Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
A Red Line Metro train arrives at the Metro Center station in Washington, July 25, 2022. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is heading into the 2024 fiscal year with a $185 million deficit.
There’s no holiday in Washington that the city anticipates more eagerly than the peak bloom of cherry trees every spring. Last Sunday, tourists and locals swarmed to the Tidal Basin near the National Mall to take in the thousands of white and pink flowering trees. Drivers who ignored days of “don’t even think about it” warnings ended up getting some of the best views even if they had to orbit the man-made reservoir in gridlocked slow motion or inch through riverside East Potomac Park for a similar experience.
The dawn-to-dusk traffic spectacle ended up being a daylong free advertisement for Metro, as the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is known in the region. WMATA had its best Sunday ridership in nearly a decade.
What would the car traffic have been like if Metro didn’t operate on Sundays? Planning annual cherry blossom celebrations without Metro seems unthinkable. But it’s easy to forget that early in the pandemic crisis, WMATA actually proposed eliminating weekend service. Only federal COVID relief funds saved the system from a long list of drastic cuts.
Despite its few stellar days of cherry-blossom ridership, WMATA is not seeing the weekday riders that the system needs to balance its books. It heads into the 2024 fiscal year with a $185 million deficit. Ridership trends in Boston, New York, and other large urban systems also indicate that people now use commuter rail lines for weekend leisure, entertainment, and special events. But in the brave new era of remote work, many workers max out at several weekday commutes.
Fiscal cliff fears and the destabilizing effects that weakened transit systems might have on metro-area economies appear to have prompted the Biden administration to toss the major transit systems a lifeline. Its proposed fiscal year 2024 federal budget contains a plan that would enable mass transit systems that serve 42 metro areas with populations greater than 200,000 to use Section 5307 Urbanized Area Formula Funding program monies for either capital or operations expenditures for FY2024 only. Normally, the major urban systems, unlike smaller transit authorities, are prohibited by statute from using these funds for operations expenditures. (The large systems were able to use pandemic relief monies for operations, however.) It would also allow certain Federal Highway Administration funds that are transferred or “flexed” to mass transit to be used for transit operations.
Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more than $6 billion has been allocated to the program; no new monies would be involved. Under this program, transit systems typically get a bigger bang for each federal dollar spent on capital funding. The federal share on capital projects is 80 percent; on operations, it’s 50 percent. (If Congress approves the plan, the operations share would remain at 50 percent.)
Transit systems in more than 40 large metro areas would gain another bucket of funding to allow them to hang on to varying degrees of fiscal solvency. In the current fiscal 2023 budget, which did not contain the administration’s capital/operations proposal, the New York metro area, served by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other smaller agencies, received $1.2 billion. The District of Columbia-Maryland-Virginia region served by WMATA and other suburban transit systems received $253 million. The San Francisco-Oakland area served by BART, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and other systems took in more than $190 million.
The deeper problem is that transit systems may have to write off suburban ridership in the next several years.
Overall, $70 billion in federal pandemic relief funding went to mass transit systems nationwide to shore them up during the brutal early COVID-19 years, when all but essential employees stayed home. But while work-from-home schedules may be nirvana for federal employees and Silicon Valley digital nomads, they have smashed a mass transit model predicated on moving suburbanites in and out of city center business districts. (Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has urged President Biden to order the feds back to onsite work, a plea that he has resisted.)
Nationwide, ridership recovery has been anemic. In Washington, which has the largest percentage of people working from home in the country, weekday bus ridership is nearly back to pre-pandemic rates. Rail travel, however, lags during the week, but jumps up on weekends. The San Francisco regional rail system, Bay Area Rapid Transit, is in arguably worse shape than WMATA; the system’s remaining federal COVID relief funds wind down in 2025. If BART can’t right itself, the system faces layoffs, station closures, shut-down lines, weekend closures—and it’s still on the hook for a new San Jose and Santa Clara line. A 2026 regional voter initiative to support BART through a tax increase is under consideration.
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has roughly another year to figure out how it plans to run a 24/7 system on dwindling funds. On Wednesday, Politico New York reported that MTA head Janno Lieber, who usually stays out of funding battles, announced his support for a payroll tax increase on businesses in the MTA service area. If the state legislature approves the budget plan, the annual revenues from the levy would increase from $800 million to $1.3 billion.
The agency faces a $600 million deficit this year (and a $3 billion deficit in two years when pandemic funding finally runs out). Congestion pricing that would levy a fee on private-vehicle trips into Manhattan has been on the table as well, but the plan still faces opposition, most recently from Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who represent New York suburbs. They want to prohibit the MTA from receiving federal capital investment grants until New York and New Jersey drivers receive congestion fee exemptions.
A one-time federal budget fix would appear to be an acceptable solution. Debating how a few transit systems spend already-allocated federal monies is likely a fight no member of Congress wants to have. Nothing is easy or acceptable, however, when dealing with House Republicans and their take-no-prisoners negotiating tactics. Systems that advocate for social justice reforms like fare-free transit end up as GOP targets, forcing Democrats to defend limited operating subsidies as a few systems work to find other sources of revenue beyond passenger fares.
The Republicans’ obsession with Washington, D.C., would likely put the city in the party’s crosshairs on free fares. The city council voted to create a fare-free bus option last year. But new city budget estimates indicate that the District of Columbia does not have the roughly $130 million it needs to make the program happen this July, setting the stage for a fight between the council and the city’s own financial officials. Boston has also used federal COVID dollars to make three bus routes free.
The deeper problem is that transit systems may have to write off suburban ridership in the next several years. Unless systems can devise alternative mechanisms to raise revenues, like the sales taxes that Los Angeles voters have authorized, or secure additional subsidies from cities and states, current service levels are not sustainable, auguring further deep cuts and a significant reworking of how mass transit operates.
“The beauty and tragedy of heavy rail is that once you’ve dug the hole in the ground and put a subway line in it, it’s there for 100 years whether people are still choosing to embark and disembark in that spot, or not,” says Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington who has studied the administration’s budget proposal. “So, you could see significant redesign of bus routes and patterns in a lot of these major cities.”
In the long run, unless there’s a seismic weekday shift in current work patterns, the push for returning to pre-pandemic levels of frequency, or even maintaining current schedules, isn’t supported by the pull of tight budgets. More frequent service has helped bring some riders back to some systems, but it’s not been enough to offset the desertions by the work-from-home crews. But the greater a system’s historic reliance on suburban commuters, the greater the fiscal peril the entire system faces. Nobody has come up with an ingenious Plan B, especially if the federal lifeline fails to materialize—at least not yet.
