Third Way Archives - Transportation For America

Transit adaptability during the COVID-19 pandemic

Transit agencies across the United States have struggled with decreased ridership, safety hazards, and low morale as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet some have responded by changing their approach to better serve everyday riders, make transit free or more affordable, and rethink what the future of transit should look like to reduce emissions and provide access for those who need it most.

This post was written by Devin Willis, program associate at Smart Growth America. It is the fourth of a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here. Some of the agencies profiled in this piece were interviewed with support from the Kresge Foundation.

This series has explored how public transit is an essential part of mitigating climate change by reducing emissions. Connecting more people to their everyday destinations via public transit offers a way to cut back on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and transportation emissions.

We’ve been writing this series against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has presented unprecedented challenges for transit agencies and the millions of riders they serve. Transit providers all over the country are struggling with revenue loss due to the massive ridership drop in 2020, service cuts, driver shortages and illness, vaccine skepticism, and low morale. Although the funds for transit in the 2021 infrastructure bill will help, those funds can’t help fund operations for most transit agencies or undo the damage caused by the pandemic. (The American Rescue Plan, passed during the pandemic, does specifically provide emergency operations support for transit agencies.)

This is a slight detour from our series about the potential of reducing emissions with more transit, but we wanted to profile a few transit agencies that shifted their approach during this historic pandemic to provide better access for their riders and rethink the future of transit in their communities—both of which are stepping stones to more significant improvements that can help reduce emissions.

Richmond, VA preserved ridership levels with fare-free transit and a past network redesign

Sheltered Richmond bus stop by a bus only lane — *GRTC bus rapid transit. Flickr photo by BeyondDC*.

Unlike many transit agencies nationwide, Richmond’s public transit only suffered a relatively modest drop in ridership, and has already recovered local bus ridership to pre-pandemic levels. This is likely due in part to a handful of bold actions on the part of the city government and the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC). GRTC CEO Julie Timm, hired just six months before the pandemic, attributes their success to three main steps taken:

1) The strength of the 2018 network redesign connecting essential workers to jobs; 2) the extensive COVID protective measures enacted early and throughout the pandemic to protect staff and riders; and 3) the ongoing commitment to Zero Fare operations to protect the health and financial stability of our riders. GRTC’s focus on connecting people to essential resources resulted in higher sustained ridership.

As Timm notes, before the pandemic in 2018, GRTC implemented a significant redesign of its bus routes to improve access and produce faster, more consistent service. Their redesign includes new route names and numbers (routes are now named after major roads that are well known to locals like Hull Street), increased bus frequency, and easier connections. This service redesign successfully produced an increase in ridership every month between June 2018 and February 2020, reaching a full 29 percent increase over that time period and providing a solid foundation to build upon during the difficulties of the pandemic.

The most notable change that GRTC made during the pandemic was the decision by the GRTC and Mayor Levar Stoney in March of 2020 to suspend all fare collection from bus riders. In Richmond, the majority of the bus service ridership and revenue comes from the often economically distressed households of essential and low-income riders. This shift to 100 percent free transit spared many families and workers from having to choose between their bus fare and other needs like food, medicine, and employment access.

While Richmond was not the only city to introduce fare-free policies during the pandemic, GRTC is among the more successful cities to do so, effectively preserving the city’s bus ridership and maintaining the zero fare policy longer term. And two years later, GRTC is continuing to offer fare-free transit while most other cities that did so have since returned to their previous fare policies. The GRTC was awarded $8 million in state grant funding from the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation to continue experimenting with the effects of zero fare policy over the next three years through June of 2025. The City of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University have agreed to match this funding in support of the zero fare policy and its positive effect on bus riders.

