite. After all, one of the primary arguments made for investing in new transit capital projects is that their long-term benefits include raising the property values of the land parcels near stations.

This creates an uneasy pro-transit coalition in many places where development and real estate interests align their lobbying with that of representatives of the poor to argue for the construction of new transit lines (usually rail), under the assumption that projects will benefit each group.

This produces an identity crisis for transit. For whom is it developed? Can its social mobility goals be reconciled with the interests of capitalists in the urban space?

Identifying the value of a transportation project is an essential element of the planning process, so asking these questions is essential, since there are limited resources. When it comes to transit, this seems particularly relevant, since most funds invested in bus or rail projects are provided by the public sector.

Ultimately, this means that the promotion of almost every transit project is defined by political ideology. Do we invest our funds in a project to connect downtown with the airport, under the assumption that economic benefits will flow down from the top, as conservatives might suggest? Is spending government money on ensuring the efficient transportation of the elite effective because it grows the economy as a whole and eventually aids the poor? Or should public dollars be reserved for redistributive causes, focusing on the needs of those who are least able to provide for themselves?

Of course there are many examples in which these questions appear to have been resolved. Even in Chicago, it would be difficult to argue that the subway and elevated lines that run into to the Loop are unhelpful for the poor, since many of the city’s greatest resources even for the impoverished are located in Farmer’s “downtown showcase zone.” Nonetheless, ponder this question next time a transit project is proposed: For whom is it being built, and why?

* Farmer, Stephanie. “Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago.” Environment and Planning A. Volume 43. 2011. 1154-1172.

** I should note that in terms of transit, the Fordist conception of the use of public resources for the benefit of social redistribution itself replaced an entrepreneurial approach towards the provision of transportation. Many, though certainly not all, transit systems in the U.S. were funded and developed by private groups. Were these investments able to straddle the competing goals of expanded mobility and economic development?

» Are public transportation operations too much of a redistributive function to be funded by local governments?

Since 1998, Congress has banned the use of federal funds to pay for public transportation operations in communities of more than 200,000 people, effectively requiring transit agencies to pay for all of their salary, electricity, and fuel costs using local or state revenues. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has continued to sponsor a majority of costs for capital expenses, including the construction of expensive new fixed-guideway bus and rail lines.

This split in funding has resulted in a number of particularities in the American transportation system — during the recent recession, transit agencies actually received more money to pay for new construction programs from the federal government’s stimulus and steady transportation allocations, but less to sponsor services from fluctuating state and local revenue sources. This has produced a situation in which many cities are actively building new rail lines even as they’re cutting offerings on their bus operations.

Should Washington be asked to help find a way out?

Since last year, when the full effects of the recession were making themselves clear, some agencies have been clamoring for the federal government to take a bigger role in operations funding; they’ve argued that the stimulus would have little effect if they’re forced to fire drivers and technicians. Recently, several Democratic Senators have suggested promoting a two billion dollar emergency operations aid plan and several agencies have been asking for the flexibility to use capital funds for operations, though the American Public Transportation Association and several other agencies argue that this would limit their ability to adapt to changing fiscal conditions; they prefer their operations and capital budgets separate.

In the past, I’ve argued against federal aid for operations, suggesting that such policy would reduce local funding responsibility and ultimately diminish the ability of the U.S. government to fund investments in new corridor construction programs. Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff suggested last month that local agencies must find more local funding before the federal government will commit to sponsoring their expansion schemes.

Nonetheless, it may be worthwhile to consider the possibility of entirely reversing the current equation — what if the federal government paid for operations costs while local governments invested in new capacity?

Paul E. Peterson — the urban political theorist whose views on most issues I hardly share — nevertheless provides an interesting approach to considering this question. In his seminal 1981 book City Limits, Peterson addresses the issue of what role urban governments should have within the U.S. federal system. He argues relatively persuasively that cities and their leaders should have only a minor interest in promoting policies that are designed to move wealth from that city’s wealthiest residents to its poorest; “The local interest in economic growth all but precludes a commitment to redistribution,” he suggests (93). “Broad-scale redistributive policy proposals are inappropriately addressed to local governments. For example, if a city-wide minimum wage is passed, it will drive business outside the city’s boundaries. If good quality, subsidized housing is built with local funds, not only must it be paid for out of local tax dollars, but it might very well attract low-income families from other places” (173).

