“Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
I don’t know about you, but I am getting tired of public transit in the United States having to depend on the kindness of strangers. Right now, the strangers who have moved the price of gasoline to $4 a gallon have been very kind to transit, or so it would seem. Did you ever think you would see that many news articles and television spots devoted to the virtues of public transit as we have seen this year? But this season’s combined high-water mark for gas prices, ridership and media attention is already receding. It’s dropped $.25 a gallon since I started this piece! Where it will be by publication date, I do not know. Many in our business think this time is different: that politicians, the public, governments and public interest groups are now firmly behind public transit as a major tool in the battle against foreign oil dependency and high prices. But are they right?
If you’ve been around long enough – about 35 years – you have experienced this several times before. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 started it all. Gasoline went from $.38 a gallon to – hold on to your seats – $.55 a gallon in less than a year. Then there was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 followed by the Iraq-Iran war, and gas prices spiked again. The war went on for eight years, but from a gasoline-price perspective, things settled down quickly. Transit got another six months of fame when the Kuwaiti invasion by Iraq brought on the first Gulf War in 1990. Gas prices held steady and then dropped during the 90s, and then came the 21st century with the 9/11 attacks, and new wars in the land of OPEC. That pretty much brings us to 2008 where we have had the unprecedented run-up to four bucks a gallon, about 10 times the price of gasoline when the modern era of temporary, but repetitive, media infatuation with public transit began.
It has been nice to be discovered again. And, if you are in the younger half of our industry, maybe your life’s work is being discovered for the first time. We cannot afford not to take advantage of this round of attention. But more than likely, the economy will once again adjust to the new level of energy costs. The emerging decrease or slowdown in the increase of demand will knock the price down a bit, and pretty soon the news articles and television talking heads will forget about public transit until the next time.
As I mentioned, there’s a lot of buzz in the business that this time was different. This time, there was a tipping point. Transit will hold onto those new riders. Ballot issues supportive of transit will appear and be passed. I hope the buzz is right, but must we continue to depend on the kindness of strangers to justify the proper increase in transit investment? Especially when those strangers tend to come in the guise of war, violence and hostile economic strategies aimed at this country?
We have our national and regional associations, lobbying and advocacy groups and our “support groups” from the business side of the business all working to capitalize on the cost of gas. There’s been progress in linking improved transit as a way to reduce the contribution of the transportation sector to climate change and air pollution. We have major trends emerging on sustainable development and a return to city centers for living, working and playing. We have aging baby boomers who will be demanding full mobility, even when they can no longer drive a car. We have a growing weariness with street and highway congestion, which so far is only slightly affected by the price of fuel. So we’ve turned the corner, right? Increased support for transit will be first and foremost on every voters’ mind when they cast their ballot this November, right? Well, not quite.
Transit services are undeniably more popular than a year ago, whether provided by a bus, a rail car or a vanpool 15-seater. But we are also seeing service cutbacks by a large number of providers. Kindness has its limits, and public transit operators are scrambling just as hard as Joe and Judy Six-pack to pay for diesel, natural gas and electricity. At the moment of our highest post-WW II popularity, a lot of us are in retreat. We’re raising fares, eliminating routes and hours of service, and shrinking our coverage area.
Elected officials and citizens in suburbs who want expanded service for the first time in their lives are told there are no extra buses to expand service. And if the transit system can find an extra bus or two, the suburban mayors and wannabe bus riders cannot comprehend that a full bus does not translate into a profit for the bus company! Transit staff, once again, is spending time trying to explain the concept of the farebox operating ratio, and trying to find an audience for the tale of the auto subsidy.
If public transit is ever going to control its own destiny in this country, the industry has to go on a sustained initiative like it has never has before. It helps to be on the right side of a pocketbook issue like gas prices, but we should not let the roller-coaster gas price ride keep us from positioning transit where it should be in local, regional, state and national funding debates. Every manager, every board member, every transit advocate needs to seize the argument about the amount of transit investment in his or her region and in the nation and reshape that argument. It doesn’t matter what the price of gas is. Our cities and citizens need and deserve a higher level of public transit. It doesn’t matter what the current thinking is regarding climate change. Our cities and citizens need and deserve a higher level of public transit.
Did we get to this point of such a huge modal imbalance by listening to the highway lobby tell us that highways were needed to save the planet? No, it just became part of the national conventional wisdom that more streets and highways equaled more economic development, more satisfaction with where we lived and worked more efficiently. In the first part of the twentieth century, states and cities indicated their progress toward civilization by showing how many miles of unpaved roads were remaining. It was accepted that a region could not really call itself civilized unless all the roads were paved. Then we moved the needle to a higher level, the planning and implementation of the Interstate highway system. We need an equivalent goal for transit, whether that is percent of population within walking distance of a bus or rail line, service hours per capita, or just plain old Levels of Transit Service A,B,C,D,E or F, that we define and award to each metropolitan area.
It is time we show there is a new conventional wisdom. We need to go further than just asking for an increase in the budget allotment, national and local. We need a plan, including detailed funding needs, and we then need to get that plan into the collective wisdom and say, “This is where we are going.” And if some strangers help us out along the way, that will be just fine.
Keith Jones is a regional transit planning manager for URS Inc.
