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Want to save the climate? Start by funding transit operations

The current trend of more driving will make it harder for us to reach our emissions goals. Making public transit a more convenient and reliable option so people can access the things they need while taking shorter or fewer car trips is one way to reverse the trend of more driving.

MARTA buses in Atlanta. Flickr photo by James Williamor.

This post was written by Rayla Bellis, Director of Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America, and Abi Grimminger, T4America Communications Associate. It’s the first of a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here.

Transportation accounts for the largest share of emissions in the US, and cars and trucks are responsible for nearly all of it. To fully decarbonize transportation by 2050, we need to transition to electric vehicles (EVs). But that transition is still decades away, and in the meantime the cumulative impacts of more driving and more emissions will make it harder for us to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. We cannot afford to wait until the 2040s to start bending the curve on transportation emissions: we need to take real action now. And we won’t get there if we continue to do what we’ve been doing: driving more and more (measured as vehicle miles traveled or VMT).

We need to give people better options for getting around without needing a car. That means public transit, and a lot more of it. Public transit isn’t a reliable option for most Americans. While about 80 percent of people in the US live within areas classified as “urban” (which includes the suburbs of urban centers), less than 10 percent of Americans live within walking distance of reliable, high quality transit that comes every 15 minutes. And 45 percent of Americans have no access to transit at all.

Image from TransitCenter’s excellent video, The Case for Federal Transit Operations Support

Yet the federal government gives transit just 20 percent of surface transportation funding, and the rest goes to highways (which often funds highway expansions that make public transit even harder to use). Transit agencies can use this funding to repair and maintain their systems and to build out new services—but they can’t use it to help cover the cost of operating their systems, which accounts for two-thirds of a transit agency’s total expenses. This has put an enormous strain on agencies’ budgets, particularly as they continue to suffer from reduced fare revenue as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We can afford to do better

In partnership with Third Way, Transportation for America recently analyzed 288 of the largest urbanized areas in the U.S. to help us understand just how much we would need to increase transit operating funding in those regions to enable residents to drive less. 60 percent of all driving happens in these 288 urbanized areas. While the scale of CO2 reduction we need isn’t something transit—or EVs, or any other single strategy—can fulfill alone, it turns out we can make real headway with an achievable increase in transit spending.

While more than two-thirds of the urbanized areas analyzed currently spend less than $100 per person on transit operations, there’s a correlation between more transit operations funding and lower amounts of driving in these metro areas. Our analysis found less driving per capita in the areas that spend more on transit operations per person (keep an eye out for a full report soon with more detail on our methodology and analysis results). That means that if we increase operating spending per person across those urbanized areas and continue to scale that spending up over time, we can expect to see meaningful reductions in driving.

We estimate that if we doubled transit spending in all of those urbanized areas by 2050, VMT in those regions will be 6.1 percent below its current growth trajectory. If we triple our investment in transit operations, VMT would be 10.7 percent lower. That’s less time spent commuting, less time in traffic, and less emissions warming our planet.

In fact, doubling or tripling transit spending would be roughly equivalent to taking every single gas-powered car off the road for about an entire day every two months for the next 30 years. If we fail to reach our goals of 100% electric vehicles by 2050, it would be closer to a day every single month with no emissions whatsoever from gas-powered vehicles.

VMT reduction impacts of increased transit spending

The 288 urbanized areas we analyzed spent $48 billion on transit operations in 2019.

By 2050, if we ↧ ↧	By 2050, we would increase annual transit spending to...	And see VMT reduction across those urbanized areas in 2050 of...
...double transit operating spending in each urbanized area	$94 billion	-6.1% (143 billion fewer miles per year than projected)
...triple transit operating spending in each urbanized area	$120 billion	-10.7% (250 billion fewer miles per year than projected)

Estimated using 2019 transit operating spending from the National Transit Database and 2019 per capita VMT from the Federal Highway Administration. Scenarios doubling or tripling transit spending were capped at a maximum of $800 per person in each urbanized area.