The suggestion is that cities cannot in their own budgets commit to politics that aid the poor; these policies generally have the tendency to encourage the wealthy to leave cities and the poor to stay, ultimately resulting in a declining tax base. Rather, Peterson argues, cities will produce more benefit by investing in developmental projects that increase attractiveness and expand the tax base. Obviously, all of these arguments must be understood with a grain of salt — they’re not all-encompassing, and cities are affected by trends outside of their own making. We also must assume that it is in a city’s primary political interest to want to increase its tax base.

Also, Peterson does not argue against redistribution entirely — City Limits does leave room for higher levels of government to be involved in funding services designed specifically for the poor — he simply points out that it is not in a city‘s long-term interest to use locally raised funds on the lower class. After all, the net migration in and out of a city can be quite significant (the city of Baltimore, just to take an example, has lost a third of its population since 1950), while the country as a whole, and its tax base, will mostly remain constant.

If we take these assumptions as more or less true, what implications do they have for public transportation? The answer comes down to both whether we define transit operations as a redistributive resource or as a developmental one and whether the tax base of a transit district is sufficiently broad as to be able to ensure long-term revenue sources from middle and high-income populations.

The first question — whether transit operations are redistributive or developmental — is not easy to answer. If a bus or rail system serves almost entirely as mobility of last resort, used only by people in the lower class to get around, it is almost assuredly redistributive. Cities that provide such services are, according to Peterson, investing in something that will ultimately lower the local tax base (I’m not sure if I would go that far, but the argument still makes some since). In these situations, it would make complete sense for the federal government to pay for operations, because it is unfair to burden already poor cities with the need to raise local funds to cover social services.

The more progressively oriented Washington’s political climate is, in other words, the more local transit operations would be subsidized. The question of how many services to provide comes down to how much we want to help the lower class.

On the other hand, if transit proponents are to suggest that bus and rail operations in themselves produce economic benefit — i.e., if you have more buses on the same line, you get an increase in economic activity — than there is an argument for local funding based on Peterson’s assumptions. If the transit system is used by a whole spectrum of the population and increases overall efficiency of the local economy, it isn’t really redistribution. In these cases, it seems highly advantageous for cities to invest local money in their day-to-day transit, even if it means taking out loans to do so.

But the other problem posed by Peterson’s arguments is where the money is coming from; the basis of the city “limits” relies on the idea that the wealthy can leave (presumably into the suburbs) if they feel overburdened by taxes to support the local poor. Yet if a transit district is large enough, this poses less of a problem. For example, if a district covers everyone in a metropolitan region and taxes them all, there is no problem with paying for redistributive transit services — assuming the taxes aren’t so high as to encourage people to leave the region entirely.

On the other hand, if that district fails to grow with an expanding population, it may lose its ability to perform these redistributive functions. Take Dallas as an example: Though the local DART agency includes a number of suburban jurisdictions within its tax base, it hasn’t expanded to encompass the region’s far exurbs, ultimately reducing its ability to maintain necessary budgetary growth. This means that it has less of a capacity to invest in essential transit services that don’t necessarily ensure long-term economic benefit.

Is a potential answer to ask Washington to pay for operations as cities and their metropolitan regions invest in new rail and bus capacity as a developmental tool? Perhaps: If cities investing in new public transportation projects can prove that that spending will increase their tax base over time, there may be advantages to taking out loans to pay for new projects and then paying them back using the corresponding increase in local tax revenues. On the other hand, because cities have a whole variety of circumstances, some places may be more capable of doing do than others; whereas a fast-growing metropolis like Phoenix may have no problem seeing immediate return in its capital investments, cities with falling populations like Detroit may not. In those situations, it should be the federal government’s role to step in, even on construction spending.

