Twelfth and Final of a Series: Mobility in the Balance—A Life-or-Death Situation

Over the summer now ending, I have examined the situation now faced by eight of the largest transit systems in the United States, all of which include significant rail networks that, between them, include all current modes, from regional train networks to historic streetcars. Of those eight, only one appears to have found a long-lasting solution to the financial woes that will soon result from the loss of one-shot federal money for transit operations that was enacted in late 2020 and early 2021. That aid came in the wake of the steep decline in ridership that began when the COVID-19 virus struck, earlier in 2020. Smaller systems also face similar financial difficulties as the federal funding for operations runs out.

In short, this is an existential threat not only to the large systems on which millions of Americans depend for all their mobility, but to the transit industry as a whole. The sole exceptions to that rule might be the smallest providers, who receive federal operating support under 49 U.S.C.§5311 (for rural systems and small starts), which only affects community-oriented bus systems that do not include rail.

When the COVID-19 relief legislation was enacted, everybody knew that the federal operating support would be temporary, generally federal funds are authorized only for capital projects and improvements. Still, transit everywhere was suffering. With respect to rail transit and all other components of the railroad industry, reporters at Railway Age and its sibling publications pooled our efforts to report the decline. The service cuts were severe everywhere. On the nation’s transit, headways were lengthened as the service day was shortened on many systems. Some railroads soldiered on and continued to provide hourly service seven days a week to the riders who needed it, including “essential” workers and other non-motorists. Those in the New York area, including New Jersey Transit, stood out for that effort. The virus also caused an unprecedented emergency for rail transit (and for bus-only systems, too), and many did the best they could to keep the residents and employees in their service areas moving.

Eventually service came back to pre-COVID levels, or close to such levels. Ridership did not, and that is a major cause of the onset of the coming fiscal cliff. Revenue has not returned to pre-COVID levels, and there does not seem to be any reasonable expectation that it will. Costs keep rising, though, and with the end of federal funds that can be used to run the service, providers must either find a way to get more money from somewhere else, raise fares (possibly drastically), cut service (possibly severely), or a combination of two or all three of those measures. The latter two are especially unsettling, since many non-motorists have limited financial means, and service cuts eliminate actual mobility for all riders.

It Has Happened Before, But Not Like Now

Transit generally and rail transit in particular, including trains, have faced severe crises before. While some rail transit survived, what the nation has left is a network so small that one person can ride all of it (I had done that in 2019 and am now only one segment away from duplicating that feat, but that segment is in Phoenix, Arizona). Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors and his allies killed most of the streetcar systems in the nation, leaving only seven survivors (plus only Toronto in Canada). The Great Depression of the 1930s drove many providers, who were almost all in the private sector in those days, into financial ruin. With Sloan’s original goal, the primacy of the automobile, firmly established by the 1960s, many rail transit lines had been converted to bus routes. It was easy for managers to cut service on bus lines in response to the proliferation of motoring as the dominant transportation mode, and they did just that. There are not many places where buses run as frequently as the streetcars they replaced had run on the same routes. Still, through it all, rail transit survived on a limited scale, and some cities and regions expanded rail transit offerings, including with the mode of the late 20^th century: light rail.

Sloan’s transit holocaust was triggered by a ruthless private-sector industry leader who did whatever he thought necessary to destroy the streetcars that people liked and replace them with the buses that he knew they would not like, as the public ran (or, perhaps more accurately, was chased) to purchase their own private vehicles, and non-motorists were increasingly left with fewer mobility options as transit service was reduced. The Depression of the 1930s was triggered by economic forces with which pre-Keynesian economic theories were ill-equipped to deal. Transit could have made a comeback and did during World War II, when wartime regulations limited motoring. But in the 1950s, government policy promoted automobile use and discouraged transit, making more of the remaining rail transit disappear.

