To Put Transit on Stronger Footing, Stop Lavish Subsidies for Driving

There’s an interesting conversation happening in urbanism circles about how to make transit financially sustainable, going back to a piece in CityLab last June from University of Minnesota professor David Levinson. Levinson made the case for running transit like a public utility, not a government agency.

There’s one thing that’s largely missing from these discussions, argues Cap’n Transit, and it’s a big one: Transit isn’t operating on a level playing field as long as roads and parking receive such huge subsidies. Glossing over the importance of this disparity is what he calls “transportation myopia”:

Transportation myopia: the condition of seeing transit as a self-contained system rather than as an option in competition with private cars and other modes, and of seeing transit as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Levinson himself acknowledges that transit was “hugely profitable” until competition from publicly funded roads and parking took away their ridership. And he acknowledges in his Way #2 that this could be reversed by charging the full cost for those roads and parking facilities. This is essentially the Magic Formula for Transit Ridership described by Michael Kemp back in 1973. And that’s really all you need.

What we need to talk about is how to get full cost pricing for roads, including potential challenges and ways to overcome them. But for some reason Levinson doesn’t talk about any of that, he just goes on to talk about smart cards and land value capture and bond markets.

Elsewhere on the Network today: BikeWalkLee shares an article indicating that Florida courts have pretty much given hit-and-run drivers a get-out-of-jail-free card. The Political Environment reports that Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker says he would “totally privatize” transportation. And Street Smart explains why a traditional street grid distributes traffic better than a highway.