It may be in the federal government’s interest to provide adequate operations funds to ensure (or even require) a minimal level of transit services in every community of a certain size. That idea, however, requires federal intrusion into policy that is overwhelming affected by state and local decision-making; this could pose insurmountable obstacles to this concept. That said, it may be time for cities to take more responsibility for the funding of new transit capacity through capital construction. If these investments do produce a measurable return on investment — and that’s an argument made frequently by proponents of new light rail lines, for instance — then municipalities should have an economic interest in using local funds to pay for them.

Image above: New York City’s George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal, by Yonah Freemark

» Washington Metro considers charging customers more to use system’s most congested stations, increasing peak-hour commute costs.

Downtowns play a primary role in organizing the daily lives of millions of Americans. Despite increasing suburban sprawl and the more recent comeback of inner-city housing, downtowns remain the single largest work centers of virtually every U.S. metropolitan area.

In the biggest of those center cities, rail rapid transit plays a vital supporting role; by hauling in tens of thousands of people to a limited number of downtown stations every morning, these systems allow the creation of dense urban cores that would not be possible were everyone to rely on private automobiles. Just as importantly, most urban rail systems would make little sense if they didn’t serve highly attractive destinations; it’s not a coincidence that almost every American urban rail line reaches the job center of its respective region. Downtowns and rapid transit are mutually reinforcing.

Why make this seemingly obvious point? Because private interests and the public sector have spent the last century working together to build these jobs centers, and the congestion now experienced daily on major rapid transit systems from New York to San Francisco is not unexpected: It was planned.

There’s nothing sinister about this fact: From a social equity perspective, there are good reasons to concentrate employment growth downtown and there are positive effects of economic accumulation that result from dense downtown cores. But that clustering — in addition to the standardized work hours enforced by most employers — ensures that rail lines and especially their downtown stations are packed in the morning and full in the evening, only to be frequently empty at midday. It’s not a particularly efficient distribution of ridership, but it’s what happens when thousands of people are working in close quarters downtown.

Facing a tough budget year and little hope of significantly more money from local, state, or federal sources, the managers of Washington, D.C.’s Metro system are considering adding a 50¢ surcharge for customers using or passing through the network’s busiest stations in the center city during peak hours. It’s an approach that has been promoted by a coalition of transit advocates and smart growth proponents who argue that some combination of additional fees would aid in the budget crisis, affect mostly wealthy riders, and reduce congestion by encouraging people to go to work during off-peak hours.

Similar schemes have been proposed over the years for a number of American transit agencies suffering from congestion at downtown stations.

Washington’s Metro already charges varying fares based on distance and hour traveled; a trip between suburban Bethesda and Union Station, for instance, varies between $3.00 at peak times and $1.95 other times. Metro requires customers to pay more for the train than the bus, likely resulting at least partially in the very different demographics of the city’s rail and bus systems. This is quite different from New York’s Subway and city buses, for instance, which charge a single, set fare at all times and for any journey, no matter the distance.

The “congested core” surcharge now under study for implementation for Washington could go into effect at the “peak-of-the-peak,” between 7:30 and 9:00 AM, and between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, when Metro is packed with riders. The mode of implementation has not yet been determined — nor has the funding device been approved at all — so I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of specifics.

Though this fee would likely reduce congestion at some stations and perhaps induce several thousand employees to change their work hours, its primary effect will be simply increasing the fares of most system users. This would provide immediate financial benefits to the cash-strapped transit agency, but it seems unlikely to solve long-term capacity problems with the Washington Metro or substantially increase the number of off-peak commuters. Most people, it turns out, still need to get home to their families at a reasonable hour, which means that most people will choose to pay the extra fare instead of changing their work schedules.

Thus the fee won’t reduce congestion dramatically — especially since the system continues to see ridership growth.