Atlanta, GA looks to restructure service to respond to changing needs

*MARTA buses in Atlanta. Flickr photo by James Williamor.*

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Agency (MARTA) had approximately 110 bus routes with over four million passengers per month. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic MARTA, like many other US transit agencies, watched ridership crater. And in the intervening two years of the pandemic, they have struggled to bring their ridership back to pre-pandemic levels. At present, MARTA’s ridership is approximately 65 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Similar to Richmond’s 2018 redesign but taking place during the pandemic, MARTA launched a major initiative to restructure bus service as a response to the pandemic and to better address the needs of residents. MARTA is currently leading a major online and in-person community engagement effort, soliciting feedback and ideas regarding new potential bus routes and service types. MARTA is posing key questions to its riders directly about the tradeoffs between service frequency and breadth of coverage directly: do riders want to see fewer routes with more reliable, frequent service between highly-trafficked areas (similar to the changes Richmond made, as well as Columbus and Houston) or more routes in more neighborhoods but less convenient service on those routes? Following the engagement, the proposed redesign concept will be released in the spring of 2022.

In addition to the bus network redesign, MARTA has also begun to experiment with mobile ticketing and fare collection to ensure the wellbeing of transit operators and riders. The agency added a mobile ticketing system in order to make transit use more contactless and limit the spread of coronavirus. MARTA hopes to make these changes permanent.

Pittsburgh, PA reroutes buses to better serve low-income riders

Pittsburgh’s Port Authority of Allegheny County lost 80 percent of its ridership during the coronavirus pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, the Port Authority’s transit network was historically focused on connecting suburban commuters to downtown Pittsburgh from residential and suburban areas in the surrounding region. When the pandemic hit and many of those office jobs switched temporarily or permanently to remote work, this type of commuter ridership dried up almost completely.

Like many other transit agencies, the pandemic spurred the Port Authority to reconsider how best to serve its lower-income passengers who rely on public transportation and may not have other options. Pittsburgh increased bus and rail frequency for 37 percent of the neighborhoods within its service area. This is part of a larger shift away from commuter routes and toward providing more service in low-income neighborhoods. Pittsburgh’s transit agency has also added more off-peak and weekend hours to accommodate riders who do not work on a 9-to-5 schedule.

The Port Authority also implemented changes in the fare system to encourage different types of riders to use the bus system. They recently introduced a modest fare proposal that would restructure the bus fare pass from a calendar-based weekly and monthly pass system to a more flexible 7- and 31-day pass system. This move is a good first step as it removes the bus pass from the commuter-centric five-day week and allows the bus system to better serve non-commuters such as persons traveling on the weekend or outside of rush hours. Locals have pushed for even more significant changes, including fare-free service or a similar policy. One proposal recommends that fares be limited for low-income passengers who are SNAP/EBT beneficiaries.

What’s next

The steps these agencies have taken are examples of what other agencies can do to increase ridership and safety in the pandemic. While the challenges faced by transit agencies during the COVID-19 crisis are very real and there are not easy solutions, the agencies profiled here were able to respond to the changing needs that they observed, focusing on providing access for those who need it most, potentially reducing emissions in the process by improving access and ridership. This type of responsive, nimble approach to transportation infrastructure will help make transit a viable alternative to driving and will help us reach our climate goals.

Reducing emissions with better transit, part three: Examples from leading cities

*Flickr/Creative Commons of a Metro Transit METRO C Line bus photo by Tony Webster. https://www.flickr.com/photos/diversey/49040491042.*

Greater transit use is key for lowering emissions, and cities across America are reconsidering how they serve their residents with public transit—and the land uses that encourage better service and ridership. Several cities are laying the groundwork to make this happen—even outside of the “transit hotspots” one may expect.

This post was written by T4America policy intern Jackson Pierce. This post is the third in a series of posts on this topic—find the full set here.

