Overturning a generations-old assumption that subsidizing public transit operations is the fast track to ruining the service, a new study out of Baltimore’s Morgan University finds that transit subsidies increase efficiency.
It was a simple but radical finding, writes Streetsblog USA. “Researchers found that metro areas that received more government subsidies per capita were more likely to run buses and trains with lots of passengers on board, rather than running inefficient, wasteful routes with just a few heavily subsidized riders per vehicle.”
“We were flabbergasted by the outcome; it wasn’t what I expected at all,” study lead author and Morgan State associate professor of urban planning Gregory Newmark told Streetsblog. “Basically, we think people have been measuring this all wrong.”
One past error, he said, has been the decision to calculate efficiency “at the level of the individual transit agency—even in metros with multiple operators that riders move seamlessly between.”
“That is not how any rider sees their transit system,” said Newmark, citing San Francisco Bay Area riders, who have access to no less than 26 transit agencies, as an example.
“If you transfer from a bus to a BART train using the same fare media, you’re not super sensitive to the fact that those are two separate operators,” Newmark explained. “You see it as one unified system, which is the way it should be.”
To more accurately reflect this reality, the study defined “transit” as “all the vehicles in an urbanized area’s ‘transit shed’, regardless of which agency’s name is on the side of the vehicle,” writes Streetsblog. It also simplified the meaning of “efficiency,” looking merely at “the simple ratio between how many miles transit passengers in the region collectively travel and how many miles transit vehicles in that region collectively travel.”
With fresh metrics to hand, the new study busts anti-subsidy dogma—and discovers something else along the way. Regions receiving the highest levels of subsidy weren’t just the most efficient, “they also generated the most revenue from fares,” writes Streetsblog, offering New York City as an example.
NYC “subsidized transit to the tune of a whopping US$445 per resident per year between 2016 and 2019, but generated $565 in revenue and had the highest efficiency score of any region in America, with an average of 27.4 passengers per vehicle during the study period.”
Car-dependent Phoenix, by contrast, “received just $97 in subsidies per person annually, collected only $20 in revenues, and had the lowest efficiency score by far, with just 8.7 people aboard every bus and train.”
Newmark’s findings should be wind in the sails of a campaign by Ottawa Centre Member of Provincial Parliament Joel Harden to Fund Transit Now! Harden is circulating a public petition asking the Ontario government to “immediately invest $750 million in transit operations” and, more broadly, to “return to 50-50 cost sharing with municipalities.”
Citing a December, 2023 Ekos poll commissioned by the David Suzuki Foundation, Harden’s petition page says 82% of Ontarians support more public transit funding.
