Human Transit

should u.s. federal transit spending aim to redistribute wealth? (guest post by alexis grant)

Alexis Grant holds an M. Sc in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh and is an active transportation advocate in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys shaping and interpreting complex systems for the benefit of their users and riding her bike around Portland. You can find her on Twitter @lyspeth.

Should the goal of US Federal transit spending be the redistribution of wealth?

The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark recently examined data from the 65 largest American metropolitan areas to provide a deeper look at his assertion that local funding for transit operations tends to depend on local income rather than on ‘need’, magnifying “seriously inequitable outcomes”:

The data demonstrate that increasing local and state transit operations spending is closely correlated with metro area median household income. This is not the case for federal aid, as minimal as it is. In addition, though cities and states with more progressive electoral tendencies appear to be able to increase local funding for transit operations, that contribution may be significantly limited by the incomes of local inhabitants.

Freemark argues that this is problematic: “Since public transportation is a vital social service, this has the perverse impact of providing the least support to the regions that likely need it most."

When I first read this line, I paused over “vital social service”, wondering whether he meant “vital public service”, but the article as well as his prior coverage of the topic makes clear that he meant just what he said: here, transit is being depicted as a social service provided to people who can’t afford other ways of getting mobility:

If public transportation is an essential social service — almost as important to our society as Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security (that is what we think, right?) — then how is it fair for the people who live in the poorest metropolitan areas to suffer from inadequate transportation services?

Freemark seems to be advocating here for addressing a perceived inequity that relates to only one of the two common goals of transit: what Jarrett Walker calls the Coverage Goal (Human Transit, Chapter 10).

The Coverage Goal reflects the “social service objective” that Freemark is appealing to, “meeting the needs of people who are especially reliant on transit”, in this case primarily due to lack of wealth, or poverty. When aiming for high coverage, agencies provide service broadly, including to those who may be difficult to serve because of poor connectivity or low density but also need the service more.

The other major goal, the Ridership Goal, reflects the desire to provide efficient and effective service by serving the most people at the least cost. Services oriented to the Ridership Goal focus on important destinations and corridors and may separate services or stops by larger distances to speed travel and avoid overspending on overlapping service.

While Walker discusses the Ridership-Coverage tradeoff mostly in the context of local decision-making, the same idea can be applied to state or federal funding.  Federal funding can pursue an ideal of maximum ridership; that would mean lots of money for big cities, where ridership potential is high, and none for Wyoming.  Or, it can focus on spreading out the resource, pursuing a Coverage goal, based either on a political ideal of equity or, as Freemark proposes, an explicitly redistributive view that spends more in poorer communities.

Freemark positions his work in contrast to academics and commentators profiled by Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic, who argue “too many projects...are poorly designed or executed, in part because of federal sway”. He pictures the redistributive power of the federal government as a positive force necessary to overcome the inability of some local governments to raise the amount of funds their areas ‘need’ to meet their presumed Coverage goals. Yet his vision of how this would make for “better projects” only asserts that it would be more fair.

Cities, left to their own devices, will restrict funding on transit operations based on the income of their inhabitants, not based on need. It is not rational that the state and local funding for transit in San Jose is more than six times higher than that in Fresno, just 150 miles apart, much because of the latter’s significantly lower household incomes and more Republican voting tendencies. Fresno, after all, has more than double the poverty rate of San Jose and thus has a significant transit-dependent population that is not being appropriately served....

To dismiss the federal government’s role is to ignore its important redistributive powers — its ability to transfer tax revenues from wealthier regions to poorer ones to help contribute to a more just society.

Coverage and equity goals tend to be in tension with ridership and mode-share goals, and by focusing solely on the coverage side of the equation, Freemark provides an incomplete picture of what the role of federal funding could or should be. Do all communities have the same goals for their transit systems, and do they want to serve the same populations? Should they? An equally good argument can be made that limited federal dollars should be spent on providing service that reaches the most people for the least amount of money.  That, too, could be called fair.