While we won’t be able to double or triple transit operating spending overnight, these are investments we can—and need to—start making now. Unfortunately, the federal government is continuing to turn a blind eye to the need for better transit funding if we ever want to reach our climate goals. Though the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act increased federal spending on transit, this legislation provides an historic amount of money for highways and prioritizes car travel. That will encourage driving-oriented road projects and development decisions that make our investments in transit less effective and the service we do have more difficult to access. A transit stop that’s dangerous or difficult to reach is a transit stop that will be underutilized, only being used by those people willing to endure the difficulty or risk. A broad coalition of stakeholders is urging $10 billion more for transit in the budget reconciliation package, which can be used to cover operating costs. Though transit will ultimately need much more than this to enable us to meet our climate goals, $10 billion is an important step in the right direction.

There’s more to this story

It’s not just about pumping more money into transit—how we provide transit service matters. In order to reduce the amount we drive, we’ll need to ensure that transit effectively connects people to the places they need to go. We’ll be doing a series of blog posts analyzing what it would take to build a national transit system that helps get us to our climate goals.

Safety over speed week: Prioritizing safety is intrinsically connected with improving transit service

Nearly every bus transit rider starts and ends their trip with a walk, and decisions made to prioritize vehicle speed over safety often have significant impacts on transit. This excerpt from the new book Better Buses, Better Cities helps explain how better bus transit and prioritizing safety over speed are intrinsically related.

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, where we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here.

The content that follows is an excerpt from “Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit” by Steven Higashide, published by Island Press. Steven is a former colleague of ours at T4America as an outreach associate based in New York a few years ago before moving on to the Tri-State Transportation Campaign and then to TransitCenter, where he today serves as the research director. We are proud to see his book in print and are thankful to him and Island Press for letting us share this long excerpt from Chapter 4 entitled MAKE THE BUS WALKABLE AND DIGNIFIED, sourced from pages 59–61 and 74-75. – Stephen Lee Davis, T4America.

On a Saturday afternoon in April 2010, Raquel Nelson, her 4-year-old son A.J., and her two other children (aged 2 and 9 years) stepped off the bus across the street from their apartment in Marietta, Georgia. It had been a good but long day. Raquel and her children had celebrated a birthday with family and pizza. To get home, they took their first bus from the pizza restaurant to a transit center, where they missed their connecting bus and had to wait more than an hour for the next one.

Home was across a five-lane, divided road. And so, together with several other people who had been on the bus, the Nelson family crossed halfway across the street to wait in the median. As Raquel stopped to gauge traffic, one of the other adults in the group decided to start walking. Raquel’s son A.J. broke free from her grip to follow, and Raquel hurried to catch up.

A.J. was killed moments later, by Jerry Guy, who was behind the wheel of a van despite having “three or four beers” in his system.

Raquel and her 2-year-old daughter were also struck and injured. And yet that was only the beginning of her ordeal.¹

County prosecutors charged Raquel with vehicular homicide, which carried a potential sentence of 3 years in prison. A jury convicted her, and she was sentenced to 12 months’ probation with the option of a retrial, which she chose. Her case wound through the courts for 2 more years before Raquel agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of jaywalking.

Raquel Nelson’s case made national news. But the loss she and her family experienced is replicated in nearly every city on wide “arterial” roads that encourage high speeds. In the City of Los Angeles, for example, 6 percent of streets are responsible for 65 percent of traffic deaths and injuries. When mapped, pedestrian deaths line up on these roads like dominoes.

Because they tend to have important destinations on them, arterial roads also tend to carry the most bus riders. But the tie between transit and walkability goes beyond pedestrian safety. Nearly all transit riders are pedestrians at some point during their trip. In Los Angeles, for example, 84 percent of bus riders get to their bus stop on foot.

The pedestrian experience is the transit experience, then. A bus rider may appreciate frequent and fast service but still be dissatisfied with her trip if she has to trudge through mud on the way to the bus stop, cross the street with her head on a swivel, and wait in the rain with no shelter. Someone who uses a wheelchair may be unable to use the bus at all if there are no sidewalks leading to the stop.

