Urban ethics and theory

via Streetsblog

In a well-intended attempt to try to get people to rethink the “jobs creation” logic of infrastructure spending, a new report from the Transportation Equity Network has released a report that talks about how shifting money from highways to transit—and, in particular, operations—would make more jobs.

The report then goes on to project the potential job creation of a 50% shift in present highway spending to transit for each of the 20 metropolitan areas. The shift would create 1,123,674 new transit jobs over five years, for a net increase of 180,150 jobs — all without a dollar of new spending.

link: More Transit = More Jobs: New Report

In some ways, this report exemplifies everything that is wrong about the transit dialog. Tons of good intention, but with so much hyperbole that nobody can credit their findings. Even Streetsblog people seem to reading with raised eyebrows, and you are not going to find a more sympathetic audience of people. Transit will, according to this argument, revive local economies. Another unrealistic expectation heaped upon my favorite, already overburdened mode.

So we’ll take money away from highway spending and use it for transit spending based on the jobs created? Not on mobility needs met or customers served….but jobs created. I understand that we are in a recession and “jobs created” is the political currency they want to draw on, but, people, honestly, I need passengers served in the benefits metric, at least tangentially, when we are talking about transit investment. Please?

However, I do respect that they are willing to shake up the “jobs jobs jobs” dialogue to some degree by pointing out that you can and would save jobs by helping agencies deal with their operating deficits. The unchallenged dialogue of “creating jobs” around transit is almost always around capital investment. So we’re building new things while we are cutting operations. It makes little sense. The TEN authors at least try to direct the “jobs jobs jobs” in a direction that it needs to go: asking why the goal of keeping CURRENT drivers and maintenance workers employed is less of a priority than shoveling money into construction to create jobs. Preservation rather than creation. It’s a good issue to take up.

Of course, those existing jobs in operations could also be saved, in theory, by cutting back on transit capital investment, too, just as easily as taking money away from highways, but I am assuming that isn’t quite what these authors want.

But, if operations is the comparison, then let’s get very honest and start opening the options: spending no money at all and given the tax back, putting transit against college stipends for foster kids, dental care for impoverished kids, etc, building local parks and any other of the dozens of worthy things we can do with public money.

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The Transport Politic has an essay up that argues:

Regional Transportation Authorities are not Necessarily the Solution to the Urban-Suburban Divide « The Transport Politic

He uses various regions as exemplars. This is a complicated topic for transportation because regional agencies, he’s right, get whipsawed between competing constituency demands. However, cities do, too.

The reasons these types of regional institutions emerge is that regions simply grow; employment and commuter sheds grow to encompass multiple jurisdictions, and as charitable as it would be for central city transit companies to serve extra-jurisdictional residential and job sites, they just can’t do it. So regional service is necessity for resource sharing and planning and for creating the sort of quality transit services are are actually useful to commuters: look at the massive area that the New York MTA now serves. But as, TP notes, all that is a lot easier said than done.

Also throwing a spanner in the regional works is the bottom line that it is easier to coordinate services across one regional institution…but there are diseconomies of scale in transit service as well, and these can be pretty bad.

Hiro Iseki, out of the University of New Orleans, is one of the best people out there working in transportation research. I remember having long discussions in our office at UCLA about this subject. The resulting manuscript from his dissertation is utterly brilliant:

Iseki, H. 2008. “Economies of Scale in Bus Transit Service in the USA: How Does Cost Efficiency Vary by Agency Size and Level of Contracting?” Transportation Research Part A (42): 1086-1097.

From the abstract:

Past studies of economies of scale in transit have tended to treat the transit industry as aset of similar agencies that have the same cost structure, and have conducted an analysis for the entire range of agency size using a single regression function. This may have caused problems in the interpretation of analysis results because agencies of different sizes that may have different cost structures are treated as a homogeneous data set. In this paper, I examine the issues of economies of scale in the provision of fixed-route bus transit service in the USA, using level of contracting as a variable to classify agencies into three different size groups.

In this analysis, using a significantly larger pooled data set (compared to previous studies) constructed from the National Transit Database of the US Federal Transit Administration from 1992 to 2000, I found that agencies with different levels of contracting exhibit very different relationships between cost per vehicle hour and agency size. Applying the observed range of agency size, I also found diseconomies of scale for all agency sizes with all levels of contracting, even when I utilized a quadratic function for the regression equation.

While the analysis is limited since the model did not control for many other explanatory variables, the findings suggest that the level of contracting is possibly an important variable, among many attributes of transit systems, with which to classify agencies into different size groups, each of which has a different transit cost structure.

This brings up a bunch of issues for institutions like the Los Angeles or New York MTA. These integrated regional agencies are rather infamous for favoring the rail side of their operations anyway, sometimes based on arguments related to costs or service quality and at other times related to arguments based on simple prestige/racism (“white people don’t ride the bus”–how many time have you heard it?). Iseki’s finding show that the institutions, integrated at a regional scale, are set up to face an increasing cost structure for the bus side of their enterprise. The rationale for doing so has been to better coordinate service: in places like LA, no matter how much rail the MTA builds any time soon, the buses are going to be an important part of the transit network. The theory is that you would get better coordination between services within one agency than across agencies.

However, it may be that we would be better off with the regional rail agency and small bus companies for distribution. The bus company could be expected to coordinate to the rail schedule by virtue of municipal contract.