In his transit planning outreach, Walker “emphasize[s] how the geography of transit generates choices among competing values, which is why citizens and their elected officials ultimately need to make the decision.” What kind of transit to fund, and how much money to devote to it, is not merely a question of the availability of money, but also a value judgment, one that the local area has to make for itself. A more conservative community’s funding choices may be in part a reflection of their values, just as their voting behavior is.

Federal funding for transit operations could provide a valuable resource for local governments that would like to do more, but can’t afford to.  But Federal funding also relies on evidence of local financial support or “match.”  Local government must decide whether it would like to fund additional transit, and if so, what the goal of that transit should be. In discussing the role of federal funding, no one is well served by assuming all cities would make that decision with the same goals in mind.

 

the build vs. maintain problem

A good article at Strong Towns highlights a structural problem with how the US does Federal infrastructure funding:

We can get money from Washington to build new infrastructure, but it is really difficult -- if not impossible -- to get money from Washington to maintain existing infrastructure.

The article explores the problem in the context of Minnesota bridges, noting that Federal funding is going forward for a bridge expected to serve 16,000 cars a day while Minnesota is unable to fund maintenance for existing bridges carrying 2.4m cars a day. 

One solution has been for the Federal funder to demand evidence of a maintenance funding commitment by the state/province, but such guarantees would need to be eternal, and eternal commitments are very hard to enforce.

Canadian and Australian readers who dream of a bigger central government role in infrastructure funding, this caution is for you!  Think hard about what you want to federalize.  If you're going to demand federal funding for infrastructure, you might want to demand life cycle maintenance funding instead of just building things that states and provinces can't afford to maintain.  Think, too, about this.

should transit agencies "retrench" to become "profitable"?

The University of Minnesota's David Levinson wrote a bracing article last week arguing for a new approach to how we decide what transit lines should exist.  In its emphasis on "not losing money," it may remind you of some of the broadsides of the anti-transit right, but Levinson is not one of that crowd, as far as I know. 

So I thought I'd quote the juiciest parts here, and provide some counterpoint.  Levinson and I use very different frames, but if you look beyond those, there's some agreement here.

Mass transit systems in the United States are collectively losing money hand over fist. Yet many individual routes (including bus routes) earn enough to pay their own operating (and even capital costs). But like bad mortgages contaminating the good, money-losing transit routes are bogging down the system.

This "profitability" or "breaking even" frame may alienate many on the left from the merit of Levinson's idea.  Currently, transit agencies are not trying to break even, so they are not failing if they don't.  If we propose a free-market view in which transit should be breaking even, well, I'd like to see this as well in a perfect world.  But that would be a world in which government isn't heavily subsidizing transit's competitor, the private car -- not just through road expenditures but through such interventions as minimum parking requirements and petroleum-based foreign policy.  I would further suggest that current environmental crises argue for government to be biased away from the private car and toward modes that do less environmental harm, and that subsidies toward transit (i.e. accepting that transit "loses money") are one valid way of doing that. 

We can divide individual systems into three sets of routes:

Always be suspicious when a transit network is analyzed as though it were a pile of routes, because a good network is more than the sum of its parts.

1. Those routes break-even or profit financially (at a given fare). This is the "core".

These tend to be of two types:  commuter express routes that run only when they're very busy, and all-day high-frequency lines in dense urban cores with all-day demand.  In my work, I describe these services as having a "Ridership Goal" or "Productivity Goal." 

2. Those lines which are necessary for the core routes to break-even, and collectively help the set of routes break-even. These are the "feeders".

Levinson is acknowledging here that it's not actually possible to classify all lines cleanly, because in a well-designed transit network designed for anywhere-to-anywhere travel it is the network that yields ridership, not just individual services.  It appears Levinson wants to distinguish a set of lines as individually unprofitable but necessary for the overall profitability of a network -- as opposed to the third category below.  OK, but this is the same as saying that there is no meaningful line-by-line measurement of "profitability" in an interdependent network; only the entire network (except for the weakest services discussed below) can be judged as profitable.  That's true in my experience. 

3. Those lines which lose money, and whose absence would not eliminate profitability on other routes. These money-losers are a welfare program. We might politely call them "equity" routes.