Poor walkability is corrosive to bus ridership and makes it harder to improve transit service. In Staten Island, New York City, transit planners had to make major adjustments to a redesign of the borough’s express buses after riders complained that the changes forced them to walk in the street or on lawns.

Although Austin’s bus network redesign has generally been considered a success, it ran into the same problems. More than a month after the launch of the redesign, Capital Metro was still moving stop locations in response to complaints that people had to transfer in places without good walking infrastructure. “If you’re going to go to more of a grid-based system and you’re going to have more on-street connections, then you really need to look at the pedestrian experience of those intersections,” Capital Metro’s Todd Hemingson said. (As of April 2019, only about 60 percent of streets in Austin have sidewalks.)

Improving the walk to transit, on the other hand, can have measurable impacts on transit ridership. Ja Young Kim, Keith Bartholomew, and Reid Ewing of the University of Utah found that after the Utah Transit Authority built sidewalk connections to bus stops that lacked them, ridership at those stops grew almost twice as fast as at stops in similar neighborhoods that had not been improved. Demand for paratransit was also stemmed near the stops with sidewalk improvements, saving the agency on its budget.

Although walkability and transit can’t be separated, government usually makes its best effort to do so. Just as transit agencies must convince cities to give transit priority on the street, they must rely on local and state government to create a good walking environment. That’s no given.

The state of walking in America represents an enormous collective failure. Even in urban neighborhoods where many people walk, engineering practices that favor drivers tend to degrade the experience. Intersections can be designed with slip lanes that allow cars to gun through turns. Zoning may allow curb cuts that turn the sidewalk into a gauntlet of traffic. The default rule at most intersections is “right turn on red,” intrinsically hostile to people walking because there’s never a time when they can be sure cars won’t turn into their path.

These decisions are rooted in a philosophy that prioritizes vehicle speeds and is often baked into engineering measures and practices. Engineers often assess streets using a metric called “automobile level of service,” where an A grade is free-flowing traffic. A major traffic engineering manual recommends against striping crosswalks unless at least ninety-three pedestrians already cross the intersection per hour—or if five people were hit by cars at the intersection in the past year. Peter Furth, an engineering professor at Northeastern University, has pointed out that “Synchro, the standard software [traffic engineers] use, is based on minimizing auto delay, and it doesn’t even calculate pedestrian delay.”

Although most streets are municipally maintained, most cities require local property owners to maintain sidewalks abutting their property. This means that wealthier neighborhoods tend to have better maintained and safer sidewalks. The further you get from downtown, the more likely it is that sidewalks themselves will shrink, decay, or vanish. Property owners may not be required to build sidewalks at all, which means many cities simply lack sidewalks in a huge portion of their territory.

Fighting for People on Foot

Pedestrian infrastructure doesn’t cost much relative to other transportation infrastructure. Houston’s $83 million in backlogged sidewalk requests could mostly be wiped out by nixing a $70 million project to add an interchange on an area toll road. Even the $1.4 billion price tag to build functional sidewalk on every Denver street doesn’t look so daunting when the Colorado Department of Transportation is spending $1.2 billion in just 4 years to widen Interstate 70, which runs northeast of downtown Denver.

Shelters aren’t particularly expensive either, costing roughly between $5,500 and $12,000 each. In 2017, medium and large transit agencies spent $297 million on infrastructure at bus stops and stations, compared with $2.2 billion on rail stations—or about 6 cents per bus trip and 47 cents per rail trip.

Creating walkable places requires changing municipal processes so that compact planning (creating neighborhoods where there are many destinations worth walking to) and pedestrian-friendly street design become routine.

This often starts with outside advocacy and political action.

The do-it-yourself movements I mentioned earlier in this chapter ultimately seek not to supplant government but to prod it to action. A year after MARTA Army launched its “adopt-a-stop” campaign, the state of Georgia awarded the Atlanta Regional Commission $3.8 million for bus stop signs, shelters, and sidewalks. Cincinnati’s Better Bus Coalition doesn’t just build benches; it has also published an analysis showing that shelters are disproportionately in wealthy neighborhoods. Streetsblog USA runs an annual “Sorriest Bus Stop in America” contest that has gotten governments in Kansas City, Maryland, and Boston to address bus stop walkability.