In our first and second installments of this series, we showed how proper funding for transit operations and for increasing transit access are a one-two punch that makes transit more useful, lessening the need to drive and in turn lowering emissions. The historic influx of transit funding coming from the infrastructure bill provides an opportunity to better connect people to the jobs and services they need while reducing climate impacts. These improvements will also help address equity concerns by providing better quality service to more people who urgently need it. In our third installment, we highlight how Houston, Columbus, Austin, and Minnesota’s Twin Cities have made strides toward better service and smarter planning by focusing on providing better transit access to adapt today’s limited funding to existing infrastructure.

Houston and Columbus rescued their bus systems from low ridership by starting fresh

Houston—with a population ranked 4^th in the nation by city proper, 5^th by immediate metro area and 9^th by expanded metro area—is infamous for its wide highways, sprawling cityscape, poor walking infrastructure in many areas, and nearly ubiquitous accommodation of the motor vehicle. Yet Houston has also become a public transit leader by significantly redesigning its bus service from the ground up in 2015 to focus on giving as many people as possible access to frequent, high quality transit, with help from transit consultants Jarrett Walker & Associates.

Houston is recognized as a leader for good reason. The city redrew its former bus network from scratch, allowing METRO (the city’s transit agency) to consolidate redundant routes into more frequent, centralized patterns that served population centers more often.

*Houston’s frequent bus routes before and after the redesign.*

On August 15^th, 2015, a network of mostly infrequent bus routes converged downtown, which was not where most bus riders needed to go in the very decentralized metro area. On August 16^th, these same buses ran on a brand-new network, a grid of 22 frequent routes that allowed access to multiple spread-out dense activity centers and neighborhoods. It was a transformation that required no new resources (outside of signage and wayfinding changes), just a smarter approach that recognized the city’s changing development patterns. (Read Smart Growth America’s longer 2015 profile of this story, just before the changes went into effect, which details the planning and work that went into it.)

There are a few things worth recognizing when discussing the replicability of Houston’s plan in other cities. Houston’s old network had clear redundancy in its routes. In other cities these routes may not exist, or have been cut in the past, so a comparable result to Houston’s “cost-neutral” solution may require greater investment overall or adding more resources elsewhere. Houston is also anchored by the Red Line, one of the most successful modern light rail projects in the country, and having that service as a network cornerstone bolstered METRO’s ridership on both modes.

While Houston is a popular example of a completely redesigned network, the idea has been successfully replicated at smaller scales.

*By Ɱ – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89607531*

Columbus: Before Columbus redesigned its routes in 2017, for example, their bus map had been largely unchanged since 1974—even though the region had become one of the fastest-growing in the country. COTA (the Central Ohio Transit Authority) didn’t have the fleet size or duplicative routes that Houston’s METRO did, but managed to add seven frequent routes to their previous total of three, including two new crosstown routes that matched the city’s multi-centered development patterns.

Equity was a major concern during Columbus’ route redesign, leading Columbus to emphasize improving the frequency of their routes on weekends. Columbus also introduced their CMAX rapid bus line in 2018. While not “true” bus rapid transit—lacking dedicated lanes, off-board fare payment, and frequent headways on weekends—it still provides a solid anchor service for COTA’s other routes to feed into.

*Frequent routes on COTA before and after the update.*

Despite a nationwide decrease in transit ridership in the 2010s, Houston and Columbus both grew their ridership with their redesigns. Within a year of opening Houston saw a six percent growth in system ridership, and before the pandemic, Columbus’ ridership was up four percent overall since the 2017 redesign. This occurred because both cities updated their transit network to match changes in development patterns, improving transit access in the process.

In Austin, a strong baseline is paying off

*CC photo of an Austin bus by I-ride capital metro on Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/i-ride/5179709865/*

Austin’s population has nearly doubled from 2000-2020 and its transportation systems are struggling to keep up, but the region’s major transit agency, Capital Metro, is working its way toward an accessible and intuitive system.

