How much transit is the right amount of transit?

WMATA is just wrapping up its annual budget. At least for the last few years, rising costs create shortfalls, staff recommend service cuts, transit advocates push for more support for transit, and some government officials try to cut back on support. Is this the right way to debate our levels of transit service?

WMATA’s budgets start from a set amount of funding, from jurisdictional contributions and fare revenue, then work backwards to determine the level of service. But this is backwards. Wouldn’t it be better to consider what is the “right” level of service, and determine funding from that?

Determining the “right” level of transit service requires balancing the costs and benefits of how Washingtonians navigate across the region. The costs of transit are represented in the WMATA budget, but this is only half of the equation. What value are we getting for our transit money, and are we buying the right amount?

These are complex but critical questions for which the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute issues a helpful Best Practices Guide (PDF). This resource highlights why transit offers much more than simply a way of traveling from point A to point B, and why we undervalue (and thus underfund) transit when we lose sight of the full extent of transit benefits.

For example, it’s obvious that saving time by taking transit is a great benefit. But each minute on the train also offers value over that same minute spent in traffic. Research shows that motorists would “charge more” — up to three times as much — for their time behind the wheel than for the same amount of time riding transit.

This makes sense, since drivers have to “work” constantly to operate the vehicle, while transit passengers experience “leisure time” to listen to music or read the paper. Therefore, even transit which might take longer than driving yields real economic benefits to the region; these benefits grow larger as you account for the reductions in pollution, traffic congestion, and vehicular crashes that increased transit ridership brings.

Transit benefits also extend beyond the direct and indirect savings of each transit trip. The sheer act of giving citizens an alternative to private vehicles yields significant economic benefits to society. Improving “mobility” (ability to move), particularly for lower-income citizens, reduces the number of work and school days missed, thus raising both current and future economic productivity of our society.

Transit also provides “option value” by increasing the portfolio of travel routes to limit the economic fallout of any one of those routes being disrupted on a given day. Transit networks offer focal points for dramatically more efficient development patterns, which reduce taxpayer cost for providing basic and emergency services. Even these savings might be dwarfed by improved public health; transit riders log on average 30% more steps per day (PDF).

How can we tap into these benefits? Fortunately, we have no shortage of tools we can use to invest in our region’s transit, including proposals for regional and local gas taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, tools to recapture transit-driven land appreciation (PDF), congestion tolling, and more.

But I think the reason so many of these tools have languished to date is that we haven’t yet established a common overarching vision for the role of transit in the region’s transportation network. We simply don’t know how much transit to buy.

We approach such a question from a challenging position. Each of the 12 WMATA jurisdictions by definition can only consider this question in a piecemeal and fragmented fashion for greater Washington. Because their individual policy tools would concentrate costs inside their borders while spreading the benefits around the region, the jurisdictions individually underinvest in the system. That makes it very difficult to fulfill the region’s transit potential - especially when that potential is not well defined or understood.

Asking and answering the question of “how much transit is the right amount of transit” would help us to debate transit funding in a much more meaningful way. If our region can collectively articulate a vision for the role of transit in the quality of our lives, we can plan for and properly fund its future.

WMATA Board member Chris Zimmerman made a recent appeal for WMATA and the region to shift attention to the fundamental long-term fate of our transit system. By shifting our focus, we can hope to move beyond annual budget shortfalls which seem to miss the forest for the trees.