City Limits: Should public transit be free?

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Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is spending a few weeks thinking about cities. As you've surely heard, they're having a tough go right now on account of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

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Sean Rameswaram: Property values will fall further, taxes will have to rise further, government spending will have to fall further, more people will leave, and so forth and so forth. And we get into this urban doom loop. And that goes for public transit, too. That is leaving just gigantic holes in the operating budgets of these big systems, like hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars per year. And the question is, what do they do?

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Sean Rameswaram: But some cities have a really out-of-the-box idea to deal with all the budgetary woes transit agencies are facing. Make public transit free. Is public transit a public good? We're going to ask the people in the know on the show.

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Sean Rameswaram: Stand clear at the closing doors, please. The next stop will be Today Explained. Today Explained will be next. Stand here. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from Riding Transit in Washington, D.C. has been confusing ever since the pandemic. Used to be you got on the bus, you paid, you went and you took your seat. But then in the pandemic, to keep drivers safe, the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority, a.k.a. WMATA, said, don't worry about it, you don't have to pay for buses, but you still got to pay for the subway. Then eventually they said, okay, everyone has to start paying for everything again. But something kind of predictable happened.

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Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people kept just walking past drivers, not paying. Drivers seemed okay with it. And personally, sometimes when I get on the bus, drivers get irate when I try to pay. Like, stop showing off, cool guy. Just get on the bus. So the status quo in DC is some people are paying to ride our buses and some people are definitely not. But while all this is happening, there's this big historic movement to make all the buses in D.C. free permanently. The idea is fairly simple. We make bus travel and rail basically free by either making it fare free or creating a monthly subsidy for residents.

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Sean Rameswaram: This is Charles Allen, D.C. city council member, arguably the city's biggest cheerleader for free transit. We also then create a $10 million a year equity and service improvement fund to make sure your service, the bus is more reliable. Because one of the things we learned in looking at other cities is you can't just make the bus free and pat yourself on the back and call it a day. You've got to also improve service. Because if I just give you something that doesn't actually get you to where you got to go for free, I didn't really do anything.

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Sean Rameswaram: I know what you're thinking. This guy's talking about making the bus and the train free while improving service at the same time. These things cost money. How do you do that? Believe me, listener, it didn't make sense to me either. But let's back up a second. To talk about how we got here, we have to talk about the global COVID-19 pandemic. Public transit is nearly empty with ridership on many agencies down 90%. As restrictions are lifted, how will people choose to get to work?

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Sean Rameswaram: A ton of people stopped using public transportation to commute to work and school. Public transit ridership is way, way down. Revenue has been slashed. The federal government had to bail out transit systems across the country. What we've been able to do, thanks to the American Rescue Plan, is get back from the cliff that a lot of these transit agencies were up against. As you said, over $30 billion being made available.

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Sean Rameswaram: And of course, even as fears over COVID receded, people didn't necessarily start riding again. And it wasn't only because they were working remotely. It was also fear. A woman is dead after being stabbed to death on a CTA platform in the Louvre. A man set off a smoke bomb inside a moving train car, pulled out a gun and started shooting as the subway pulled into a station in Brooklyn. Police say 10 people.

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Sean Rameswaram: A lot of people did not want to return to the office, even though their employers wanted them to return. Because they were scared to use transit in order to get there. Tracy Haddon Lowe is with the Brookings Institution in D.C. She told us more about the fear of transit that's affecting ridership.

Tracy Haddon Lowe: I want to be clear that, like, some of the stuff that's going on in society as a whole is also affecting the transit system, but it is not like a symptom of the transit system, and it's not disproportionately concentrated within the transit system. I think we need to acknowledge the fact that when there is criminal or even just antisocial behavior in transit, it feels scarier than it would somewhere else because you are in a situation where you're in a confined space.

