Time to reinvent mass transit, but how?

Ridership slumped during COVID, and the changing work/life patterns left in its wake requires creative solutions to revive demand.

I’ve lived and worked in cities most of my adult life: New York, Cincinnati, Chicago, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. Each had a mass transit system that allowed me to commute to work, and, in all but Cincinnati, shop, dine out, attend entertainment venues and visit friends.

I’ve crammed onto trains whose arrival times could be predicted with the accuracy of a Swiss watch (Tokyo in the 1990s). I’ve sweltered in stalled cars in a system that teetered on the brink of physical and fiscal collapse (New York in the early 1980s).

I’ve waited for buses while staring anxiously at the irrelevant schedule posted at the stop (Cincinnati in the 1970s). And I’ve lived long enough to see the day when I could check my bus’s arrival time on an app so I never have to wait more than a minute in the freezing cold (Chicago in the past decade).

But in more than five decades of riding trains and buses, I’ve never seen a time when I could board either at rush hour and find, not just a vacant seat, but a half-empty car. That is, until now. Mass transit ridership collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic, falling by more than 80% between that year’s Christmas season its nadir four months later.

And while it has crept back slowly, over the past six months it has remained fairly steady at about 70% of pre-COVID ridership. Work patterns have changed, perhaps permanently. White collar employees, having experienced working at home, appear unwilling to give that up. Employers are going along by establishing two- and three-day in-office requirements. Some have resorted to giving bonuses to people who return to the office.

It is changing the shape of cities. People are demanding larger living spaces to accommodate home offices. Major retail spaces are standing vacant as online shopping displaces visits to department stores and shopping malls. Residential streets, both urban and suburban, are crowded with parcel and food delivery trucks.

Real estate developers are responding by turning half-empty office towers into residential apartments. Chicago is planning to convert the Loop’s LaSalle Street, once the financial center of the city, into a mixed-use residential and commercial corridor by converting three office towers into 1,000 housing units, a third of which will be reserved for low- and moderate-income residents.

The home office revolution is also changing the nature of travel demand. People are more likely to run off in the middle of the day to shop or run errands, even while nominally “at work.” Very often, that means traveling by car since parking, even in most large cities, is ubiquitous and often attached to the commercial enterprise. Sometimes it leads to taking a cab, easily hailed by smartphone.

The impact of changing travel patterns

The result is that with the return to full employment, urban highways and streets are more crowded than ever. Rush hour-style traffic jams extend throughout the day, often in both directions. Local streets are jammed with people in cars, either owned or hailed.

This is disastrous on many fronts, especially when it comes to the nation’s health. First, staying home to stare at a computer screen all day reduces the amount of walking in daily routines. This will exacerbate the obesity epidemic with all its deadly consequences.

Second, replacing bus or train trips with local car trips worsens global warming. Most cars and buses will remain gasoline-powered for the next decade. A full bus, even one diesel-powered, emits just one-sixth the amount of greenhouse gases per passenger mile compared to an individual riding in a car. Even when the fume-spewing diesel bus is carrying just 15 passengers, it is “greener” than an individual driving their car to a strip mall.

There are also equity concerns if mass transit remains in its shrunken state. People living in low-income communities, who are disproportionately minority, are more dependent on mass transit to get to work and to shop since they are less likely to own their own cars, or, they can’t afford to use them for their daily commute. A 2016 Pew Research Center study found 23 percent of African-Americans and 15 percent of Latinos use public transit, compared to just 7 percent of white people. Post-pandemic, those ratios are probably higher since lower income people are more likely to work at service and construction jobs that require being on site.

That’s why most transit agencies, especially in big cities, have always retained low-volume routes and service schedules through low-income neighborhoods, even after they have lost population. It is a necessary social service, not something that can be driven purely by marketplace demand.

But the subsidies to maintain that level of service, which increased dramatically during the pandemic emergency, are coming to an end. Fare box revenue, which has never covered costs in the seven-plus decades since local governments took over bankrupt private train and bus systems, remains depressed. A recent American Public Transportation Association survey of its membership found over half of the nation’s transit agencies will face a “fiscal cliff” within the next five years, with 71% of large systems predicting shortfalls of 10 to 30 percent of their total operating budgets.