In 2010 Austin launched Capital Metrorail, a 32-mile commuter rail line that failed to draw significant riders, because it runs infrequently and misses much of the city’s density. To address that gap, in 2014, Capital Metro launched MetroRapid, a rapid bus system (similar to Columbus’ CMAX) featuring two lines making limited stops along some of the city’s main north-south corridors, hitting the neighborhoods that Metrorail missed, including the downtown core, south Austin, and the University of Texas. And in 2018, Capital Metro also embarked upon a full bus network redesign, which they dubbed “CapRemap.”

*Austin’s current high frequency transit network.*

CapRemap followed the principles of Houston and Columbus’ work, achieving similar results. A year after CapRemap’s release, the total bus system’s ridership had increased by about 4 percent and MetroRapid’s increase was about 6 percent—indicating that improving the grid of routes that increase accessibility across the city also strengthens the core of the system. Capital Metro also introduced new standards of mapping and signage that make Austin’s buses easier to use and navigate.

These improvements contributed to the success of a ballot initiative in November 2020 for the agency’s much more ambitious $7 billion ProjectConnect plan (click to see a map.) At the center of that plan are two light rail lines, which largely follow the current MetroRapid routes, paired with the introduction of new MetroRapid upgrades for some of the busiest existing bus routes. ProjectConnect is evidence that a well-planned baseline system will grow public support for more substantial infrastructure through incremental upgrades.

The Twin Cities are focused on serving corridors with the highest driving demand

Compared to the prior examples, Minnesota’s Twin Cities are taking a more incremental and perhaps unconventional approach to transit improvement and network strengthening. Like in Houston, many of the region’s main activity centers—like downtown Minneapolis, downtown St. Paul and suburban Bloomington—are connected by well-used local light rail services, which are reinforced by a grid of crosstown bus routes. Sixteen of these bus routes run every 15 minutes or better on corridors that are highly traveled but do not need the level of capacity that rail provides, and the region’s transit agency, Metro Transit, sees this network as a key to improving access throughout the region.

Kick-started in 2010 by the region’s Transit Master Study, Metro Transit has begun upgrading several of its busiest bus lines to what they call rapid arterial routes by “stopping less frequently and allowing passengers to pay before boarding.”

The A Line and C Line are currently operating as “backbone” routes of the bus network, with three more (F, G, and H) prioritized for near-term service frequency upgrades in the agency’s 2021 Network Next plan. This plan, set to be updated every five years, is centered around making data-driven, equitable decisions that improve speed and reliability.

Metro Transit is also working to better integrate local buses into its larger regional bus network, branded with colors, which operates partially on major freeways. The Orange Line, which just opened in December 2021, travels in dedicated high-occupancy toll lanes southward from downtown along Interstate 35W, one of the region’ busiest freeways. Unlike some freeway express routes in other cities, the Orange Line runs in both directions at 15-minute intervals (during weekdays) and serves substantial, accessible modern stations that bridge the gap between the speed of freeway travel and the pedestrian accessibility that serves successful transit. This approach also acknowledges the reality of the region’s multiple centers and serves the places that people are already going by car.

*One of the I-35W rapid bus median stations on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line.* *Photo by Metro Transit*.

*Final construction of an I-35W rapid bus median station on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line.* *Photo by Metro Transit*.

*An early rendering of an I-35W rapid bus median station on Metro Transit’s new Orange Line. Photo by Metro Transit.*

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Metro Transit became one of a number of agencies to adjust its service to respond to shifting transit needs and provide better access: by lowering fares, providing near-term service to get students to school in the wake of bus driver shortages, and expanding a program to provide targeted transit passes to specific apartment buildings to better meet the needs of residents and actively reduce car-dependence.

The agency’s strategies stem from three principles, according to Metro Transit arterial bus rapid transit manager Katie Roth, who collaborated with T4A in this case study: 1) to meet the market for transit as it stands today, 2) improve the market for transit for the future, and 3) improve access to transit in communities that have historically suffered disinvestment. “This is how we’re going to emerge from the pandemic as a transit system,” she says.

Following traveler demand and creating a reliable all-day network will boost the resilience of neighborhoods around the region, providing a solid foundation to expand upon with their Network Next plan.