This time, circumstances are different. The COVID-19 pandemic was a force majeure that affected the entire world. It scared everybody, especially before the vaccines were developed, and rumors of questionable validity that it was dangerous to ride transit circulated widely. The virus killed millions around the world, including over one million Americans. It was not as severe as the first appearance of the H1N1 virus from 1918 to 1920, but only a few historians and epidemiologists bothered to make that comparison. Besides, rail transit was at its zenith slightly more than a century ago, and railroad mileage in this country, including interurban and streetcar mileage, hit its maximum in 1919. Most people still needed trains and transit then. Sloan’s concerted effort to kill transit did not start until a few years later.

Today most Americans do not need transit. They have their own automobiles, which take them anywhere they want to go, whenever they want to go there. The negative implications of such concentrated automobile use for land use planning, climate change, and the environment generally are staggering, but individual motorists do not think of that when they get into their vehicles. Neither do truckers as they haul the loads that the freight side of the railroad industry no longer cares to carry, but that part of the overall problem is different from the one at issue here. Beyond global implications for transportation generally and personal mobility in particular, the plight of non-motorists always hangs in the balance. The result for them (and you can legitimately say “us” if you are one) is always a loss of mobility, with the looming prospect of being stranded without options, as transit providers cut back not only on how often they serve a locality, but also on the number of localities they actually serve.

Can Our Transit Be Saved?

There is no reason why America cannot only save the trains and the rail transit we have now, but even expand the rail mobility map and the frequency with which its components run. However, it will take a concerted effort, along with the required funding, to achieve that result. Such is always the scenario that is required to solve a crisis, and our transit is facing a crisis of that level of severity right now.

Ultimately, the decisions that will improve non-automobile mobility (and that includes Amtrak, even though “America’s Railroad” is beyond the scope of this series) will ultimately be made by motorists. They include the elected officials who control transit funding, as well as high-level transit managers. Very few of the limited number of Americans who hold that amount of power depend on transit for all their mobility, so very few have actually experienced a genuine need for transit, at least not as adults.

It’s true that some elected officials and the opinion leaders behind them consider transit to be a waste of money, something that should be eliminated, probably because they don’t need it themselves. Famed anti-transit activist Randal O’Toole comes to mind, because the first piece I wrote for Railway Age, almost six years ago, was a rebuttal to a book he had recently written. He lived in a small town with no transit at all, so he would have no personal reason to care about transit. Millions of Americans do not share his lifestyle or his attitude, though. Rather, we are concerned about climate change and the environment and want alternatives to automobile use, even though many Americans have access to an automobile. We are concerned about inclusion, so that non-motorists are not stranded, kept away from opportunities for better jobs, career advancement, or access to places and events that enhance their quality of life. If we depend on transit, we are concerned about losing our personal mobility. If not, we are concerned about having choices, after all, having choices is what “freedom” is all about. We are also concerned about the local economies that support us, and we understand that transit helps people get to jobs, earning money and spending it to support local businesses and improve the local economy.

The media need to play their part. The impending loss of mobility for non-motorists and motorists alike is a significant story, a disaster in the making. Sadly, “ordinary” individuals, including most transit riders, do not have the platform they would need to deliver the message to the people who need to hear it. General media outlets do, and they need to tell the story. Boston advocate and former journalist Dennis Kirpatrick told Railway Age that coverage by Boston media of the MBTA’s financial woes did not have a “breaking news” quality about it. That coverage should instead demonstrate the urgency of a situation that could make life worse for many of the residents of the city and its surrounding region.

Similarly, senior transit managers and members of transit boards are often politically connected, some appointed by a governor, a mayor, or another person with strong political clout and authority. The people who govern and manage transit systems have a responsibility to fight for the funding that will keep their systems in a good state of operation, as well as a good state of repair. That is a fiduciary duty they owe to their riders, especially riders who need their systems to get from one place to another.

I have witnessed such efforts, but very few of them. I once heard announcements on public address systems on the CTA and Metra in Chicago that urged riders to contact their legislators and call for better funding for transit. On a visit to Atlanta, I once covered a “MARTA Matters” rally led by Dr. Beverly Scott, the head of the agency at that time, as part of a campaign for increased funding from the Georgia legislature. Maybe her training, a Ph.D. in political science, helped her prepare for a career in transit leadership. In today’s transit world, it might have been the most-relevant preparation available, but most transit managers came to their careers through other paths. That does not mean that they have some sort of political obligation to keep their profiles low while their agencies are threatened with starvation budgets and the damage they can cause, but many still do. Rather they should consider themselves obligated to fight for their riders as if transit is facing a life-or-death struggle, because it is.