But more fundamentally, one should ask whether it makes sense for a transit system to charge extra for exactly the service it is supposed to provide best: journeys to and from the downtown core at peak hours. Should the District of Columbia push for years to increase the number of office jobs downtown if it decides to reverse the game later on and disincentivize the use of the region’s primary transit service to get there? Why penalize the people who are using the system in exactly the way that the system was designed to work?

Unlike automobile congestion zones, which are meant to increase the number of people using public transportation and other alternatives to driving (and, in turn, encourage the further densification of core land use), a transit congestion zone serves the opposite role. By increasing the cost of getting downtown by train, it degrades the value of the transit system’s primary use, which is to get from the outskirts to downtown during rush hour. It encourages car use and the build-up of areas outside of the core instead of within it.

Washington’s proposed fee is relatively minor and its global effects would be minimal, but there remains a conceptual gap between the idea of charging more to use center-city stations and the way in which American cities are currently designed. If we’re going to continue the concentration of center-city offices, we need to provide transit that reinforces it, not that works against it. Transit systems play an essential part in organizing regional developmental geography; their fare policies must reflect broader land use goals, not defeat them.

» Residents fear light rail would cause accidents, gentrification, and displacement. Can any transportation project be so influential?

Like many sunbelt cities, Houston is rushing to build a transit system that can provide an alternative to the congestion caused by a population that has exploded by more than a million people over the past forty years. Now with about 2.3 million inhabitants, the city has developed a five-line light rail plan that would extend rapid transit across the densest areas of the metropolis. Though fiscal difficulties may result in a delay in the construction of two of the planned corridors, most of the project is expected to advance as planned, with new lines opening beginning in 2012.

Houston’s first modern rail operation — along Main Street from downtown to the stadium complex — opened in 2004 and has been a roaring success, attracting more riders than initially foreseen.

Yet any plan as ambitious as this will encounter controversy, so the news that some residents along the proposed Southeast Corridor are protesting the project isn’t particularly surprising. But are the concerns expressed by community members affected by the line’s construction worth considering? Can city officials make the planning process more democratic with the aim of ensuring a sense of local incorporation, even while advancing a program whose aims are more about long-term, citywide goals?

The six-mile Southeast line will extend the light rail system from downtown to Palm Center, along Scott Street, Wheeler Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, reaching the University of Houston, MacGregor Park, and an area of the city whose population is predominantly poor and black. Eleven stations will stop in zones that have low to moderate residential densities and relatively little retail. A rail corridor could project a new vitality into the area — or it might have little influence on the community’s look.

Not yet sure of the eventual outcome, however, some residents have been vocal in expressing their concerns that the new light rail line — which will operate primary in the median of relatively wide streets — will put in danger the neighborhood’s existing conditions by endangering pedestrians and transforming the low-rise community into a medium or high-rise one.

The specter of out-of-control light rail trains mowing down seniors and children is, frankly, an absurd one: trains don’t travel any faster than do cars, and unlike automobiles, trains stay in their travel lanes. Yet people from Houston to Los Angeles to the Washington suburbs are convinced that the sheer unfamiliarity of the trains will make them a danger. Meanwhile, the average fifty Houston pedestrians who die every year after being run over by drivers doesn’t seem to elicit much soul-searching; no one is talking about shutting down the major arterials of Southeast Houston to cars.

But the worry about neighborhood change is a legitimate one: one of the very explicit goals of the new light rail system is to increase density along affected corridors and to encourage a change in the landscape of Southeast Houston, much of which today is hardly different than your average sprawling suburban neighborhood. And indeed, the fear that improved transit can produce negative mutations is shared between communities both rich, often convinced that criminals will ride trains into wealthy neighborhoods, and poor, anxious that rail will bring in developers who will search to kick the impoverished out of their homes.

Transit isn’t as powerful as either its proponents or opponents would suggest: it won’t instantly result in a radically morphed neighborhood, for the better or worse. The by-products often attributed to new rail systems are usually the consequence of a series of decisions and investments, not just those related to transportation. In other words, it’s not really the light rail trains themselves residents of Southeast Houston should be afraid of, but rather the way in which that light rail system is used to shape the growth of an area. The inhabitants of the neighborhood certainly won’t suffer from better transit access!