What other communities can learn about improving transit access

Making a real impact on our climate will require providing transit that offers a true alternative to driving. While there is no “one-size-fits-all” answer that works for every city and no US city that has fully solved this puzzle, the agencies profiled here have several things in common: they used data to understand service needs and were willing to rethink their route structure—sometimes dramatically—to provide better access for people most reliant on transit and keep up with changing development patterns, often seeing significant increases in ridership as a result.

Unfortunately, no amount of clever service redesign will make up for resources that simply aren’t there, so increasing transit funding must be part of the picture. And even a significant boost in funding won’t be enough to meaningfully improve transit access for all the people who need it in the more sprawling areas of our metro regions, so putting more people in the path of high quality transit by changing local development practices is a critical step on the path to a lower-emissions transportation system.

The Twin Cities region isn’t the only one that has updated its transit service to respond to evolving needs during the pandemic and beyond. In our final post in this series, we will be profiling agencies that have changed their approach during COVID to shift some focus away from traditional 9-to-5 commuters, make transit more affordable, and rethink what the future of transit should look like to reduce emissions and provide access for those who need it most.

Reducing emissions with better transit, part two: Improve transit access

Increasing funding for transit operations is a vital first step to help more people drive less, but there’s an equally important next step: connecting more people by transit to more of the destinations they currently reach by car.

*Bus riders wait at the Silver Spring Transit Center in Silver Spring, MD. Photo by BeyondDC*

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

In our first installment of this series on the importance of transit to reduce emissions, we focused on increasing spending on transit operations—more buses, more trains, running more often (in the 288 urbanized areas with available data.) We found that by increasing federal support for transit operations across these areas, we can make meaningful progress in reducing driving emissions. But while that’s a crucial step in the right direction to meet our climate goals, we also need to consider how to expand access to transit and help more people use transit to get where they need to go.

Pairing expanded transit service with greater access to transit

For a second phase of our analysis of how investing in transit can help meet our climate goals, we looked at what we could achieve by improving transit access—in this case meaning how well transit connects people from their homes to available jobs in their region within a reasonable travel time. Improving transit access goes beyond simply expanding transit service. While offering more routes or more frequent service can certainly improve transit access, it won’t necessarily do so if those routes aren’t designed to connect the places where people live as directly as possible to the places they need to go

In the 288 urbanized areas studied, we examined the annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) estimates for all 88.5 million households included in the 2017 National Household Travel Survey. We analyzed what share of their regions’ jobs (within 45 minutes from their homes) they could reach with existing transit service using data from the EPA’s Smart Location Database. Unsurprisingly the households that are unable to reach any jobs by transit within that time frame traveled quite a bit by car—averaging 23,090 miles per year.

Households that could get to work using transit drove significantly less, and the improvement came with even modest levels of access to jobs via public transportation. Households that could reach just 10 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area by transit drove 19,040 miles per year (an 18 percent drop). When that access increased modestly up to 10-20 percent of jobs, households drove 17,710 miles per year on average (a 23 percent drop), and when they could reach over 20 percent of all metro-area jobs with transit, average driving in those households dropped to 16,380 miles (or 29 percent less than households with no transit access).

Even improving transit access to connect people to up to 20 percent of metropolitan area (MSA) jobs leads to significant drops in average miles driven per year, reducing emissions.

Based on those results, we estimate that if we could manage to give all 88.5 million households we studied access to at least 20 percent of their region’s jobs by transit by 2050, we could reduce annual vehicle miles traveled by these households by 23 percent, leading to a total reduction in VMT (including non-household trips like deliveries and ridesharing) in those urbanized areas of 16 percent in 2050 compared to projected VMT based on our current trend. This is 377 billion fewer miles driven annually. Given that transportation emissions are the main perpetrators of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., this would be a major step toward improving climate outcomes.