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Tracy Haddon Lowe: So the standard of behavior is higher In our society as a whole in the past few years there has been a huge increase in general antisocial behavior in alienation and loneliness We have gone through a huge disruption that is incredibly scary and it is normal and understandable that people need reassurance But people have not been reassured Brookings data shows Bay Area transit ridership is still at only about half of what they had in 2019

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Sean Rameswaram: Similar deals in Chicago, New York, Seattle, and D.C., which brings us back to council member Charles Allen and his plan for free transit in the nation's capital. Because you know who's been riding public transit this whole time? The essential workers, the folks who are working in those hospitals day in and day out, The folks that were putting food on the shelves in the grocery store day in and day out, those essential workers that everybody stepped out on their front porches and their balconies and banged pots and pans and celebrated, they never got off the bus. Why? Because that's how they get to work. It's how they move around.

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Sean Rameswaram: Our bus connects our neighborhoods across our city in a way that rail doesn't. Rail moves people in, moves people out. Our buses connect our neighborhoods. And so I think there's a very strong equity argument that's been made that people's light bulbs have gone off as to why this is so important as well. Alan's plan is called Metro for D.C. So where we are now is we are about to later this year make Metro buses in the District of Columbia. You get on the bus in D.C., there is going to be no fare that takes place. We're also going to expand to a dozen lines that are going to run 24 hours a day. Then the third part is this $10 million a year that we're going to put into improving service.

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Sean Rameswaram: So you get a bus that runs more reliably. It's faster. It's better. You've got better bus shelters. And so that's phase one of Metro for D.C. Then the second phase is creating a $100 a month subsidy for every DC resident, which is it should take a little bit longer. And that'll really apply mostly to the rail system at that point. It sounds sort of paradoxical because you're talking about getting rid of fees and improving the system. How do you do all these things at once? How does that work?

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Charles Allen: Well, keep in mind that our any transit system is heavily subsidized. We pay for it in the same way that I pay for your sidewalks. I pay for your roads. I pay for your bike lanes. No matter how you get around, government helps largely pay for that through your tax revenue. So we already pay the lion's share of what it costs to run a transit system. Only 7% of WMATA's operating costs are coming from that bus fare revenue. So it's not a huge gap that you actually have to fill by putting those investments forward. So we can do that.

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Sean Rameswaram: But 7% isn't insignificant, right? If that 7% disappears- It doesn't disappear. The government takes on that cost in a $17 billion budget that is the District of Columbia. We can do that. On top of that, our recovery is strong in the District of Columbia. So this December 31st, our CFO, our chief financial officer gives us a report and says, you know, we need to be careful, be smart. But the recovery is happening and the revenue that's coming in has already paid for this.

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Sean Rameswaram: This sounded really nice when I spoke to Charles Allen in late February. There was so much revenue in D.C. The city could afford to make buses free and to improve service. Everybody wins. But the vibe seemed off. The plan would put D.C. on the map as a public transit revolutionary in the United States. And somehow the mayor of D.C. didn't seem that stoked about it. She wouldn't talk to us about it. She wouldn't really talk to anyone about it. What we do know is that Metro for D.C. passed last December without her signature.

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Sean Rameswaram: So I had to ask Charles Allen about that. It seems curious to me if this is such a great deal for D.C., if it's going to put D.C. on the map as the biggest city in the country to take this leap, that she wouldn't want to own it. And I know you are not she, but why do you think that might be?

Charles Allen: I don't know. I don't know. But here's what I can tell you. Sometime this summer, we're going to have the very first fare-free ride take place. And I can guarantee you that the mayor is going to be there, the general manager of WMATA is going to be there, I'm going to be there, and we're all going to step on that bus together at the same time and celebrate this moment.

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Sean Rameswaram: About one week later, this whole plan fell apart. That program is in doubt tonight following a new report from the district's chief financial officer. Remember the CFO, chief financial officer of D.C.? This December 31st, our CFO, our chief financial officer, gives us a report and says, you know, we need to be careful, be smart. But the recovery is happening and the revenue that's coming in has already paid for this. That guy does an about face on free transit. Chief Financial Officer Glenn Lee warns some D.C. tax revenue could fall by as much as $464 million over the next three years.

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Sean Rameswaram: He's proposed cutting the free ride program to save money. Interest rates are up, real estate is down, and all of a sudden there's no money for radical transit ideas. And the mayor, Muriel Bowser, heretofore hush-hush on the free bus bus, she breaks her silence, sort of. We got a copy of a letter she sent to her CFO asking all sorts of questions about where the money was coming from for free buses and service improvements.

