Jake Blumgart has a must-read in CityMonitor pointing out that in most wealthy countries, Covid-19 has raised few doubts about the future of public transit, nor have there been significant threats to funding.
City Monitor spoke with experts in Canada, East Asia, western Europe and Australia about the impacts of the pandemic on public transportation. None feared that systems in their nations would be deprived of the funds needed to continue providing decent service – and most even believed they would keep expanding. … In the US, by contrast, systems have been preparing doomsday scenarios, and advocates fear for the future.
We are seeing this with our own clients outside North America: Even with demand cratering, authorities continue to fund good service.
There’s one technical reason for this in some cases. In most wealthy countries outside North America, transit agencies are not free-standing local governments dependent on their own funding streams. Instead, any needed subsidy flows to public transit directly from the central government budget.[1] This means that public transit funding is debated alongside other expenses in a central budget, so the service level depends on what the nation or state/province values as a society, rather than what a transit agency can afford.
But there’s no question that apathy about public transit, and in some cases hostility, is higher in the US. In my work I hear three kinds of negativity:
- Cultural hostility to cities, which implies indifference to meeting their needs.
- Disinterest in funding things that are useful to lower-income or disadvantaged groups, or groups that are culturally “other” in some way.
- Especially aggressive marketing of new technologies as replacements of most public transit. (Many new technologies are compatible with high-ridership public transit, but some are not, and many are overpromoted in ways that encourage opposition to transit funding.)
All three of these are understandably worse in the United States than in most other wealthy countries.
In any case, if you’re in the US, remember: there is no objective reality behind the idea that Covid-19 is a reason to care less about transit. It’s just a US thing, and we could choose to make it different.
[1] By central government I mean whichever level of government is sovereign: In most countries this is the national government, but in loose confederations like Canada and Australia, it’s the state or province.