Municipal governments have a powerful say in arbitrating the use of improved public transportation to spur development. If local authorities choose to concentrate growth in specific parcels near stations, they can provide incentives to build bigger there, or ban new housing or commercial outlets from areas outside of those zones. On the other hand, some governments do very little, choosing not to up-zone land around stations and allowing low-density sprawl to remain the name of the game.

For the sake of increasing ridership and the development of walkable urbanism, there are clear advantages in promoting the former: higher-density neighborhoods at transit stops.

But residents of affected neighborhoods don’t necessarily want to see that kind of environment: many people live in Southeast Houston because of how it looks, not because they’re looking to see it evolve into a district of four-or-five story structures. That kind of neighborhood change is exactly what the people who are protesting are trying to prevent.

The City of Houston, like any place developing improved transit, has a responsibility to encourage expanded democratic involvement in determining how the neighborhood can or should transform. Houston has set up a community office near the terminus of the proposed line at Palm Center, a former shopping strip, and this is a good first step. But the city should be engaging in an open dialogue with willing community members about which parcels to improve and which to keep as they are. The transit line is only the first stage in what must be a permanent back-and-forth about how to make the neighborhood a better place.

Encouraging this kind of civic discussion will reduce uninformed criticism of light rail as well as ensure that new housing and commercial developments along the line are scaled appropriately in an attempt to meet local desires. There is no perfect way to go about doing this, but making an effort could certainly expand popular support for the project and potentially even improve it.

Image above: Rendering of Houston’s Southeast Light Rail Corridor along Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, from Metro

A new Brookings Institution report by Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr puts in dramatic clarity the rise of suburban poverty in the United States. Not only do a plurality of impoverished Americans now live in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas — 1.5 million more than in their respective central cities — but in many regions, central city poverty fell in the period between 2000 and 2008, even as it rose in the surrounding suburbs.

In the time period studied, 5.2 million more individuals descended into poverty, which in 2008 included 13.2% of the population — before the most recent recession and its devastating economic effects.

In most regions described by the study, which documented changes in the nation’s 95 largest metropolitan areas, poverty rates in suburbs and central cities mirrored one another — and overall growth statistics roughly replicated trends we’ve been seeing for years. Central city poverty rates were nearly twice as high as those in the suburbs, 18.2% versus 9.5%. Meanwhile, suburbs grew by 12.5% overall, compared to urban cores, which grew only by 3.9%. The nation suffers from growing economic inequality: more than 30% of the population fell below 200% of the poverty line by 2008. The situation has undoubtedly grown worse over the past year.

But poverty is clearly shifting outwards: the number of people living in poverty grew by 25% overall in the suburbs, compared to only 5.6% in central cities. In eighteen of the 95 metropolitan areas studied, inner-city poverty decreased or remained the same even as suburban poverty increased or remained the same. This was true of Northeast U.S. regions as a whole. The old assumptions about American cities being home to the poor and their suburbs housing the wealthy are quickly falling by the wayside.

I wrote about Paris’ investment in its suburban transit capacity on Tuesday to show how regional officials have prioritized improving public transportation in areas outside of the inner city. The French example — spurred by abundant transit within the city of Paris but insufficient services virtually everywhere else in the Île-de-France region, despite high densities and elevated social needs — may be increasingly relevant for the U.S.

I mentioned Boston, San Francisco, and Washington as three places that could benefit from expanded investments across the suburbs, and indeed, all three feature decreasing poverty rates in the urban core and increasing rates in the suburbs, as noted in the table below. Each has an old, relatively small central city and a focused transit system, fast-regenerating urban cores, in addition to a number of built-up, somewhat dense suburbs. (Note, however, that “suburbs” like Cambridge, Oakland, and Arlington are considered “central cities” by the Brookings report.) The same could be said for Baltimore, New York, Providence, and St. Louis, each of which are experiencing similar trends.

