I’m in Portland’s Oregonian today on the topic of the budget crisis affecting TriMet, the region’s transit agency. If you’ve arrived from the link on that article, welcome! This blog’s resources to help you understand transit issues are organized here.) If you haven’t read the article, please read it first, and then let me expand on a few points.
TriMet’s overall budget hole is over 30% of its 2025 service level. The cuts made today are dramatic, but they close only about a 5% gap, so there is a long road ahead to bring the transit budget into balance. This is not a small problem.
It is also not TriMet’s fault. In our work we stay in touch with transit agencies all over the US, and they are all having the same problem, escalating costs of offering each vehicle-hour of service, due to (a) competition for qualified staff, (b) higher spending on security to satisfy demands for a greater perception of safety.
Let me expand on each of these because they are both inflamed by a lot of crazy talk on social media.
Transit agencies are having difficulty hiring qualified staff — drivers and mechanics — mostly because the exploding delivery industry is hiring such huge numbers of these people. The job of a bus driver, in particular, has also been growing more difficult and at times dangerous, and this also makes hiring harder. All those things are pushing up the cost of labor. Sometimes you can find statistics about individual employees getting eye-popping compensation by doing lots of overtime, but this is noise. It is the free market for labor, not the influence of unions, that is making transit so expensive.
Security is an even harder issue, because TriMet is being expected to solve large societal problems with its meager budget. Social media blowhards will go on about needing cops on every bus, but that would more than triple the cost of running the service, so immediately TriMet would have to cut 2/3 of the system to pay for it. TriMet already more than doubled its security budget from 2022 to 2025, but at this point, the biggest danger to the agency is runaway demands for more and more security spending that can only lead to more service cuts. Police-recorded calls for service on TriMet are down 52% since 2021. The situation is better than most non-riders perceive from what they see on social media, so the question is how much to spend, on security instead of service, to move a perception. Please don’t pretend this is easy.
Finally, are you hearing people complain that the buses are “empty”? This complaint expresses a common confusion about how transit’s costs work. To knock that one down, see here.
Over the next few months I will be writing more and larger pieces on the challenges facing US transit agencies. To make sure you see them, click here to subscribe. It’s free!
Why should cops on transit be paid from the transit budget, rather than being paid from the police budget? If people want the cops on transit as a public safety measure, they can be honest about the public safety budget they want, rather than secretly stealing transit budget for public safety.
I’m guessing it’s because are subcontracted private security personell and thus not tied to the police?
The line about competing with the delivery industry for drivers and mechanics is the part most transit coverage skips, and it is worse than it looks. We run a job board for traveling trades, and agencies are not only losing mechanics to Amazon – a diesel or industrial mechanic who is willing to travel can clear well past agency scale, because travel work pays hourly plus an untaxed per diem, often $100 to $125 a day on top. So the wage TriMet has to beat is not the local one. Closing 5 percent of a 30 percent gap while the security budget doubled is a hard place to be doing that from. We track what a mechanic’s ticket is being posted at outside the agency, and that number has moved a lot faster than public pay scales have.