One of the biggest reasons that our country fails to provide convenient, affordable, and rapid public transportation service in cities and towns of all sizes is the fact that highways receive 80 percent of all federal transportation funding. This is all due to an arbitrary policy started in 1982 that limits transit to only 20 percent of these funds.
For almost four decades, Congress has severely underfunded public transportation, leaving millions of Americans reliant on deteriorating transit systems with infrequent, inconvenient, and unreliable service—or leaving them without any transit option at all. This particularly hurts people of color, who make up 60 percent of all transit riders, and over one million rural households that rely on transit.
It’s time to fix this. Send a message to your House representative urging them to cosponsor a groundbreaking new resolution calling for equal funding for highways and transit.
