Within months after obtaining my Master’s Degree in Urban & Regional Planning, I know how hopelessly incompetent those in charge of public transit can be, and often are. In my first consulting job, spending a full year helping the Illinois Department of Transportation’s newly-appointed director of policy and planning to develop a document explaining what his 21-person staff actually did, I learned that within 10 years of the State’s construction of a freeway system (such that no Illinois resident would live more than 15 miles from a major freeway) the State did not have the funds to maintain it. And this was only 1976 – barely two decades after President Eisenhower triggered the construction of a 49,500-mile-long network of Federal highways (known as the Defense Highway Act of 1956).
At the same time, along with Missouri, the State of Illinois triggered the construction of Mid-America Airport (about 30 miles east of St. Louis), allegedly a “transfer airport” to relieve the overcrowding of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, among the nation’s most heavily used airport, and the one with the greatest number of transfers. Mid America is actually open, and functioning today – but performing only a tiny fraction of the tasks its multi-billion-dollar budget was designed for.
Before my year as a consultant to IDOT was finished, I knew I could not remain in this field much longer – at least at the planning level. This was because planning rarely entered the decision to do anything in public transportation. Instead, virtually every decision was made by elected officials at some level, often at multi-levels. Among the other sins of IDOT at the time, former President Jimmy Carter made a deal with IDOT’ director, Langhorne Bond: If IDOT supported the construction of Chicago’s crosstown expressway (to which most Illinois residents were opposed), Chicago Mayor Richard Daley would be the first to nominate Mr. Carter as the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate – a stunt for which Mr. Bond (whose southern family went back a couple hundred years with the Carter family). This stunt worked, and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter (a self-proclaimed “nucular” engineer) became President.
Apart from triggering Iran’s capturing, Carter betrayed his promise to make Langhorne Bond the Secretary of USDOT, and instead appointed him as the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – a position he held until a commercial flight from DCA Airport (renamed Reagan International Airport) when it added a few flights to Canada) crashed into the 14th Street bridge during take-off. As one of his most notable achievements, President Carter made a speech, in Iran, in 1978, justifying our CIA’s assassination of its leader in 1953 and his replacement with the Shah — a speech that so angered the Iranian people that a mob of college students took 66 employees at the American Embassy hostage in 1979 (soon releasing 12 of them), which led to the election of President Reagan. The Republicans have IDOT to thank for this.
Backbones and Sieves
While planes and trains tend to capture one’s imagination, the three backbones of the U.S. passenger transportation system are its highway and street network, a fleet of half a million schoolbuses, and most cities’ fleets of transit buses – the last a dying ember that could soon disappear in many places.
One recent episode of crass political stupidity shared by still-incumbent New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams (still in power because of President Trump’s granting him immunity from prosecution related to some nasty criminal charges) was the introduction of congestion pricing – about which I wrote for National Bus Trader in its October, 2022 issue. That article justified this concept in a few dozen medium-sized cities, at most, but it bestowed cruel and unusual punishment to travelers to Midtown and Lower Manhattan (especially for the working class poor) who already experience $50 to $80/day parking fees and $16/day round trip bridge or tunnel fees for driving into the City.
Some of this thinking reflects the fact that 48 percent of the City’s bus riders do not pay fares (see https://transalt.com/article/the-further-collapse-of-fixed-route-transit/ ) Piling another tax on motorists was much easier than enforcing “turnstile jumpers” (or whatever the term may be for bus riders who either board via the rear door (where no fare collection equipment lies) or who simply board at the front door and walk right past the driver and his or her modesty panel and Plexiglas gate.
Such problems are clearly solvable: Many transit buses shipped to African countries overwhelmed by poverty and the desperation (that drives a small percentage to commit street crimes) require boarding at the rear door – and their fares are collected by a “cashier” positioned inside a floor-to-ceiling box of thick steel mesh designed to keep him or her from being stabbed in order to steal the moderate bounty tossed into some canister serving as a fare box. The idea-proof intelligentsia that is America’s transit community would never think of such a thing, but instead, would simply pose an additional tax (and to many commuters, a steep tax) to travel into the city seated in their mix of expensive foreign cars, limousines or jalopies. The notion of actually enlisting a small army of law enforcement officers (perhaps accompanied menacing attack dogs and/or a tiny cannister of pepper spray) to arrest and either fine or imprison the cheaters is even more out of the question.
