Running frequent service: World-Class American Transit

Investing in thousands of transit vehicles will require commensurate increases in operating expenditures to pay for their maintenance, fuel, drivers, and other operating expenses as these vehicles are used to provide more service. To run the new vehicle fleet acquired under the world-class transit scenario, we would need to invest $989 billion in transit operations above projected baseline levels between 2026 and 2045, or $2.48 trillion, including baseline spending. Under this scenario, the U.S., using funds from all revenue sources (including fares, which accounted for approximately 30 percent of revenue for high-performing agencies), would need to invest $170 billion to run the world-class transit fleet of nearly 180,000 vehicles at its peak in 2045.

Assumptions

Operations cost assumptions are derived from 2023 National Transit Database data by summing the total reported operating costs for each fixed-route transit mode, including fuel, salaries, tires, facilities, and other miscellaneous costs. We then divided those costs by the size of the transit vehicle fleet, as defined by the number of vehicles operated at maximum service. This may overestimate the costs of operating a new vehicle introduced into revenue service, as the total operating cost includes the cost to operate and maintain all vehicles in a fleet, not just those deployed at maximum service. By assuming static operations costs, this scenario also ignores the economies of scale associated with operating a larger fleet, thanks to shared staff, maintenance equipment, or improvements in automation or fleet management that may develop over time. To develop an estimate for bus operations, we derived an annual operations cost for buses by averaging commuter bus, motor bus, bus rapid transit, and trolleybus expenditures. This assumed average is above the cost to operate the average transit bus in all of the United States, but falls in line with per-vehicle operations costs in cities with higher costs of living.