Many people don't want to talk about this category, but these routes exist in any network.  They tend to be circulator services in low-density areas -- including rural areas -- that provide lifeline access but have little or no potential to compete with the car.  You can identify them because they don't contribute substantially to the performance of the main network (though this is of course a matter of degree with no hard edge).  

If an hourly circulator carrying 5 boardings per hour connects with a major trunkline carrying 100 boardings per hour, and half the circulator's ridership makes a connection with the trunk, then at worst deleting the circulator (and losing all its ridership) would cost the trunk 2.5% of its 100 hourly boardings, which will barely be noticed.  If the service spent on the circulator were spent instead on even more frequency on the trunk, you might well make up the difference. 

On the other hand, if the trunk weren't there, the circulator would lose 50% of its boardings, probably a fatal blow.  So while connecting lines are always interdependent, some are so weak that the relationship might as well be viewed as a one-way dependence.

Levinson's right about all that, but since I don't share his "profitability" frame I can't share his derision about "welfare" or "equity."  In working with transit agencies, I try to educate about these "Coverage" routes, the equivalent of Levinson's third group.  I define these as "predictably low-ridership services motivated by goals other than ridership -- goals generally including social service objectives, expectations of "equity" between different subareas of the region, and a generalized desire to cover the whole service area with some kind of service."  In my work, I encourage public transit authorities to make a conscious choice about how much of this service they want to operate, understanding that every dollar they spend on Coverage service is a dollar they can't spend on Ridership goals or related outcomes of mode share and fare revenue.

So given Levinson's "profitability" frame, here's his solution:

Mass (or public) transit agencies are transportation organizations first, not welfare organizations.  They should be considered public utilities rather than departments of government, which provide a useful service for a price to their users.

The conflct between Ridership and Coverage goals needs to be resolved by government.  This doesn't require removing transit authorities from government, as there are many needs (especially land use integration) that argue the opposite.  Even if transit operations were considered a "utility," policy and planning functions of transit very much need to be part of government, in my experience.   Many Australian states, for example, gave away too much policy and planning control to operating companies, and are now undergoing reforms to take this authority back.

My thesis is that the local transit systems should identify and propose to retrench to the financially sustainable system, and present local politicians with a choice.

If local politicians want additional "equity" services, they should be presented with a cost of subsidy per line, and then can collectively choose which lines to finance out of general revenue, as this is primarily a welfare rather than an transportation function. In other words, public transit organizations would present the public with a bill for these money-losing services (the subsidy required in order to at least break even on operating them (i.e. the difference between their revenue and their cost), and not be expected to pay for them out of operating revenue.

If the cost of those lines is deemed too expensive (i.e. the politicians are unwilling to pay for them with general revenue tax dollars), they should be canceled. Transit agencies would no longer be losing money, they would now be break-even or slightly profitable. They might even pay a dividend to their owners (the general public).

General revenue (the treasury) would of course now be losing money, we didn't pull money from thin air, but since this is a social welfare/redistribution function, that is perfectly appropriate. This would entirely change public and political perception of transit services. It might also result in fewer bad routes being funded, since it would be crystal clear where the subsidies lay.

Levinson's tone here is needlessly divisive in my view.  I prefer to work from a position of respect toward the users and defenders of low-ridership services, understanding that other valid public purposes are being served.  I also respect the notion that a community that pays into a transit system should expect some service in return; this "equity" impulse has nothing to do with "welfare." 

But Levinson is right that a choice must be made.  There really are two competing goals for transit:  Ridership (which leads to high mode share, sustainability outcomes, and "profitability") and Coverage (which provides social inclusion and equity benefits in low-density areas that a Ridership-based system wouldn't serve.)  These two goals lead network design in opposite directions.  So transit agencies should have guidance -- from those who fund them -- on how much to spend on one goal or the other. 

I agree with Levinson, too, that transit policy would be much clearer if we had budgets definitely allocated to the purpose of maximum ridership -- with other budgets that funded the Coverage services. 

For more, see this paper of mine on the same topic, and Chapter 10 of my forthcoming book.