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Sean Rameswaram: On Wednesday, her budget proposal dropped. Metro for D.C. was not in it, setting up a fight in the coming weeks. We called Charles Allen back to ask about his guarantee for free buses this summer.

Charles Allen: Well, the chair of the council, Phil Mendelsohn and myself are pretty upset. The chief financial officer does not have the ability, does not have the right, does not have the authority to decertify a program. What they did is did not follow the law. And now the attorney general has come in and backed us up. So to the riders, to the businesses, to the folks that are looking forward to a fare-free system, our guarantee stands. We are going to get this done. We are going to have this happen. The challenge is going to be that it won't happen in July. It's going to likely happen sometime in the fall.

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Sean Rameswaram: How hard are you going to push this in the coming weeks and months? Both the chairman and I have said, we are going to get this done in the budget that we're about to go through. So I think you've got the leader of our council, the chair, and then you've got myself, the chair of the Transportation Committee, saying, we are going to get this done. And at the end of the day, I promise you, The very first ride that is going to be the first fare free ride with all the cameras and all the video being taken. The mayor is going to be right there with us as we get on that first bus.

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Sean Rameswaram: I'm going to hold you to that promise. I'm going to send the invite to the mayor. I'm going to make sure. Free transit in D.C. is very TBD. But it's not just D.C. trying to make this happen. A lot of cities want to figure out a way to introduce or expand free transit right now. Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, Boston. But there are a lot of passionate public transit people who think it's a terrible idea. It at least a distraction and it might even be counterproductive That in a minute on Today Explained.

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Sean Rameswaram: We are back at it with Today Explained, joined by David Zipper, who just wrote about a potential transit death spiral for Vox, what we've been calling a doom loop on the show. We are at a inflection point with transit, especially in the biggest cities. Zipper says forget going fare free. With so many daily commuters now working from home, the biggest transit systems in America need to figure out how to survive.

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David Zipper: So the question now is, like, are we going to face a moment where trans agencies aren't able to find new revenue sources, in which case they have to dramatically scale back their service, like the number of runs of the buses and trains? And if you scale back service, that leads more people to not ride. Now they have even less fare revenue. And now you just repeat the cycle over and over.

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David Zipper: And that's how you get the sort of nightmare scenario of a downward spiral where you end up with sort of just a skeletal transit service compared to what we've been used to for the last several decades in these big cities. Obviously, the pandemic plays a huge role. But have we seen this kind of downward spiral when it comes to transit before? Kind of.

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David Zipper: If I can take you on a little bit of like a history lesson. We love that. Transit's heyday, some would say, including me, was sort of like around the time of World War I when streetcars were really the dominant mode of transport for people in cities. A streetcar improves upon the whole strong buggy. For nothing, it smells better.

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David Zipper: You had New York and Boston, like, celebrating the opening of their new subway systems. It was really an exciting moment for transit. But you might know that that is just at the time when cars were arriving in the U.S. Forget foot models, forget hand models, forget supermodels. The Model T is better than all the rest. Step aside bicycles, tricycle vans, streetcars. This is the new way to travel.

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David Zipper: So as cars really caught on in the 20s and 30s, that really did eviscerate the streetcar systems, which were privately owned by the time, by the way, because people would, with a car, they would move to the suburbs. and then they wouldn't be needing to use transit so much anymore. And these transit companies, the streetcar companies, their streetcars were caught in car traffic now. Bumpa to bumper, the avenue's packed.

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David Zipper: And they had fewer customers and they were private companies. They had to not invest in maintenance and raise fares where they could. And that, of course, just led more people to leave. So in the post-war period, that's when you really saw this sort of takeover of these sort of flailing, borderline bankrupt transit systems by public agencies. And also, by the way, I should note, the federal government was not being helpful at all. In fact, they're making the situation worse by, for example, with the interstates that were funded in 1956 that, you know, further sped up this move to the suburbs.