The riders need to fight for their own mobility, too. I came from the rider-advocacy movement, and I know many of the advocates across the country. They are intelligent, knowledgeable, and serious about their efforts to help transit to survive and succeed, because it means mobility for their constituents who ride. Sadly, most transit providers ignore the advocates for their riders or, even worse, fight against them. While transit officials trusting and working with the advocates for their riders is a necessary element of a campaign to keep transit properly transparent, properly funded, and properly operated, the riders need to take their advocates seriously, too. They need to become involved with their transit, learn more about it, and learn to work closely with the advocates who fight for them and for their mobility.

Business leaders need to become more involved, too. Rather than denouncing transit as a waste of money, they should support it, because it brings employees to their workplaces and customers to local businesses. Business leaders must also use their influence to persuade elected officials that, in the words of a campaign by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA): “Transit Means Business!” That goes especially for transit on rails, which represents a physical commitment to the places it serves. Just to cite one example, downtown Los Angeles looked and felt like a ghost town after the city lost its streetcars in the 1960s, a situation that persisted for decades. Now that rail transit has returned to the area, the city’s core has made an amazing comeback. That can happen elsewhere, too, if rail transit thrives. The reverse can also happen if it is allowed to wither and die.

A Continuing Story

I now conclude this series, as summer gives way to fall. The crisis will soon befall transit almost everywhere in the nation when the one-shot COVID-19 relief authorized by Congress for the operating side runs out. That is starting to happen, and this particular ill wind will blow no good for almost all transit and its riders soon. With the apparent exception of New York’s MTA, providers are getting by for the short run, but it is measured in months for too many agencies, and not even measured in years.

It’s already happening at SEPTA. In July, we reported that the agency was “hoping for good news” from the legislature, but it never came; not yet, at least. In the previous article in this series, which ran six days before this one, I noted that SEPTA’s financial woes could get worse as early as this fall. In the middle of that six-day period, on Friday, Sept. 6, Railway Age Executive Editor Marybeth Luczak reported that the agency had already started the process to raise fares. The proposed fare hikes will not be nearly enough to fill in the anticipated shortfall, but it constitutes a signal and an acknowledgement that something has to be done.

Railway Age is a non-partisan publication, and we are here to report what is happening on the railroad and on rail transit. Still, we all know that a big election is coming soon, one where the country is almost evenly divided (at this writing) and almost everybody agrees that the stakes are extremely high, even though many disagree on whose suggested policies would be better for the country. There is no need to go into political details here, but it is clear that the result of the election could determine the prognosis for the improvement, and possibly even the very survival, of the nation’s regional trains and rail transit.

This series has concluded, but the story has not. If transit agencies keep getting more reprieves like the ones they received recently, the story of their post-COVID survival could have more twists, turns, and cliffhangers than the movie serials and radio soap operas from the middle the past century. It could go either way. We will keep reporting these stories to you as they happen, but we must warn you that transit everywhere in the nation is in for a rough ride. So are its riders, and that won’t end anytime soon.

David Peter Alan is one of North America’s most experienced transit users and advocates, having ridden every rail transit line in the U.S., and most Canadian systems. He has also ridden the entire Amtrak and VIA Rail network. His advocacy on the national scene focuses on the Rail Users’ Network (RUN), where he has been a Board member since 2005. Locally in New Jersey, he served as Chair of the Lackawanna Coalition for 21 years and remains a member. He is also a member of NJ Transit’s Senior Citizens and Disabled Residents Transportation Advisory Committee (SCDRTAC). When not writing or traveling, he practices law in the fields of Intellectual Property (Patents, Trademarks and Copyright) and business law. Opinions expressed here are his own.