Raising the bar

Providing all households in the 288 urbanized areas we studied with access to at least 20 percent of their region’s jobs by 2050 will require more than simply increasing investment in transit or even just running more trains and buses because of the existing low-density suburban development in many of these regions, which has contributed heavily to VMT growth and emissions in these cities. It will take a real push to make transit-supportive land-use decisions and provide the right transit service to connect people to the destinations they need. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In fact, some urbanized areas are already providing a significant share of their residents with access to at least 20 percent of their regions’ jobs by transit today, raising the bar for communities across the country.

In cities like Champaign, IL, Bloomington, IL, Duluth, MN-WI, and Boulder, CO, more than 70 percent of households can currently reach more than 20 percent of metropolitan-area jobs using transit. Bringing all 288 urbanized areas we studied up to a level of access comparable to those regions by 2050 (in line with the current top 2 percent of cities in the graphic below) would result in an 11.9 percent reduction in VMT in 2050, compared to what is currently projected for that year. Though a slightly less ambitious target, bringing all 288 urbanized areas up to the level of access provided in the top 5 percent of cities would still have a sizable impact, resulting in a 9.5 percent reduction. That would significantly reduce both emissions and the amount of time Americans spend in their cars on average—a win for the environment and for commuters.

In cities with the best current transit access (those in the top 2 percent), about 70 percent of households can reach more than 20 percent of their jobs by transit.

Bringing all 288 urbanized areas to the level of access provided by the current top-performing regions could reduce annual VMT in 2050 by 11.9 percent compared to currently projected levels for that year.

If we brought all 288 urbanized areas up to a minimum level of transit access to jobs already achieved by the…	…we could achieve a reduction in annual VMT in 2050 of…	…meaning a cumulative VMT reduction over 30 years of…
Top 25% of urbanized areas	-3.7%	-2.0%
Top 10% of urbanized areas	-6.5%	-3.6%
Top 5% of urbanized areas	-9.5%	-5.2%
Top 2% of urbanized areas	-11.9%	-6.5%

Source: Estimated using data on household VMT from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey and data on transit accessibility from the EPA Smart Location Database.

It is important to note that the impacts of poor access to transit aren’t felt equally. People who most need an affordable alternative to car travel are often the same people who don’t have viable transit access. Black workers are four times more likely to take transit than white workers, yet transit access is roughly 24 percent worse in the quartile of urban areas with the most Black residents, compared with those with the fewest. Areas with high poverty rates get less frequent, reliable transit service than wealthy neighborhoods. If we want to face climate goals head-on, we also have to address these inequities in transit access.

But how?

Increasing access to jobs via transit will require an intentional policy and investment strategy, because it depends on several factors beyond just how much we spend on transit: how well transit serves different populations currently, development patterns in the region, and where jobs and services are clustered. And overall, to make the more ambitious scenarios possible, changes in local and metro-area land-use decisions need to go hand-in-hand with the increased transit investment.

Some cities would need to spend a great deal to significantly improve transit access in the more sprawling portions of their regions if development practices don’t change, which is all the more reason to change those development practices now. Yet scores of cities could likely make meaningful improvements to transit access with very little additional spending. For instance, some cities (like Columbus, OH and Houston, TX) have been able to expand transit access simply by reconsidering the way their routes are structured and reconfiguring their service from the ground up with a focus on improving access.

To address the pressing need to reduce emissions from transportation to meet ambitious climate goals, we’ll need to not only invest more money overall in running more buses and trains more often, but also consider how to expand that transit service into more places and serve more people—especially those who need it most. More on this in an accompanying report coming in the new year.

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.

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.

House transportation bill goes big on climate

House transportation leaders introduced legislation to update our national transportation program to address climate, equity, safety and public health. Climate advocates and climate leaders on the Hill should recognize the strides taken with this proposal from Congress and fight to protect those changes in the bill.