In Nashville, a long-time neighborhood activist, Angie Henderson, was elected to the city’s Metropolitan Council on a platform of walkable neighborhoods in 2015. Henderson later sponsored and passed a law requiring most developments in inner-city neighborhoods and near commercial centers to include sidewalks or pay into a citywide sidewalk fund. Denver’s City Council created a $4 million fund to help lower-income homeowners fix the sidewalks in front of their houses and budgeted for three new Public Works employees to manage the program and step up enforcement of sidewalk regulations throughout the city. And Seattle’s Department of Transportation has broken with the engineering guideline that says crosswalks should be striped only where many people already cross or where there are frequent pedestrian crashes.

Within transit agencies themselves, it’s important to raise the profile of the walk and the wait. Metro Transit’s Better Bus Stops Program is a great example. The decision to elevate a routine process into a branded program gave bus stops new stature throughout the agency.

“[The process of siting bus shelters] could be thought of as very dull and unimportant,” Farrington said. “But to package it, to get a great little logo and have it be a substantial program with its own name and people, it’s been a positive spiral of more resources and more support of the work.” She said that staff who had previously worked on park-and-ride stations were now spending more time on bus stops. True, in some ways the program was an outlier, funded by an Obama-era discretionary program, Ladders of Opportunity, that no longer exists. But transit agencies could replicate it using funding from many other sources.

Metro Transit’s program also offers a clear example of how well-resourced, well-planned public engagement can strengthen and educate both the transit agency and the communities it operates in.

Thanks again to Steven Higashide and Island Press for allowing us to run this excerpt. You can buy his book direct from Island Press or find links to purchase at other various outlets there. -Ed

Leaders say St. Petersburg transit measure key to economic success

Voters in Pinellas County, Florida, which includes St. Petersburg and borders Tampa, have the chance to approve a one percent sales tax next week that will raise $130 million per year. The money will kickstart a 24-mile light rail system, improve and expand their bus system by 65 percent, build bus rapid transit lines, and increase important regional connections.

Passage would be a major step forward for St. Petersburg and the Tampa Bay region, coming four years after a similar measure in neighboring Hillsborough County narrowly failed.

The plan, known as Greenlight Pinellas, would make a key change to the county’s current funding mechanism for their bus system, erasing the transit millage on property taxes and replacing it with a one percent sales tax. That’s a key change, as it shifts the burden of paying for transit from property owners only, to one that’s shared by the large numbers of tourists and visitors visiting the region. As much as a third of the revenue would eventually come from tourists, according to Greenlight.

The Tampa Tribune endorsed the measure, especially the aspect to shift the funding burden away from solely Pinellas property owners. “Tourism is at record levels as the recession fades. It’s time the county adopted a comprehensive mass transit vision reflecting that dynamic growth.”

The plan would almost immediately improve bus service and increase frequency, and will eventually expand service by about 65 percent, adding new weekend and night service, as well as more frequent service to job centers like Tampa International Airport and downtown St. Pete and Tampa to better connect employees to jobs.

Rapid bus and BRT service will be added on six of the busiest, most productive corridors, and work will begin on a 24-mile light rail line that runs across the county, from Clearwater in the northwest, to downtown St. Pete in the southeast. (Pinellas will still have to assemble other local, state and federal funding to complete the $1.6 billion rail project, but importantly, this measure would also raise enough money to cover the operations of that line once it is up and running.)

The business community has been full-throated in its support of the measure. As of October 10^th, supporters had raised over $1 million to support the campaign. The Tampa Bay Partnership, the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, Sykes Enterprises, Bright House Networks, TransAmerica Insurance and Derby Lane, the Tampa Bay Rays and Lightning, and numerous other local small businesses are supporting the measure.