UPDATE:  Professor Levinson responds here.

transit and a shrinking u.s. government

The recent "deal" intended to cut the US Federal deficit looks like it can only lead to further cuts in Federal spending on almost everything. 

Cities, in general, require higher levels of infrastructure, and a range of other spending, than the country as a whole.  So the further Federal budget cutting to come is likely to mean further damage to essential services in cities, including public transit.  While a powerful cadre of urban economists and thinkers are ready to make the case that the city is essential to the economy of the nation, and the battle for continued Federal funding may well be won, cities and local governments, including transit agencies, should clearly be strategizing for the possibility of permanent decline in Federal investment.

It's important to separate, in all of our minds, two questions about urban services such as transit that often get confused:

• Should urban services be subsidized by taxpayers to purchase their benefits to the whole community and economy?
• At what level of government should this be done?

I have strong feelings about the first question but am quite agnostic about the second.  It's unavoidable, though, that if the Federal level of government decides to care less about cities, other levels of government will have to care more, and spend more.

The prospect of shifting responsibility from one level of government to another is understandably horrifying to anyone close to the task.  Voters must be convinced of the need to adapt to new realities with new funding.  Processes that have been working have to be changed.  Long-settled debates must be unsettled.  Most challenging is that the prospect casts doubt on the job security of the very people who have to make it work, though in general the job-security impact would be that Federal jobs would disappear and state-region-city jobs would have to grow. 

But you always have to separate thinking about the transition from thinking about the end state. 

Would it be a bad thing for each state, each city, and each urban region, to have its own debate about its own funding sources for transit, as it would for similar urban services that may see federal cuts?  The outcomes would vary from city to city and state to state.  Would that be bad?

Even within urban regions, is it a bad thing for different cities to want different levels of service, and to come forward with their own funding sources if they want more than higher levels of government, including their own regional transit agency, can offer? 

What would a US be like in which each city's transit network reflected its own resources and intentions, based on its own hard-won local consensus, in the face of declining Federal funding and therefore declining Federal influence? 

California and Texas would become even more different than they are now, as they charted this landscape guided by their very different values.  Urban outcomes in general would grow more diverse, as the choice became more stark between low-tax, low-infrastructure, low-service cities and others with higher taxes but a stronger foundation of infrastructure and essential services.  So we'd see, even more clearly, the result of that competition.

In other words, US urban policy would become more like that of Canada, a country where the Federal role in most urban matters is much smaller than in the US, but where cities, regional governments, and provinces are correspondingly freer to chart their own way, and pay for it.

It's easy to imagine that more conservative states would just let their cities die through underfunding, but that's certainly not happening in Alberta.  Canada's most conservative province, a natural resource powerhouse that draws comparison to Texas in its boom times, has remarkably good inner-city transit policy and a continuous stream of provincial investment.  Calgary's downtown commuter parking cost is about the same as San Francisco's and the result is extremely strong ridership on its bus and light rail system, at least for commutes, and support for a dense core. 

The transition to a more Canada-like Federal role would be hell.  Everyone involved is understandably horrified by the prospect, including me much of the time.  But if the Federal budget-slashers win, US cities and states will be on that course whether they like it or not.  Are we sure the eventual outcome would be a disaster?

Just thinking out loud here.  Discuss.

that influential texas "urban mobility report"

You know you're a transport geek when you find yourself at a 9 PM debate about how governments should measure "urban mobility."

The opportunity arose one night at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Madison last week.  Long after most urbanists had adjourned to the bars and restaurants, a small but sharp audience gathered to hear Tim Lomax of the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) debate Joe Cortwright of CEOs for Cities.  Tim was there to defend TTI's influential Urban Mobility Report (UMR), an annual compendium of statistics that are widely used to define how US cities think about mobility problems and to benchmark these cities against each other.  Joe was there to attack TTI's methodology as biased against compact, sustainable cities. 

The technical core of the argument is simple.  TTI's Travel Time Index, one of their more quoted products, is a ratio of peak congested travel times by car against uncongested travel times by car.  In other words, travel times are said to be "worse" only if they get much longer in peak commute hours than they are midday. 