This is a joint post by Transportation for America and Third Way, co-written by Rayla Bellis, T4America program manager, and Alexander Laska, Third Way Transportation Policy Advisor for the Climate and Energy Program. It is also posted on Third Way’s site.

The House transportation committee’s markup of the INVEST Act starts at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, June 17th. View our amendment tracker here, get real-time updates by following @t4america on Twitter, visit our hub for all T4America content about the INVEST Act, and take action by sending a message to your representative if they sit on this House committee.

While it isn’t perfect, the INVEST Act introduced in the House takes some very important steps, including:

Measuring and tracking important outcomes like GHG emissions and access to jobs and services.
Making significant progress towards electrifying our vehicle and transit fleets; and
Supporting investments in low emissions transportation modes, including:
- Supporting transit with more money and better policy; and
- Supporting biking and walking with a comprehensive approach to improving safety.

For too long, federal transportation policy has prioritized car travel and the infrastructure to support it while neglecting cleaner and more affordable transportation options like transit, walking, and biking. We are now seeing the consequences of decades of spending in line with those priorities: car-ownership is a prerequisite for participating in the economy in most communities, and many people are driving further every year to reach work and daily necessities. It is unsafe, inconvenient, or flat-out impossible to reach those destinations by any other means in much of the country. As a result, transportation is now the nation’s single largest source of greenhouse gases (GHG), accounting for 29 percent of emissions, 83 percent of which comes from driving. While cars and trucks will and should remain an important part of our transportation system, any effective strategy to reduce emissions from transportation must make it easier for Americans to take fewer and shorter car trips to access work and meet basic needs.

Last week the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released their transportation reauthorization proposal. Third Way and Transportation for America unveiled a scorecard earlier this week to show how the new House reauthorization proposal and previous Senate proposal stack up against the recommendations in our new Transportation and Climate Federal Policy Agenda. The House bill makes significant strides in several areas in line with our federal policy agenda:

Measures and tracks important outcomes

We measure all the wrong things in our transportation system and therefore get the wrong outcomes. Instead of measuring whether people can get where they need to go (e.g., jobs, healthcare, and grocery stores), we measure how fast cars are moving. Rather than being required to reduce transportation emissions, states are distributed more money if their residents drive more and burn more gasoline.

The House bill takes important steps in reversing these perverse incentives. It requires states to measure and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their transportation system (a similar requirement from USDOT was rolled back early in the Trump administration). States that reduce emissions can be rewarded with increased flexibility, while states that fail to reduce emissions will face penalties. This is a major shift, and it will lead to significantly different outcomes if states are truly held accountable to these requirements.

In addition, the bill requires a new performance measure to help states and MPOs evaluate how well their transportation systems provide access to jobs and services. This access measure is monumental. For the first time at the national level, recipients of federal transportation funding will be required to measure whether their transportation system is performing its most essential function: connecting people to the things they need, whether they drive, take transit, walk or bike. This will have profound impacts in communities, including directing more funds to projects that shorten or eliminate the need for driving trips. It also happens that providing a high level of access, especially for nondrivers, correlates with lower GHG emissions.

Makes significant progress towards electrification

Decarbonizing our transportation system will require us to transition quickly to zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs)–and that means making sure we have the infrastructure ready to support those vehicles. The INVEST In America Act establishes a new $1.4 billion program to deploy electric vehicle charging and hydrogen fueling infrastructure in public places where everyone will have access. The grant program will focus on projects that demonstrate the most effective emissions reductions. We believe the program should additionally focus on ensuring this infrastructure is accessible to low-income communities; this, combined with policies to make ZEVs more affordable, will help ensure all Americans can benefit from the air quality improvements and other benefits of clean vehicles.