Michael Kalt, a senior vice president with the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, told Greenlight that, “Transit is really the linchpin to economic success and improving the quality of life in any major metropolitan area.”

The Tampa Bay Times supported the measure in a strong op-ed. “Tampa Bay is the largest metropolitan area without a viable transportation system that includes bus service and some form of rail.” This project, if approved, will be the first step in “correcting a weakness” of the Tampa Bay region, the editorial continued. Their columnist Joe Henderson also argues for the passage asking his readers, ”How much longer does it take you to get from Point A to B now than it did five years ago? You think an extra penny in sales tax is expensive? Try measuring the loss when businesses take their new jobs elsewhere because of the congestion.”

The project has major political support in addition to the private support, with endorsements from the mayors of the four largest cities and Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL), who said, “This is an active community; this is a community on the go, but we need better transportation options.” Encouraging her constituents to vote yes, she said, “When you do that, you will be making an investment in yourself.”

The organized opposition, No Tax for Tracks, worries about the burden of increasing the sales tax one cent, bringing it to a total of eight percent. They are also concerned about low ridership, though Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority has reported record boardings the last few years on its buses.

Perhaps no one will be watching this measure more closely than their counterparts across Tampa Bay.

It’s no coincidence that some of the strongest support has been coming from leaders there in Tampa and Hillsborough County: They have high hopes for a referendum of their own to expand existing transit service, build new light rail and some new regional connections, especially after seeing a measure fail four years ago. This new light rail line from Clearwater to downtown St. Petersburg could be the beginning of so much more.

“Perhaps, the rail line represents what could be the start of a regional system across the Howard Frankland Bridge that might one day link the airport, the University of South Florida, the commercial hubs in Gateway, West Shore and downtown Tampa,” said the Times editorial.

Stay tuned next week to hear the results of the voting.

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Pinellas County is one of a handful of state and local measures to raise revenue to invest transportation. For more information on the measures we’re keeping a close eye on next week, make sure to check out our full Transportation Vote 2014 page.

To better serve the states and localities that are currently campaigning (or hope to campaign) for smart transportation investments, we are hosting the Capital Ideas Conference in Denver on November 13-14^th. There’s still time to register, so learn more today.

If you want to know more about ballot measures related specifically to transit, turn to the Center for Transportation Excellence, who tracks all of those measures and aggregates numbers on results nationwide on an ongoing basis.

Guest post: public transit made accessible in Mississippi’s capital city

In the midst of discouraging news coming from hundreds of transit agencies across the country facing difficult choices in the midst of budget crises (see our map), we bring some encouraging news from Mississippi, and an update to a story we’ve covered previously. This post was written by T4 America supporter and friend Dr. Scott Crawford, who we’ve periodically been in contact with about incomplete streets and the state of public transportation in Jackson, Mississippi. (Read more about Dr. Crawford and Jackson.)

Our congratulations go out to Dr. Crawford — a true hero for Jackson.

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For years, the capital of Mississippi ran a public transit system that was largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. Fixed route buses routinely ran without working wheelchair lifts and the complementary paratransit vans were booked up at least a week in advance. The system was slowly allowed to deteriorate as the existing fleet aged and became unreliable for even able-bodied people.

Three years ago, a group of people with disabilities in the Jackson metro area began a movement to change things. When phone calls and letters failed to make an impression or a difference, we protested outside city hall, forcing the city to appoint an ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliance officer. That was just the beginning. As lead plaintiff in the case and a wheelchair user myself with multiple sclerosis, I photographically documented countless times I was left on the side of the road by non-working bus lifts.

Bus Lift Failure Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Dewone Banks waves goodbye to a bus operator who is forced to leave him after his lift fails to work. The bus was more than a decade old. Photo by Scott Crawford

After sending complaints to the Federal Transit Administration’s Office of Civil Rights and seeing little in the way of progress, in September 2008, Disability Rights Mississippi filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of myself and others. Not for money, but for compliance with the ADA. In the summer of 2009, the Federal Department of Justice’s Section on Disability Rights got involved and intervened on behalf of the plaintiffs and joined the lawsuit. The City threatened to shut down JATRAN altogether and serve no one rather than comply with the equity requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They eventually relented at the last possible minute at the urging of the plaintiffs and the Department of Justice.

