Yes it is. And not because I’m remotely a fan of Donald J. Trump. But as everyone knows, a broken clock is correct twice every 24 hours.
Complete phony as he is, neo-Nazi faux genius Elon Musk either could not find the Deep State or, far more likely, didn’t bother to look. Instead, he used his on-and-off-again position as the head of DOGE to trash our country’s foreign aid program – a program far more related to national security, and gaining allies, than anything else we could likely do.
Comparing Modes
There are a few conventional ways to evaluate a mode of public transportation. Some of these, like safety, may average out to relate to a specific mode, and looking into the “weeds,” one can discern trends that make one mode safer than others – although we do not yet have enough experience capturing date to measure, for example, the accident rate of autonomous cars (such as the Waymo fleet) to compare this mode’s accident rate with that of other modes. Nor do we even have date to measure what I sense is an abysmal accident rate of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs, like Uber and Lyft). So that mode’s safety is difficult to compare to that of other modes, and frankly, it would be hard to make a case that every “professional driver” of a public transportation vehicle is more capable than an Uber driver operating his or her own vehicle (or a rental). Many professional drivers clearly are better than an untrained “civilian” motorist with no training, no access to a dispatcher, and no monitoring by any semblance of management. But my experiences as an expert witness involved in more than 700 cases has clearly demonstrated that many “professional drivers” are no better than a civilian driver. (Such a comparison can never be completely fair, since the drivers of certain modes – fixed route transit and motorcoach services operate much larger vehicles, and they and, particularly, the drivers of paratransit, NEMT and special need schoolbus transportation have additional responsibilities that civilian drivers – I include Uber and Lyft drivers as civilian drivers – do not have, such as the need to secure wheelchairs. But in all these modes, the operation of some agencies or companies’ services are safer than that of others. And each mode experiences different types of incidents. So comparing the overall safety of one mode versus another cannot ever be accurate, although sloppy comparisons may be possible.
A far more interesting way to compare these modes is their efficiency. And a key indicator of their efficiency is commonly referred to as their “operating ratios.” A system’s operating ratio is a measure of the percentage of full operating costs (including those of a lead agency that engages a contractor or broker (or, in rare cases, both) covered by passenger fares. In some modes, like NEMT service (the most dangerous of any of them, for a variety of reasons), its operating ratio is extremely low because most of the operating costs are covered by MediCare, Medicaid, the Veteran’s Administration or social service agencies providing service to developmentally disabled individuals. For this reason, NEMT service transports few passengers who actually pay the fares, which are, frankly, enormous for these individuals, and which do not, in any way, represent the costs of transporting these individuals. Instead, these fares simply reflect that the NEMT provider chooses to charge these individuals.
Fixed Route Transit
Part 1 of this short series, that will deal with every mode of public transportation, involves fixed route transit – a part of the Deep State for sure. Fixed route transit’s abysmal operating ratio has an interesting history.
The transit services in most U.S. cities were reduced to a skeleton, often on the brink of disappearing altogether, as some were by the early 1960s.The ability to remain profitable is obviously limited by the number of potential passengers to pay higher and higher fares. (This is part of what “urban planners” call “demand elasticity” – part of the “gravity model,” the essence of which is that one’s attraction to a destination varies in proportion to its distance from each passenger (or “user” as they are often called in discussions of this model) — and which is inversely-proportional to the distance from the origin to destination. But this relationship is also affected by cost. Most travelers not using their own personal vehicles will choose a taxi or TNC for a short trip, whereas they would choose bus service, or passenger rail or motor coach service, for various types of long trips. And even these choices are affected by cost: Despite the longer travel time, many Americans, for example, travel coast-to-coast by motorcoach, which is considerably less expensive than travel by commercial airlines, and which consumes a fraction of the fuel.
Apart from these theories, the decrease in operating ratios has an interesting history. As transit service began to disappear in the early 1060s, as noted – a direct response to what is known as “urban sprawl,” and which was triggered by President Eisenhower’s “Defense Highway Act” (promulgated in 1956), which led to the construction of 49,500 miles of freeways, and compounded by both the crooked shenanigans of public officials like New York City’s Robert Moses (see The Power Broker for exhaustive details of his disruptions to living patterns, creation of traffic and other consequences), and the tendency of many states to greatly expand their network of highways and freeways to expand many of their communities’ connectivity to the Defense Highway. For example, the State of Illinois decided that no Illinois resident should live more than 15 miles from any freeway. Their expansion of so overwrought that by 1975, the State did not have the funds to maintain its highway system.