In these regions, the socio-spatial geography of a gentrifying core with less-wealthy surroundings stereotyped by Paris is coming closer to reality — though of course there is still plenty of poverty in American inner-cities. Thus far, few metropolitan areas have responded adequately to the transportation concerns that will progressively manifest themselves; while central-city-oriented transit networks are promoted vigorously, the concerns of suburbs are sidelined (including by this site). This condition seems unlikely to improve, with few metropolitan areas actually planning as a region, unlike Paris, where transportation planning and financing is conducted from the regional level.

There are major differences between the U.S. and France: American suburbs are incredibly sprawled-out, which means that high-quality, high-capacity transit would be both inefficient and inappropriate in most places. Indeed, U.S. poverty can increasingly be defined as a car-dependent one — which means that expecting to address transportation needs of the least well-off in the suburbs through better public transportation will be a failure in the short-term. This also means, unfortunately, that policies that increase costs of driving will fall directly on a large number of the working poor.

The development of a more equitable and sustainable transportation system demands an intense effort to densify and pedestrianize the same suburbs that are rapidly becoming economically diverse. We cannot continue allowing — and often subsidizing — people to live in isolated cul-de-sac neighborhoods completely inaccessible to anything by anything but a private automobiles. We must construct new town centers in suburban communities with essential services and mixed-income housing accessible via transit to urban cores. The current trends, enforced by local, state, and national planning decisions, are producing a lower class that spends far too much on private transportation.

It’s a reckless course barreling straight towards increasing inequality.

The most stormy period of the recession may have passed us by, but states and cities continue to face the devastating consequences of the millions of jobs lost over the past two years. Unlike the national government, which is able to maintain a budgetary deficit, lower-level governments in the U.S. federal system have a legal requirement to produce a balanced budget each year — a difficult task to fulfill when raising taxes is political suicide even as citizens expect a minimum standard of minimum public service.

As falling tax returns have become standard, that’s bad news. It’s especially troubling for transit systems in California, which may face a collective $1 billion cut in support if Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gets his way on the state’s next budget.

California’s legislators faced down a massive budget deficit earlier this year, closing a gap of $43 billion in February and $26 billion more in July only by cutting aid to schools, health care institutions, and prisons. For next year, it has another $21 billion for which to account, and there are fewer and fewer places from which to skim the fat.

The Governor is expected to argue that the state’s commitment to mass transit ought to be one such casualty when he announces his proposed budget early next year. His plan would transfer about $1 billion in annual funds currently devoted to public transportation operations to other essential services, basically leaving local transit agencies to fully sponsor their own services. The gap would have an immediately destructive effect: Los Angeles’ Metro transit agency, for instance, has come to rely on $50-100 million in yearly state appropriations. This is compared to the system’s roughly $3.8 billion budget for FY 2010; in other words, this is no minor loss, and the same principle applies to the state’s other bus and train networks.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has been fighting to reduce funding for transit agencies for years, despite his claims to be a “green” politician at the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference. Since 2007, he has led the state legislature in redistributing transit money towards other programs, though that effort was declared unlawful by the State Supreme Court in June, leading to the repayment of $3 billion in missing tax revenues to needy transit systems.

Another such transfer would be similarly against the law, so the Governor has invented what his staff sees as a novel policy to get around the issue: get rid of the source of the problem. Mr. Schwarzenegger would simply eliminate 5¢ of the state’s sales tax currently pointed towards transit programs and replace it with a new excise tax of an equal sum designed to go to the general fund. Protections for highway spending, of course, would remain entirely in place. The Governor plans to ask Washington for aid, but no support has yet materialized. Offshore oil digging is an additional element of the plan.

Whether the Governor will get his way in his last year of office is up for question — particularly since he currently has a 27% approval rating. Yet the legislature will have to find spending cuts somewhere, since the assembly’s Democratic majority isn’t large enough to vote for increased taxes that would be necessary to prevent any service reductions. California’s constitution makes it very difficult for the legislature to agree to new sources of revenue.

