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Public Transit Gets Funded-for Now

The infrastructure deal won't dissuade the GOP from looking for new
ways to defund public transportation.

 

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. (Thomas Slusser/The Tribune-Democrat via AP)

 

****

**** 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 came within a few billion dollars of 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.

To be sure, Senate Democrats and the administration caved to Republicans
for several hundred billion dollars less than the original White House
plan. The American Jobs Plan envisioned $165 billion in new spending on
mass transit and passenger and freight rail; the bipartisan deal has
$105 billion. (For its part, the INVEST Act had proposed $109 billion
for transit and $95 billion for passenger and freight rail.)

New climate programs were also 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.

**Read all of our infrastructure coverage here**

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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.

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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.

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.

 

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