Transportation For America » A grim milestone: 80 U.S. transit systems facing cutbacks

A grim milestone: 80 U.S. transit systems facing cutbacks

February 27, 2009
By Andrew Bielak

The Monterey-Salinas Transit System in California is one of the 80 systems chronicled on our map facing job cuts, service cuts, or fare increases. Photo submitted by Danny Avina and the MST.

Here at Transportation for America, we’ve spent a lot of time documenting examples across the country of transit agencies cutting service, raising fares, or laying off workers to cope with slashed budgets and growing deficits. In nearly every instance we’ve found, there’s a similar pattern — declining state and federal aid, paired with decreasing revenue, pushes a local transit agency to make cuts, even while ridership remains at all time highs as residents look for cleaner or more affordable ways to get to work or go to the store.

Unfortunately, we’ve hit a grim new milestone in our search for transit cuts. Transportation for America has now documented 80 communities across the United States (even stretching up to Alaska) being hit by these service reduction, fare increases, and layoffs. You can look at all the cuts we’ve found on our transit cuts page. (Continue to let us know if we’re missing any.)

At a time when cash-strapped Americans are continuing to drive less, these harsh cutbacks are hitting people who depend on transit service the most incredibly hard. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment will provide some assistance by feeding $8.4 billion into local transit agencies across the country, the language in the bill does not allow agencies to spend a single cent to help them with keeping their systems running, which would prevent some of these harsh cuts. Agencies might get stimulus money to buy new buses or railcars, but they won’t be able to pay the drivers to operate them or the maintenance workers to keep them running.

People in every corner of the United States are being affected by draconian cuts in a service that connects them to their jobs, their schools, and their communities. Ultimately the lesson here is simple — If we want to provide a down payment on a greener future and stronger economy, we need to provide public transportation with the robust investment it deserves.

If you’d like to see that situations like this become a thing of the past, sign your name onto our Platform urging Congress to make sure that our transportation spending charts a course for a bold new direction.

One Response to “A grim milestone: 80 U.S. transit systems facing cutbacks”

Adam on
March 9th, 2009 12:17 pm

CDTA (the Albany, NY-area transit system) has already made service cuts and is planning a fare increase for April 1. See here: http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=763089&category=BUSINESS

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