The funding shortfall could undermine the Biden administration’s plans to jumpstart converting the nation’s transit bus fleet to full electrification over the next several decades, a must if it is to accomplish its environmental and public health goals. (Diesel-driven big trucks and buses generate more greenhouse gases and particulate matter than passenger cars.) The bipartisan infrastructure bill earmarked $7.5 billion over the next five years to transit bus electrification. The $409 million awarded in the first round covered just one-fifth of the projects submitted by transit agencies across the nation.

Most of those grants require local supplementation by state and local governments. Winning local taxpayer support for more rapid investment will be much more challenging if demand for the service remains at 70% of pre-pandemic levels.

Thinking outside the box

That’s why transit planners inside and outside the agencies need to closely study the changing nature of travel and deal with existing roadblocks to more people using mass transit. They need to generate creative solutions for not just restoring demand, but increasing it beyond pre-pandemic levels. That means making transit cheaper, faster than car travel, ubiquitous and easier to use.

I admit I’m a transit buff. When I attended journalism graduate school in the early 1980s, I did my masters thesis (in essence, a long magazine article) on what turned out to be a successful plan to refurbish New York’s subway system.

Why my ongoing interest? Beyond the obvious environmental and public health benefits from encouraging train travel and electrifying the nation’s bus fleet (half of all mass transit trips are by bus), I believe public transportation serves an important social purpose. It brings people from diverse economic and social backgrounds together in a common activity. The heavy foot traffic at major stops rejuvenates neighborhoods and supports local businesses. An effective transit system promotes housing density, which will help alleviate the nation’s housing shortage.

I don’t pretend to have a laundry list of solutions for creating a mass transit system that is cheaper, faster, more ubiquitous and easier to use. Clearly, there is no one size fits all prescription. Nearly 60 percent of the nation’s 2,200-plus transit agencies are rural; small cities offer infrequent service; the social problems plaguing systems in many large urban areas — crime; trains and buses serving as a homeless refuge; stations overrun by people with mental health and substance abuse issues — will remain top of mind for officials at those agencies, even as they contemplate how to better serve their changing communities.

However, the problems in every area will be more easily solved when there is increased demand for the service. Systems need to do a better job in marketing mass transit.

Like health care, most people pay for transit on a fee-for-service basis. Take a ride, pay a fare. Take another ride, pay another fare. Why not greater promotion of monthly or annual passes with bigger discounts from the standard cost of a daily commute? Why not allowing riders to roll over any unused portion of a monthly pass (vacation, sickness, work-at-home) into the following month? Why not use income-based pricing for passes, just as most areas already provide discounts for senior citizens?

On the infrastructure side, why not dedicate lanes for buses on urban thoroughfares? Why not build more dedicated bus lanes on interstates and limited access highways, especially those that reach airports and employment hubs?

Minnesota this past spring received a federal grant to cover nearly half the cost of a half billion dollar dedicated express bus lane with 12 stops that covers the dozen miles of I-94 between suburban Woodbury and downtown St. Paul. That’s far less expensive than light rail, and in the coming era of bus electrification, just as green.

Transit planners need to abandon the mindset that all bus routes must traverse major streets and connect population-dense areas with job-dense downtowns. Urban and suburban neighborhoods could begin deploying electric buses that are smaller and circulate more frequently along routes that link the major streets of sprawling suburbs with the area’s regional shopping malls and office complexes.

The additional operating cost of hiring more drivers to accommodate the frequency needed to make such a service successful will be offset, at least in part, by the reduced cost of smaller buses. Moreover, relying on circulating buses allows communities to shift routes and frequencies as living, working and shopping patterns evolve.

I’m no transit planner and I haven’t dedicated my reporting career to thinking about its issues. But from what I’ve read and seen, there is clearly a bias among planners to prefer rail to buses, and to see the issues bedeviling mass transit through an urban lens.

As a frequent user of mass transit in my own large city, I believe that mindset needs to change. Our patterns of work and shopping have changed. The electrification of buses and app-ification of payment and access (smart phones allow one to know exactly when it is coming) has made mass transportation potentially more convenient than ever.

Yet the funding allocation in the bipartisan infrastructure bill reflected the priorities of the passing era. Of the $284 billion dedicated to transportation, $110 billion went to rebuilding and expand roads and bridges; $66 billion went to rebuilding the nation’s rail networks; and just $47 billion went to transit agencies, which included the $7.5 billion for bus electrification.

Clearly, transit planners will need to be very creative with its thin slice of the pie if they’re going to make any progress in reviving the nation’s ailing mass transit systems.