Stranded at night Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

The author is stranded into the night (December 10th, 2007) after three buses failed to pick him up. After about six hours, the police from a neighboring jurisdiction loaded him into a pickup truck to get him home (about 10:30pm). Credit photo to Scott Crawford

More than two years later, Jackson’s Public Transit (JATRAN) has eight new paratransit buses to take people with disabilities to their doctor’s appointments, shopping centers, and jobs. In addition, there are now thirteen brand new regular fixed route buses with reliable ramps and lifts so that people in wheelchairs will no longer be forced to watch others board while they are left stranded on the side of the road.

I was on a bus several weeks ago when I met an older woman in a power wheelchair. She asked me if I rode the buses frequently, and I told her, “All the time!” The woman replied, “This is my first time — they never used to pick me up.” She added that she was so happy to be out of her apartment and going places again. “I want to get an all-day pass and just ride!”

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978).

New Paratransit Buses Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

Dr. Scott Crawford tests out the lift on a new paratransit bus for JATRAN in Jackson, Mississippi.

Atlanta-area transit system 14 days from shutting down, 2 million rides disappearing

C-Tran Clayton County Transit Service Eliminated

Flyer from the Clayton County C-Tran website, which advertises their service as “Tomorrow’s Transportation Today.”

Clayton County, one of metro Atlanta’s five core counties — Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport is partially in Clayton — will terminate all transit service in 14 days. The transit service, which provides over 2 million rides each year on buses “full to bursting” with riders, according to MARTA CEO Beverly Scott, will shut down service entirely, leaving the 50% or more of C-Tran riders with no regular access to a car stranded.

Public transportation (or anything that provides people with mobility) is really about access. It gives people access to opportunity, access to daily needs, access to a job, access to life — and maybe even the means to improve the quality of that life.

One story highlighted in October in this piece from the Atlanta Journal Constitution shows the vital connection that C-Tran makes for one Clayton County resident:

Twenty-year-old Bridget Milam takes Clayton County’s bus system, C-Tran, wherever she goes. She takes it to Brown Mackie College in Atlanta, where she’s getting an associate’s degree in early childhood education. She rides it to her job at a day care center. She has never had a car and can’t afford one now. C-Tran is her lifesaver. Not for long.

…[she] may have to put school and her day care job on hold. “It means I have to find a job closer to home, in walking distance,” she said. “It would probably be fast food.” …Milam expressed frustration that she will “have to settle rather than doing something that could further my career.”

Access to the opportunity that public transit provides can mean the difference between becoming a teacher one day — or a future of asking customers if “they’d like fries with that?”

Despite a proposal to raise fares dramatically, the deficit was still at $1.3 million, and the 5 county commissioners voted 4-1 last year to shut the service down completely, asserting in a statement that “paving roads is a primary duty of the county. Public transit isn’t.”

The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority disagreed strongly with that view. “In Georgia, local roads are a local responsibility, and local transit is a local responsibility,” GRTA Deputy Director Jim Ritchey told the AJC.

Unfortunately for Bridget Milam and thousands of others in Clayton County who depend on C-Tran each day to get to work, class, the doctor or pretty much anything else, Clayton County leaders don’t see it that way — leaving them stranded at the station come April 1.

If you’ve been affected by cuts in transit service or fare increases — especially if you’re in Clayton County, Georgia — tell us your story and we’ll help share it with Congress.