The bill also reorients federal funding for transit buses towards electric vehicles by boosting funds for the Low- and No-Emission Vehicle Program five-fold, incentivizing the purchase of electric fleets, and requiring a plan for transitioning to a 100 percent electric bus fleet. This improved program, and other transit reforms, will help transit agencies procure electric and other clean buses, as well as the refueling infrastructure to support them. Transit is already a lower-carbon alternative to driving, and shifting our fleet towards clean buses will make it even more so. Ultimately, all federal funding for bus procurement should go towards low- and no-emission buses, but the significant increase for this program is a good start.

Supports transit with more money and better policy

Too many Americans must drive because they either are not served by transit or only have access to infrequent, unreliable, and inconvenient service. Transit has been underfunded for decades at the federal level despite the significant benefits it provides to communities: reduced emissions, improved economic opportunity, a way out of congestion, cleaner air, mobility choice, better health outcomes, and improved quality of life. Our failure to invest sufficiently in transit has disproportionately impacted low-income people and people of color, who are more likely to rely on transit to access jobs and services.

The House bill gives transit a big increase in overall funding: 47 percent. Equally importantly, however, it changes some policies that have long obstructed transit as a truly viable option in communities. For years, federal transit funding has incentivized lowering operating costs (usually accomplished by offering less or infrequent service) at the expense of building transit that best serves people’s needs. The new bill includes policies that shift those incentives, focusing instead on frequency of service. This will make transit a real option for more people in more communities.

Supports biking and walking with a comprehensive approach to improving safety

Dangerous road conditions pose one of the biggest barriers to taking short trips by walking or biking in many communities, leading to unnecessary driving trips that increase traffic and emissions. Between 2008 and 2017, drivers struck and killed 49,340 people walking on streets nationwide, and pedestrian fatalities have risen by 35 percent over the past decade. People of color, older adults and people walking in low-income communities are disproportionately represented in these fatal crashes.

The House proposal takes a comprehensive approach to make walking and biking safer through a combination of increased funding, policy reform, and better provisions to hold states accountable. For example:

The bill requires Complete Street design principles and makes $250 million available for active transportation projects including Complete Streets.
It proposes changes to how speed limits are set to prioritize safety results over a faster auto trip.
It requires states with the highest levels of pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities to set aside funds to address those needs.
The bill would also prohibit states from the current practice of setting annual targets for roadway fatalities that are negative—in other words, targets that assume the current trend line of increased fatalities is unstoppable, essentially accepting more fatalities every year as an unavoidable cost.

The House bill isn’t perfect, but is a significant improvement over the Senate’s proposal

While the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s proposal takes many steps in the right direction, it still misses the mark in some areas based on our agenda. It still includes significant funding for highways without the proper restrictions in place to avoid unnecessary buildout of new lane-miles we can’t afford to maintain, and congestion relief is still a primary goal embedded throughout the proposed program. This ultimately prioritizes the same types of transportation investments we have seen for decades.

Yet, the House bill takes significant steps that the Senate EPW bill introduced last year did not. In contrast to the broad, holistic approach the House bill takes to addressing emissions, the Senate bill introduced some new (but relatively weak) stand-alone programs to address emissions, congestion, and other important topics. Importantly, the Senate bill did not make any needed changes to the core federal formula programs, continuing to direct the vast majority of funding into programs that incentivize building high-speed roads and making travel by any means other than driving — and emitting — impossible for most Americans.

Bottom line: the House’s proposal could be a game-changer for climate, equity, and safety goals

The House’s proposal introduces more substantial reforms to our national transportation program than we have seen in years, and many of the changes will directly support reduced emissions, environmental justice, and other important goals. This is a big deal, but the magnitude of the changes may not be readily apparent. Many of the most transformative proposals do not sound like climate initiatives because they do not specifically reference emissions or address electrification. Instead they change funding formulas, policies, and performance measures that, over decades, have produced a transportation system that requires more and longer car trips and greater emissions.

Climate advocates and climate leaders on the Hill should recognize the strides taken with this proposal from Congress and fight to protect those changes in the bill. Advocates for preserving the status quo are preparing to fight these important changes. We need climate advocates to do the same to defend them.