If you live in an urban progressive bubble in the US, it may seem absurd to speculate about whether US conservatives could support public transit. The Trump administration’s Secretary of Transportation is openly attacking the funding plan for the nation’s most transit-dependent big city, while amplifying exaggerated narratives about crime. It’s rare to see national Republican politicians speaking up strongly for public transit as a worthy public investment, particularly where this would compete with road funding or with other Republican priorities such as tax cuts.
But locally, the picture is quite different. And like all local pictures, it’s different in each locality.
This is about to become very important, because we are headed into a period of epic state and local battles about public transit across the country. Many agencies are facing financial crises that will require either new funding or service cuts. That new funding will need to be approved either by voters, or by state and local politicians who will need the support of voters. All this needs to happen by November 2026 at the latest.
And in a lot of places, that will mean winning the votes of some people who see themselves as conservatives. These are not people who will vote for Democratic candidates nationally, but who are still open to local efforts to solve problems that they see in their own communities.
So I want to flag a remarkable detail from a survey just completed by Spokane Transit Authority in Spokane, Washington. 85% of self-described conservatives believe that it’s at least “somewhat important” for “the region to support and fund public transportation”!
(Note for math geeks: Yes, I know that with 447 total replies a single cell of a crosstab may not be statistically meaningful, but look at the larger pattern: Over 90% saying at least “somewhat important” in a region that’s not especially leftist. Again, this is a statistically valid survey, not a self-selected one.)
Spokane area can fairly be described as a purple region in a blue state. It has some universities but is not culturally dominated by them. The City of Spokane itself is moderately progressive and much of the suburbs are quite conservative. The congressional district is safely Republican. So while the transit system benefits from state funds that it wouldn’t have if it were a few miles further east in Idaho, it still must build local support in a bipartisan way. The agency’s communications and management have been aware of that for some time, and have grown adept at engaging with conservatives to build left-right consensus.
I don’t believe for a moment that the Spokane area’s conservative voters, when presented with a specific tax measure and a specific “no” campaign, would vote 85% yes. But this does speak to the importance of not presuming they will vote no, and talking about transit in ways that will appeal to them. Transit agency comms and campaigns must avoid signaling that transit is an exclusively progressive cause, even if some on the urban left will find the results a little irritating. There’s just no other way to build a large enough consensus. In California, for example, the political leadership is overwhelmingly progressive and will tend to speak in progressively-coded ways, but many sales tax measures require 2/3, which means the deciding voter is far to the right of the median voter
As Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn likes to say, “When bottom-up conservatives work with bottom-up progressives, they find that they need each other.”
Meanwhile, have other transit agencies asked this question and run this crosstab? If not, it’s something I’d recommend.
Like many US liberals or progressives, I believe support for transit as elicited by these polls is somewhat misleading. Sure, it’s seen by the majority as somewhat or very important to have a strong transit system…except that shouldn’t impact their daily life or preferences whatsoever. Therefore, roads cannot be made safer for those traveling outside of cars, should this come at the expense of a motorist’s mobility (perceived or otherwise). Land use regulations and frameworks should not be changed to discourage car-oriented businesses, new-construction sprawl, or the like, all of which are well-liked by most Americans and especially conservatives. Similarly-purple cities like Dallas, where transit funding has resulted in continued expansion of DART’s rail network and bus network reorganization, have not necessarily created a transit network that offers a remotely-competitive alternative to driving for the vast majority of trips in the Metroplex. DART’s expansion has also, for the most part, not been accompanied by requisite changes to metropolitan-scale land use, financial, and governance mechanisms necessary for successful public transport.
One reason why a person might say that they support transit in a survey, but vote no on a ballot measure to improve transit is if they believe that most of the money will be wasted, rather than actually improving transit. This begs the question of how to convince the average voter, who probably doesn’t ride transit or follow the transit agency very closely, that the agency is spending money effectively, and is deserving of more taxpayer money.
Using New York City as an example, one very common refrain I here over and over again about why more money should not be given to the MTA to improve the subway, is that the MTA does not spend the money it has very efficiently.
Of course, part of the problem here is that transit agencies are constrained by all sorts of laws and rules that prevent them from spending their money more efficiently, even if they may want to. For instance, a litigation culture that subjects subway expansion plans to endless lawsuits, or “buy America” rules that force agencies to purchase American-made buses, even if they cost far more, or are functionally inferior to buses used in foreign countries. ADA is another example, as it forces agencies to spend huge sums of money putting wheelchair ramps on all their buses and operating paratransit routes, which ultimately move very few riders (because there just aren’t that many wheelchair-bound people, even fewer going places where transit is usable for them, given their disability). However, it’s not as simple as just eliminating these rules because they all exist for a reason. The lawsuits exist because we don’t want subway routes whose construction destroys neighborhoods. The “buy America” rules exist because, without them, no U.S. company making buses would be able to stay in business. And the ADA rules exist in order to protect a very vulnerable group of people who would, otherwise, be stuck in their homes, without any alternative mobility options. But, all of these rules ultimately come with tradeoffs that make transit operations expensive, and the public needs to come to terms with that, and decide what’s worth keeping and what isn’t.