Thomas Slusser/The Tribune-Democrat via AP
Cambria County Transit Authority riders, donning protective masks, board a bus at the central hub located on Main Street in downtown Johnstown, Pennsylvania, May 7, 2020.
The conventional wisdom among Washington Republicans gets public transit all wrong. The persistent stereotypes about transit and the people who use it run rampant on Capitol Hill and almost knocked the infrastructure talks off-kilter.
Ultimately, Senate negotiators matched the House asks on transit, with new spending and surface reauthorization priorities brought together into one mammoth piece of legislation. The new spending on transit was about $9 billion less than the initial bipartisan deal, but a boost to the highway/transit formula on the routine spending balanced this out to a degree. The policy statements remain pretty backward-looking compared to the House’s INVEST Act, however.
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To be sure, Senate Democrats and the administration caved to Republicans on some fronts, but came out ahead of the original White House plan in other respects. The American Jobs Plan envisioned $165 billion in new spending on mass transit and on passenger and freight rail; the bipartisan deal serves up about $10 billion more—nearly $110 billion for transit and another $66 billion for the rail sectors. (For its part, the INVEST Act had proposed $109 billion for transit and $95 billion for passenger and freight rail.)
New climate programs were pared back to a bare minimum, provoking justifiable anger among progressive House Democrats, who found themselves up against President Biden’s praise for the deal over a no-deal outcome.
The amazement that something, that anything of significance, emerged from the Senate should not obscure the threat of Republican obstructions to come. Through the weeks of tumult after Biden unveiled his initial $2 trillion proposal, some Republicans griped anew about public transportation, made threats, and rehashed ancient arguments about urban transit and who should pay for it.
Transit doubles as another battle ax the GOP wields in the urban-rural culture wars: It gets framed as an expensive “service” for poor people of color, undocumented people from "shithole countries," and antifa hooligans led by bicoastal technocratic elites, wasting in the process billions of tax dollars paid by hardworking real Americans. As Republicans depict it, transit is a luxury for the undeserving that the country can no longer afford.
This picture ignores a country filled with rural transportation networks. No matter, say Republicans, rural public transportation is an unfathomable contradiction in terms. Since public transit cannot possibly meet the challenge of serving people spread out over vast distances, highways are the only answer. This portrait willfully overlooks the million or so poor people—white and Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American—who don’t have reliable cars or who can’t drive at all.
For rural Americans working low-wage jobs, along with students and seniors and disabled people, public transit is essential. Faced with long distances to get to work, or school, or health care, residents of rural towns and villages are uniquely vulnerable to being stranded.
But along came Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who sits on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, with a worldview straight out of the 1950s. He has called for curbs on transit spending, and has labeled the president’s infrastructure package a “welfare plan” (he has a particular beef with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority). Gutting transit, of course, would free up megabillions for new highways. (Republicans forget that new highways often induce demand, get congested, and recycle the frustrations that got the “new” routes built.) Earlier this week, after rounds of criticism, Toomey backtracked, telling CNN, “Nobody's talking about cutting transit.”
Toomey does want localities and states to take on more of the funding burdens. His complaints were also fueled by the specter of unspent COVID transit funding, which he viewed as “overfunding for urban and rural transit agencies.” Scott Bogren, executive director of the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA), claims that’s “a false narrative” since there are very specific regulations on how COVID funds can be spent.
Toomey’s brash dismissal of public transportation would likely raise more eyebrows if he weren’t retiring. In fact, rural ridership, unlike urban, is increasing. Increasingly, rural residents are poorer; they are older; and about one-third are veterans using VA health care systems. They spend more of their hard-earned dollars on transportation than urban residents. Toomey’s own Pennsylvania has the third-largest rural population, behind only Texas and North Carolina; nearly one-third of Pennsylvanians live in rural areas. Between Philadelphia’s Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority and Pittsburgh’s Port Authority of Allegheny County are 21 small urban and 22 rural public-transportation systems. Forty-four percent of their riders are senior citizens.
Longtime mass transit champion Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman, has blasted the GOP’s “highway mania,” which was unleashed by the establishment of the interstate highway system under Dwight Eisenhower.
For DeFazio, building new highways and expanding existing ones is not a sustainable solution to moving people around in the era of climate change. He has called the GOP’s highway mania “Eisenhower 8.0.” The GOP fixation on expanding the national highway system, a product of the mid-20th-century superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, ignores not only the current challenges of climate, but also those of racial disparities and persistent poverty.
As Republicans depict it, transit is a luxury for the undeserving that the country can no longer afford.
Last week, DeFazio told the Regional Plan Association, a New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metro area think tank, “I want states to look at that before they just go out and pave it over.” He added, “It’s not working. It didn’t work. It’s not gonna work in the future.”
Under current funding levels, the federal government provides 80 percent of capital funds and monies for certain paratransit services and 50 percent of operations funding for rural regions of fewer than 50,000 people. In fiscal 2020, rural systems received nearly $760 million in formula grant funding. Bogren says that COVID dollars were important but limited. CTAA’s 1,500 members received less than 5 percent of the COVID stimulus funds. Even within that, he says only a “very small sliver was set aside for rural operators.” Another slice went to small cities (with populations between 50,000 and 200,000).
Pandemic ridership in rural areas did not decline as steeply as it did in urban systems. Although many riders abandoned rural routes in the earliest days of pandemic lockdown, some frontline workers never left or came back earlier because, like the urban essential workers, they relied solely on public transit. Rural transit systems have played key roles in battling COVID by setting up mobile vaccine clinics and ferrying residents to vaccination centers. When Minnesota allowed rural transit agencies to deploy buses wherever they were needed, Southern Minnesota Area Rural Transit began delivering meals and bulk food deliveries.
The Republicans’ plotline about the uselessness of transit may energize their base, but it ignores that what usually stands between riders and a ride are the sums of money that only the federal government can generate. Rural transit operators and their riders can look forward to new investments, but the infrastructure deal should not blind anyone to the threats on the horizon.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
This post has been updated to reflect the correct transit allocation in the bipartisan plan.