This notion violates the cardinal principle of the unwritten U.S. Jobs Elimination Program, a program I believe began shortly after the energy crisis of 1973 (as gasoline prices jumped, thanks to OPEC, from roughly $3.00 a gallon to nearly $12.00), when gas stations (most owned by a handful of existing or long-gone oligopolies like Sunoco, Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, Shell, British Petroleum, ConocoPhillips and PetroChina, and their forerunners such as Amoco, Gulf, Union 76) employed millions of professionals – many of whom performed maintenance, and all of whom looked “under the hood” (either upon request or automatically) to help protect the motorists’ engines and transmissions and steering and brake systems).
Within a few years, these millions joined the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed, as all but two states eliminated them altogether. The two exceptions – New Jersey and Oregon – still employ pump jockeys today (although few look “under the hood”).
Regardless, the District of Columbia recently experienced a wave of turnstile jumpers. While the percentage of riders doing this was not nearly as high as in New York City, the District (which, by the way, had the nation’s second-highest percentage of operating costs covered by fares in 2018) simply arrested the perpetrators.
But sustaining a crooked mayor is only a starting point. Lest one think that our nation is completely polarized, it is fair to point out that the one exception is our corruption. If President Trump’s granting of immunity to Mayor Adams illustrates anything, it illustrates that a respect for corruption even trumps racism (the reader should excuse my usage of a verb used in the same sentence as a proper noun).
To place the income derived from New York City’s congestion pricing travesty in perspective, it was touted to raise an additional $1B/year. Placing this in perspective:
- Shortly after 9-1-1, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey squandered $4B to construct a new rail station to the handful of PATH trains that mostly ferried commuters between the City’s Financial District (containing the stock market) and their homes or mansions in (mostly northern and central) New Jersey. For slightly more money (roughly $5.7B), China built more than 400 miles of heavy rail – including all the train stations, plus a sizeable number of light rail spurs – running through six countries (see https://transalt.com/article/controlling-cars-the-last-frontier-of-public-transportation/ ).
- A few years ago, this same Port Authority spent $11.8B to widen the Route 1/9 highway on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-7-the-cost-of-failure/) – an extraordinary burst of corruption that did not add a single vehicle’s additional capacity to the Tunnel, but which clearly enriched landowners, businesses, investors and speculators with facilities (or the intention to create them) on the New Jersey side, near the “Meadowlands.”1
- And then there is Uber. When this monster began to engulf New York City’s streets (see https://publictransitexpert.com/article/danger-signs-ahead-for-u-s-transit-and-motorcoach-sectors-part-1/ and https://publictransitexpert.com/article/danger-signs-ahead-for-u-s-transit-and-motorcoach-sectors-part-2/), a taxi medallion cost roughly $1.1M. But Uber drivers paid nothing to enter the City, along the way decimating the City’s taxi industry. Thanks to Uber, the last three medallions sold at auction, in 2019, went for between $136,000 and $138,000. Thirteen more medallions remained unsold, because no one would bid on them.
In the early years of his administration, Mayor Adams actually capped the number of Ubers floating around at 60,000. Had they been forced to pay the going rate for a medallion (frankly a pipe dream) when prices crashed, these fees would have added perhaps $7B to the City’s treasure – considerably more than congestion pricing would ever yield. Of course, without Uber, the City’s taxi fleet would have expanded beyond the roughly 13,000 cabs operating in 2015 – and the far smaller number of vehicles that were actually needed would likely have paid more than the 2015 medallion’s rate – a rates that was only $325,000 a decade earlier.
Corruption and Stupidity
Corruption is not the only thing in America that is bipartisan. Bi-partisan corruption walks down the aisle, side by side and hand in hand, with stupidity. And one need not even be elected to demonstrate it. While countless Democratic Senators and Congresspersons intensified their hatred and loathing of President Trump by noting that he announced most of the things they hate and loathe while running for reelection (and serving as the President barely four years earlier), the same is true of plenty of Democrats, at all levels. The most recent figure illustrating a notorious degree of stupidity is New York City’s recent Democratic primary winner, and would-be mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
Appealing to his “base” (largely the huge swath of low-income residents in most of “da boroughs),” and to compensate for the fares otherwise collected by bus riders, candidate Mamdani most recently called for a freeze on rents (on “stabilized apartments”), free early child care, and City-built and -run grocery stores. Mr. Mamdani also favors raising the City’s income tax (currently between 3.078 and 3.876 percent) by two percent on residents earning $1M/year or more (a proposal that would pose little hardship on those paying it), increasing the City’s corporate tax from 7.25 to 11.50 percent (in contrast, a significant burden on plenty of businesses, particularly small ones), and shifting the property tax burden from the “outer boroughs” to expensive homes in richer, Whiter neighborhoods (according to his website).