UPDATED: Like this touching story that Carmen, a now former C-Tran rider, shared with us on that page:

Hello. My name is Carmen and I’ve been a passenger on CTRAN’s paratransit service for as long as they have been in service. I work for Delta Air Lines and use the service to get back and forth to work. At this time, I have to move closer to my job in the Fulton County area. This is a hardship because now I have to cancel my lease agreement with my current apartment complex in order to move. They have been very helpful but I really did not want to move because of the negligence of Clayton County managing the taxpayers’ funds. Not everyone can afford to move at the last minute. I truly hope that Clayton County uses the funds they do have in reserve, as mentioned by Eldrin Bell, to keep CTRAN running. If the Commisioners or their family members were in our position maybe they would look at the situation differently. But of course those that are not affected are not concerned at all and that is a shame they are not here for the people.

Update 2: Read this superb and touching story from the LA Times on the last day of service.

Conservatives and public transportation; join us for an upcoming debate

Conservatives and Public Transportation book cover

UPDATED: This session has been rescheduled for 12/14. If you already signed up with the link below, you won’t need to do a thing, and should get an email from us about the change.

Everyone has to get from point A to point B at some point each day. Though most people don’t rate it as one of their most important issues, transportation is something that affects everyone, whether we realize it or not.

If you are not convinced that the need for transportation reform is an issue that transcends labels and partisanship, you’ll definitely want to join us for what should be an interesting online debate/discussion on Monday, December 7 December 14. A handful of experts from differing perspectives are going to discuss the viewpoints shared in a recent book by William Lind and the late Paul Weyrich called “Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation.”

William Lind, one of the book’s co-authors, will be expanding on the arguments made in his book; that public transportation is something conservatives should embrace, because it can protect national security, promote economic development, support tight-knit communities and reduce congestion; and how many libertarians and conservatives often ignore the fact that our interstate highway system has been a massively subsidized project, made possible only through heavy government intervention.

Sam Staley, a critic of mass transit who serves as director of urban and land use policy at the libertarian Reason Foundation, will provide an alternative perspective to Lind. We’ll also have John Robert Smith, president and CEO of Reconnecting America and former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi; and Bill Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA).

Join us online for the debate on Monday, December 7 December 14 at 3:00 p.m. (Eastern)

The tone of the book by Lind and Weyrich, published jointly by the Free Congress Foundation and Reconnecting America, is perhaps best captured by former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson, a Republican, who writes in the forward: “why do academic conservatives seem to believe that all transit is bad, when as a real-world conservative, I know it isn’t?”

Weyrich and Lind do a thorough job of knocking down myths peddled by some right-wing groups, like the “decline” of bus and light-rail. Many of these numbers are attributable to policy choices that gave preference or hefty subsidies to the automobile. Building codes and tax policy, for instance, have effectively subsidized auto-oriented growth for decades.

The authors are also unafraid to take a jab or two at some of the libertarian think tanks that regularly oppose funding for public transportation. Many of these critics decry support for light rail and bus systems as “subsidies,” but when offering their own proposals, often ignore the evidence that building more interstates or highways requires massive government support as well.

While critics like to label light rail projects as social engineering, it is hard not to look at our current transportation system without coming to the same conclusion, Weyrich and Lind argue.

“In no other society in history have places to live, places to work and places to shop been separated from one another, separated so widely that you need a car to get from one to another.”

There’s a old argument that transit must be a waste of money, because it carries only a small percentage of all trips. As Lind points out in the Streetfilms video below, the critics are disingenuously comparing apples to oranges. 1/2 of all Americans have no access to transit. And of the half that do, 1/2 of those say that the service is inadequate or unsatisfactory. If you break it down to a corridor where transit is available as a viable option to automobile travel (“transit competitive trips, as Lind calls it”), public transportation may be carrying a number closer to 40% of the total trips.

Weyrich and Lind make a thorough economic case for public transportation, offering superb guidance for making a compelling case to a conservative for supporting public transportation. But they also introduce a cultural element that is equally compelling. To them, reviving downtown streetcars or beefing up bus service does more than bring people to their destination and fuel development. It adds “flavor” and lifeblood to urban centers, spawning community. This may be a conservative sentiment, but it’s one that appeals to a broad audience.

Streetfilms had a chance to interview William Lind at the recent Rail~Volution conference in Boston about his book and produced this terrific short video that is a must-watch.

Stephen Lee Davis contributed to this post.