The impact on fixed route transit was even more severe. In response to the disappearance of transit in most cities, President Johnson created the Model Cities Program within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD – which was soon consolidated into the Department of Health and Human Services, along with the Department of Education). The model cities program included a component named the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), enacted in 1964, paid for 80 percent of the buses purchased by transit agencies, or smaller communities that did not have transit agencies. In 1967, when the U.S. Department of Transportation was created, President Johnson quickly moved UMTA (whose name was changed, in 1991, to the Federal Transit Administration) into USDOT. By 1977 – a mere decade later, the operating ratio of the nation’s fleet of fixed route buses had sunk to 50 percent. By 2018 – two years before COVID-19 decimated transit ridership, our nation’s highest operating ratio was in New York City, a ratio of 35 percent. This ratio, in service areas like Los Angeles County, were roughly 9 percent (see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/upshot/transit-battered-by-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage. (Readers might keep in mind that, today, the operating ratio of fixed route transit systems in Tokyo is over 100 percent – in other words, these systems are earning profits.)
As an indicator of the depth of stupidity in this Deep State, two of the three cities with the highest operating ratios – New York City (at 35%) and Washington, D.C. (at 25%) – both advocated making bus fares free in 2025 or 2026 –with New York City’s proposal completely abandoned shortly after the new Mayor Zoran Mamdani — who ran on a platform advocating free buses – was elected and began “operating the City” in his Fantasy Land fashion.
As an interest twist in the decline of this Deep State, I was completing my Master’s Degree in Urban Planning in the early 1970s, and worded as a consultant to the Illinois Department of Transportation (in 1976), and to the USDOT for the next four years – before my departure to another Deep State agency, in 1980, working for the newly-formed Los Angeles Department of Transportation, in a County, as noted, whose transit system enjoyed an operating ratio of 9 percent two years before COVID, a ratio decimated by COVID-19 in 2020, and which, just as it was beginning to recover, was decimated yet again by President Trump’s military occupation of the City by ICE, his usurpation of State’s National Guard, and a small continent of Marines – the presence of which drove a full sixth of the transit system’s ridership (effectively Hispanics) away.
Ironically, in the early 1970s, there was no shortage of great ideas (some misdirected) to create what are now the missing pieces of transit: alternative work schedules (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-1-alternative-work-schedules/); park and ride lots (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/); feeder services (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-3-feeder-service/); the intelligible use of system design to form transportation networks (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-4-system-design-and-networks/); high occupancy vehicle lanes (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-6-high-occupancy-vehicle-lanes/) and Ridesharing (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-5-ridesharing/). So deep were the depths of stupidity in the Deep State that ridesharing was advocated as an alternative to the use of transit, rather than as a device to thicken transit ridership. Otherwise, small numbers of most of these system elements continue to exist – alternative work schedules being the sole exceptions. For the most part, these elements have vanished, and by doing so, contributed to the lack of ridership that has left most cities’ transit systems on the brink of disappearing.
Interestingly, in 2019, when Kansas City’s operating ratio was about 6 percent, and it cost more to collect and process the fares than they could cover, Kansas City eliminated bus fares altogether. Mitigating this ignorant policy (which could have been intelligent structured to charge much lower fares to those through a program known as “low income certification” (see https://transalt.com/article/low-income-certification-why-not-motorcoaches/), Kansas City resumed charging bus riders fares this past July, 2026. Otherwise, concepts like “low-income certification” are known to no one in the Deep State. My articles about this concept was likely read by a small subset of readers of National Bus Trader magazine (in which it was published this same July 2026), or more likely, by attorneys whose clients were injured on one or another form of public transportation, or who are defending the systems on which these victims were allegedly injured as a fault of these services, as they were operated.
As noted, fixed route transit service is only one sector of our nation’s Deep State. Were one to guess, or perhaps rely on the questionable wizardry of ChatGPT, Los Angeles County’s operating ratio, this year (2026) is estimated to be six percent. So it is sobering to know that Tokyo’s fixed route bus system yields an operating ratio estimated to be 65 percent. While the operating ratio for the whole transit system is not published, it claims to run at a profit – i.e., an operating ratio of more than 100 percent.
Peering over the edge of our nation’s Deep State public transportation system, I would suggest that a single parachute might not be enough to get one safely to the bottom. The most salient components of the Deep State are allegedly Big Oil and Big Pharma. The latter industry’s extraordinary overcharging of its customers makes it competitive with Public Transit as part of the Deep State. But make no mistake about it: America’s public transit system is among the deepest of its Deep States.
Most sectors of America’s public transportation system are legitimate members of the Deep State, irrespective of one’s political position and beliefs. Fixed route transit, while not the worst, is clearly a member of this Deep State.
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