Adding more stupidity to something already stupid, an estimate from the New York City Independent Budget Office found that “if just 4 percent of subway riders switched over to the free-bus network, this mode split would forfeit an additional $91M in annual revenue (Bloomberg News). According to Adie Tomer, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, “Making [bus rides] free creates new holes in the MTA budget that have to be filled from other sources.” All this lies apart from Governor Hochul’s antipathy to Mandami’s “free buses” proposal. Further, even with the fare evasion, the City’s bus fares in 2024 yielded roughly $800M (4/5ths of what the congestion pricing program is estimated to produce) – a figure expected to reach $972M in 2028.
Further, this revenue decrease would occur at the very time the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority embarks on a $68B multiyear capital investment program to modernize a more than century-of transit network – which would include a $14B contribution of federal funds. I myself also wonder how the Federal Transit Administration would react to it, since its contribution of operating funds to the City’s transit system is contingent upon both a “state and local share,” and eliminating bus fares would appear to jeopardize the City’s ability to raise its part of this contribution.
As an operating matter, many spokesperson on both the Left and the Right are concerned that the benefits to bus riders would be outweighed by the need to invest in better and more comprehensive service. And by making only bus service free, this policy would create the wrong incentives to transit riders by rerouting most of them who would be better served by trains to buses (although, at the same time, the subways are often overcrowded while the bus system is, at roughly the same times of day, often empty).
One alternative cited is to expand access to both modes by offering reduced fares to riders – a program referred to, locally as “Fair Fare” – a new name for what has been known as “low income certification” for half a century, about which I wrote in my July installment for National Bus Trader (see https://transalt.com/article/low-income-certification-why-not-motorcoaches/).
As one of the last Americans to be a business partner in the final, dying years of a genuinely socialist country (Yugoslavia), I cannot fathom New York City becoming a socialist city-state – especially as it squanders enormous sums of money via its own flavor of corruption and stupidity among major cities. Otherwise, almost certainly unbeknownst to candidate Mamdani, eliminating fares for bus riders while not for subway riders would be a boon to wheelchair and walker users, who frequent buses more than subways, since many of New York City’s subway stations do not have elevators (a waiver granted, under the ADA, to a few cities with old subway systems and deeply-underground station platforms) and the fact that wheelchairs on subways are not secured as they are on buses. (Like all our nation’s trains, New York City is unwilling to bear the operating costs of positioning a trainman in the “handicapped car,” or retrofit even one car per train as one in order to minimize these costs.
Beyond being a far-easier, far-cheaper and more progressive approach like reinforcing honesty, candidate Mamdani’s “solution” ignores the fact that New York City’s transit fares (at least when they were collected) cover the nation’s highest share of operating costs – a whopping 35 percent of these costs even when transit ridership began declining by roughly 10 percent a year, nationwide, beginning a few years before COVID-19 squashed transit ridership (see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/upshot/transit-battered-by-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage).
The Clan’s Survival
Roughly 165 years ago, our nation went to war with itself – with two percent of the nation’s population killed, wounded, captured or missing – because, among other themes, President Lincoln felt that there was strength in numbers, and in his words, “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.” This prophetic understanding proved itself in two world wars in the last century.
Since then, many things in America have changed. Without any poll having the gall to obtain or reveal such findings, one suspects than many among the two polarized factions of our population wish that many of our opponent’s faction would simply go away and die. Yet there is no clannish separation of those who can think clearly compared to those who cannot. If one needs proof of this, he or she need only examine our public transit systems. To avoid fading to despair, I suggest not even taking a peek at the corruption and waste in the paratransit sector, or even worse, in the non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service sector. But no one can say that these failures are the fault of one’s clan versus the other. When it comes to stupidity and corruption (at least in public transportation), bipartisanship is the order of the day. Those days when bipartisanship led to extraordinary accomplishments are long gone. Those of us stranded somewhere in the passenger transportation sector of our economy – particularly drivers and attendants – continue to pay the highest price for this failure.