This ratio inevitably gives "better" scores to cities where normal uncongested travel times are pretty long -- in other words, spread-out cities.  Here's the CEOs' critique of how the TTI compares Charlotte and Chicago:

This index certainly looks hard to defend as any useful measure of travel time, even by car.  Two cities that expose the average motorist to near-identical amounts of congestion delay are being scored entirely based on how far people have to drive there, where "further" means "better" on the travel time index score.

In his rebuttal, Lomax emphasized that Institute doesn't stress its Travel Time Index as much as it used to.  He even offered a table showing the number of times his report mentioned the index in each successive year (plenty in the 90s, but way down in the late 00s.)  We were to conclude that critiquing the Travel Time Index is a 20th century battle.

The real problem, of course, is TTI's title, "Urban Mobility Report," for a document that's really mostly about congestion.  Only if you live in a very car-dependent city, or care only about car-dependent citizens, can you reduce mobility to congestion in that way.  A more truthfully titled "Urban Congestion Report" would raise no objection.

Lomax argued that his insititute is interested in the other modes and wants to be able to talk about them more effectively, and I'm sure that's true.  It's also true that nobody can be responsible for what journalists and editors choose to emphasize in reporting about their work.  It may well be that journalists continue to fixate on the Travel Time Index more than the Institute itself wants them to. 

But look at how the TTI's own website introduces its most recent study:

The 2010 Urban Mobility Report builds on previous Urban Mobility Reports with an improved methodology and expanded coverage of the nation's urban congestion problem and solutions. The links below provide information on long-term congestion trends, the most recent congestion comparisons and a description of many congestion improvement strategies. All of the statistics have been recalculated with the new method to provide a consistent picture of the congestion challenge. As with previous methodology improvements, readers, writers and analysts are cautioned against using congestion data from the 2009 Report. All of the measures, plus a few more, have been updated and included in this report.

Mobility is in the report title, but this entire leading paragraph is about congestion.  If you dig into TTI's full press release about its 2010 report, you also find that it's all about congestion except for this curious paragraph:

The congestion reduction benefits of two significant solutions are discussed—public transportation and roadway operations. Without public transportation services, travelers would have suffered an additional 785 million hours of delay and consumed 640 million more gallons of fuel—a savings of $19 billion in congestion costs. Roadway operational treatments save travelers 320 million hours of delay and 265 million gallons of fuel for a congestion cost savings of $8 billion.

The journalistic spin that TTI itself recommends is that non-car modes matter only if they reduce congestion, and that congestion remains the primary measure of urban mobility.

What's more, TTI's suggestion that public transit directly reduces congestion is actually quite fraught, and many transit experts, including myself, steer away from it.  Transit certainly creates alternatives to congestion for individuals, and the resulting benefit to individuals can be aggregated to describe society-wide improvements in both productive time and personal/family time.  But those calculations are much more clear and direct than any "transit benefit to congestion" overall.  That's because newly freed, high demand road space tends to induce new car trips. 

Most transit projects are not trying to reduce congestion, or not all by themselves.  If congestion reduction is your goal, you need a combination of transit and market-rate "decongestion" pricing for motorists.  For most advocates of transit in the context of compact sustainable cities, the goal is not to reduce congestion but to give citizens options to liberate themselves from it.

Could a real "Urban Mobility Report" have value?  Yes, but it would look totally different from TTI's, and it wouldn't be easy.  Creating mobility measures that work across all the modes -- cars, walking, cycling, transit etc -- is fiendlishly difficult.  I have some notions about how it might be done, but it would have to start with the right question.  If you're going to talk about true urban mobility, then surely you have to ask questions like:

• How much of people's lives is lost to travel, where that travel has no positive value to them as personal time or recreation?  

Or perhaps even more powerfully:

• What degree of freedom do people have to move about their city at will? 

Any methodology that focuses on the performance of a single mode -- whether congestion on freeways, continuity of cycle networks, or reliability of transit -- is not going to lead us that way.