The proposal would strike at the heart of the state’s transit systems after a difficult year. Generally poor economic conditions resulted in an overall decline in ridership nationwide of 3.8% in the first nine months of the year, according to the American Public Transportation Association. That statistic will not improve if transit agencies continue to make service cuts as a result of fewer revenues — before the state cuts spending any further. Already planned for next year: AC Transit in Oakland will reduce operations by 8%, San Francisco’s Muni will increase fares, San Jose VTA will delay the purchase of dozens of buses, and San Diego will cut more than half its services on Sundays. This is no easy time for the state to reduce aid.

Last Christmas, I wrote of the need to use transit as a tool to encourage social justice, and I maintain that public transportation must fulfill a role beyond that of simply increasing “mobility.” Reducing public transportation service is an outrageous idea when driving is simply too expensive for a large percentage of the population, as the environmental consequences of carbon emissions mount, when the lives of our cities demand alternatives to the automobile.

California’s predicament is no easy one: it could maintain state financing for transit, but it would have to reduce spending somewhere else, probably just as important. The state’s politicians have a responsibility to their constituents: to be courageous enough to fight for increased taxes to pay for the vital needs of their communities. That may require altering the constitution, or it may necessitate convincing a few Republicans of the need to augment revenues. Either way, something must be done; a cutback in services is no way to celebrate the new year.

One of the primary roles of mass transit is to assure mobility for all; by offering transportation at a reasonable price, accessible to everyone, buses and trains serve as a redistributive tool and reduce inequalities in our society. But politics and economics make the goal of universal mobility something less than a reality. Though a $2 subway ride may be cheap enough for most, there is no doubt that even the smallest savings in transportation expenses can improve the quality of life of the poorest individuals.

Consider how the transit systems in five cities — two in Europe and three in the United States — discount their transit fares for the benefit of people who cannot easily pay full charge:

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The chart demonstrates that while these three U.S. transit systems provide advantageous fares to children, the elderly, and the disabled, they largely ignore the needs of impoverished adults. On the other hand, London and Paris provide generous discounts for university students, people in poverty, and the unemployed. In addition, London provides free passes for veterans and their dependents, while Paris offers relief for families with large numbers of children. In both cities’ cases, significant subsidies are provided to the transit operators by local and national governments to make up for lost revenue as a result of these discounts.

It would be difficult to argue that transportation should be reserved for only those who can afford it, and therefore fare schemes that incorporate the needs of the poorest are necessary. Not only should we be pushing vigorously for more transit, but we should be asking for cheaper transit, at least for those without good-paying jobs.

To those who suggest that providing free or cheaper rides to the destitute would result in the permanent occupation of our transportation networks by the uncouth, look only to these two European cities for evidence to the contrary. To those who argue that able-bodied adults have a responsibility to find the funds to pay for their transportation, I suggest that our country doesn’t provide as many opportunities as we often claim it does. Even those who work minimum-wage jobs — consenting to our government’s rabid mission to get people off welfare — spend too much of their limited incomes paying to get around.

In this time of mass unemployment and reduced incomes all around, we must work to reduce fares for people who cannot always afford the mobility options transit offers.

A society is only as strong as are its least fortunate.

We typically don’t spend time on this blog defending transit, because we assume that our readers are for the most part on “our side.” And yet today, we should remember that transit is tool for social justice.

Transit is a great equalizer. Because our buses and trains are subsidized, public transportation provides for the mobility of people of all classes. Without mass transit, millions of people in the United States wouldn’t be able to get much of anywhere. Low fares ensure that free movement remains more of right than a privilege; they ensure that getting around isn’t an activity reserved only for the rich and middle class.

In the name of this deepening recession, the MTA in New York City begins discussing $3 base fares and transit systems across the country start cutting service. Shall we allow the dark face of the market economy to intrude upon the benefits that transit provides?

This is not to say that efficient management and financial prudence isn’t a priority. But on Christmas, we must remember the role transit plays in providing for a more just society. In this case charity isn’t necessary – just remember to pay your taxes.