Given the resources and credibility that TTI has, I really hope they move in this direction.  But it won't be easy.  If the TTI report continues to be about congestion, that's another choice, but in that case their "Urban Mobility Report" will be a report of declining relevance (and increasingly offensive title) as this urban century unrolls.

quotes of the week: ed glaeser

"Conservative" economist Ed Glaeser, author of The Triumph of the City, at today's Congress for the New Urbanism plenary:

De-federalizing [US] transportation policy would help transit compete more effectively with the automobile.

He's talking about the funding methodologies imposed by the US Federal Transit and Highway Administrations, which effectively (a) federalize the transit/highway tradeoff and (b) put possibly excessive weight on near-term ridership outcomes as opposed to personal mobility outcomes, not to mention impacts on urban form.

Would block-grants to states that allow each state to determine its own highway vs transit balance be a better structure?

u.s. "transit lovers unite"

A new campaign by the American Public Transporation Association:

Washington, DC –The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) and its more than 1,500 members are launching “I <3 Transit”(I heart transit), a mobile text campaign, to engage riders across the country  and demonstrate the importance of public transportation to individuals, communities and the nation.  The campaign, which starts this week,  allows participants to show their support for increased public transit funding by simply texting “transit” to 86677.

Each year 10.2 billion trips are taken on the nation’s public transportation systems.  Riders depend on their local transit provider for freedom, mobility and access.  By texting “transit” to 86677 public transit riders and enthusiasts alike can stand together in support of public transportation.  This simple action helps spread the message that Americans want public transportation as a travel option in their daily lives. 

Supporters can also follow the campaign on twitter at @ihearttransit.

 

conservatives commit to federal funding of transit (in australia)

US readers watching the Federal budget process, in which one major party is proposing Federal disinvestment in city-serving infrastructure, might note that Australia is moving the other way.  The Labor government created Infrastructure Australia in 2008 to be a conduit for federal funding of transit infrastructure, a role similar to that long played by the Federal Transit Administration in the US.  Now, the more conservative opposition -- the "Coalition" of the Liberal and National parties -- has endorsed the contination of that policy, signaling that this role is likely to continue regardless of who is in Government.  On his party website, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott states:

The Coalition supports Infrastructure Australia (IA) and in government will strengthen its role, creating a more transparent, accountable and effective adviser on infrastructure projects.

We’ll keep it, we’ll fund it and we’ll listen to it because important infrastructure decisions should be made on the basis of rational planning ...

The Coalition will ensure that Infrastructure Australia has guaranteed ongoing funding. ... The Coalition’s commitment means that IA will be provided with the resources necessary for it to do its job properly.

It's interesting to think about why urban issues that are bipartisan in Australia seem to become Democratic concerns in the US.   In both countries, most of the population lives in urban areas, but there is a crucial difference in language that creates a difference in habits of thought.  Americans think of big "cities" as separate from their "suburbs," and often use these terms as shorthand or euphemism for a range of other oppositions.  (Only in America, for example, would a style of music associated with black people be called "Urban.")  Americans also have the idea of a suburban center (what Joel Garreau calls an "Edge City') that clings to the outer orbit of a big city but can think of itself as unrelated to it.  Hence someone in Tyson's Corner, Virginia, say, may be happier thinking of their metro area as "Northern Virginia" rather than "greater Washington DC."   

Those word choices lead to a US political reality in which big cities -- narrowly defined in exclusion of their suburbs -- represent a minority of the population and thus attract the interest of only one side of the political divide. 

By contrast, when Australians say "Sydney" or "Melbourne" they usually mean the entire urban area -- the continuous patch of lights that you see from an airplane.  So people who live in what Americans would call the suburbs of Sydney think of themselves as living in Sydney.  This way of speaking encourages them to accept that the problems of Sydney are their problems, whereas a resident of Tyson's Corner may feel quite removed from the problems of "Washington."  When cities are understood in that inclusive way, it follows that most Australians live in cities, so naturally both sides of the political divide must care about them.

futility, geometry, and action

To bypass the rage and righteousness around an issue, and move toward solving it, we first have to convince ourselves that solving it is impossible.

That's the thesis of Andrew Sullivan's piece today, "Why the Healthcare Question is Insoluble."  He's talking about healthcare in the US context, but few countries have achieved widespread contentment on the issue.  I'm not sure you can expect widespread contentment on an issue that requires thinking about sickness and death, at least not at humanity's current level of spiritual development.

My work on transit policy has always come from the same existential position that Andrew lays out.  Like every family working out its budget, societies have to make choices between different things that they value.  As in healthcare, arguments about these choices often use pre-emptive appeals to compassion or justice to shift our attention away from the the real choice.  Government actions that are "compassionate" or that address "civil rights" seem to be responding to an absolute standard of goodness and truth, but often, they still cost money, possibly more money than any government can expect to spend.

I'm very glad to be in transit instead of healthcare, because a few hours debating healthcare makes transit problems look easy.  Easy, but still impossible. 

By easy that I mean that the questions are relatively easy to frame (Connections or complexity?  Ridership or coverage?  Wide stop spacing or close?) and it's not too hard to explain (a) the consequence of each choice and (b) why the choice is geometrically unavoidable.  Laying out those questions is the main work of my current book project. 

But once you lay out those questions, you have to pause and see that by their nature, there's no answer that everyone will like.  There may not even be an answer that a majority will like.  And in that sense, the task of resolving the issue is impossible. 

The geometry of transit tells us that each of these choices gives us a spectrum of possibilities.  A transit network can go to the extreme of relying on connections, and thus minimizing complexity, or it can go to the extreme of avoiding connections, which maximizes complexity, but every time you move toward one desired outcome, you move away from another one.  That's how a spectrum works.  And you can appeal to "civil rights" or "compassion" or "common sense" or "the needs of working families" as much as you want; those appeals may prod policymakers to move one way or the other, but they don't change the geometry.  In fact, they're dangerous to the degree that they encourage us not to notice what has to be sacrificed to move in the direction that the speaker advocates.

My experience with many transit agencies is that everyone is a little scared of stating these questions in such a simple way, because it means you really have to answer them.  And answering them requires accepting, with some humility, that any possible decision will leave many people outraged.  Faced with the courage that this requires, it's tempting to retreat into the confusion.  It's tempting to want the issue to be complicated so that you'll never be called to account for making a clear, stark choice of this over that -- even though true leadership lies exactly in the willingness to make those choices.  So when an issue seems complicated, we always need to ask, "what interests are being served by the sheer complexity of this issue?"  "Can the issue actually be made simple?"

I'm not sure that can be done for healthcare, but bravo to Andrew Sullivan for trying.  I am pretty sure it can be done for many of the main debates in transit policy, and that's the core of my work right now.

transit acceleration campaign goes national

For over a year now, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has been spearheading a "30/10" initiative, designed to accelerate the construction a range of urgently needed transit projects (mostly rail transit lines).  The key word is accelerate, not fund.  The projects are already funded, but on a 30-year timeline.  The 30/10 proposal would deliver the projects in 10 years.

The idea begins with Measure R, a 30-year sales tax increment approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2008 to fund a large package of rail transit improvements, including the Wilshire subway to the westside.  Villairagosa wants the Federal government to create a mechanism to bond this revenue so that it can be spent in one decade instead of three. 

Well, you can only get Congress interested if the same idea can be applied in many places, so predictably the Mayor and Metro are now presenting America Fast Forward, a national campaign to create a similar mechanism for any urban region that has already put funded projects in place.  Los Angeles Metro's blog Source covers it here, the Los Angeles Times's Tim Rutten opines here.  Here's a puffy PDF.

Because it relies on Federal financing rather than spending, and because the funding sources are local tax streams that are relatively stable, it's an approach that could potentially succeed even in lean times.

In a tweet, Cap'n Transit asked me:  Could it be used to build highways?  Yes, it looks like the same mechanism could be used, in theory, to fund any locally supported infrastructure.  I hope it will be constrained to transportation, and if it were constrained to voter-approved funding streams like Los Angeles's Measure R it could well usher in a new era of these measures, in which most voters could vote up or down on a set of plans knowing that if passed, all of them would be built and running in just ten years, soon enough to affect most voters' lives.