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David Zipper: Much of the interstate system is designed to ease transportation problems in urban and suburban areas. And well, it should, for according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 90 percent of the population growth in the United States will take place in suburban areas this decade. Where you end up with is like these sort of publicly managed transit systems that really caught on in the 50s, 60s, and were around in the 70s, that would get some money from the federal government to support their capital budgets, but pretty much nothing to support operations, meaning like the actual like the driver and the the fuel and stuff like that and that came from the actual farebox revenues and it came from state and local governments so you have this weird situation where agencies these days still to you know up through covid have had relatively speaking a lot more money for investing in new rail lines or buying new buses than they have to actually like run the service which if you think about it is just not a great incentive um but just to bring us up to sort of 2019, like the last year before the pandemic, you have these large systems that provide a relatively higher level of service than the smaller systems that just don't move as many people.

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David Zipper: They are really reliant with 25, 35, 40 percent of their operating revenues coming from those fares that suddenly, as of March 2020, basically disappeared when COVID struck, which starts that doom loop, as you put it. So what's on the table to break the doom loop? That is the big question. I mean, more than anything else, agencies need money. And I recently wrote an article for Vox, and nobody I talked to in the course of researching that article really expects Congress to come in again as a deus ex machina and providing the money That just not likely to happen with a Republican House So that leaves states and it leaves regions state budgets, regional referenda to provide support.

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David Zipper: And there are some identified opportunities, like for example, congestion pricing in New York City. Drivers will be charged to drive into Manhattan's Central Business District, which is the area below 60th Street. And that money can't fund operations, to kind of fund maintenance, which is super useful for providing high-quality service. Beyond that, though, this becomes a really interesting and nuanced question, which is how do you convince people at the state legislature or in the suburbs who are going to vote in a referendum to put more money into transit? Because the majority of them are not going to be riding transit themselves.

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David Zipper: And how do you get them to do that? You know, historically, the reasons why people who have not used transit themselves would support it sometimes, actually often, would be because they saw transit as a substitute for cars, for driving. That provides a whole lot of good stuff if other people are riding transit instead of driving. It means you can have less congestion. It means economic development. It means there's fewer emissions. It's all this stuff that people see value in personally if other people are using transit.

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David Zipper: It's something that the onion of all places sort of like nailed with a kind of in transit circles famous headline from 20 years ago. Ninety-eight percent of U.S. commuters favor public transportation for others. And what's funny, you laugh, it is funny, but actually some academics did a study and concluded that that's true. That is actually not 98 percent necessarily, but there are a lot of people that when you survey them, why do you support more transit? Well, I hope it induces other people to not drive.

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David Zipper: Right. So that begs the next question is just how does transit induce people not to drive? And there's actually a clear answer to this, and that's to provide frequent high-quality service because that's what people value. They value their time. And interestingly, this is what everyone says. It doesn't matter if someone's low income or more affluent. They say, I am more likely not to drive and take the bus or train instead if the service is reliable and fast and frequent. That is what transit agencies need to be unshackled to provide right now, in my view, to have a credible argument in state capitals and in the suburbs to say, look, you should be supporting transit in our moment of need because we can provide all this good stuff for you by reducing driving.

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David Zipper: I don't think it's a good idea. It's not something that gets me fired up. I'm a D.C. resident. I used to work for a couple mayors in D.C. I love this city. I just think the fare-free thing is it's at least a distraction, and it might even be counterproductive. I've spoken with some leaders like Monica Tibbetts-Nutt, who's the Undersecretary of Transportation for Massachusetts and a former MBTA board member. That's the transit system for Boston. And she said the fare-free discussions actually make it harder to get statewide support for transit because people outside of Boston, which is obviously the big city, the city that is most interested in fare-free transit, just don't really get it. They're not really into it, and they feel like it is not a priority for them.

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David Zipper: And if we have a real problem, if fare-free transit leads to an association in people's minds of transit with being a service solely for the poorest in society, because in the United States, we just don't have a great record of funding things that are for low-income Americans. That is not the frame that is most likely to get transit the resources that it deserves. Sad. Sad, but I want to be realistic because we're facing this critical moment right now, and we need to have the best arguments that we can.

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Sean Rameswaram: We took David Zipper's argument back to D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who's actually a big fan of David.

Charles Allen: Well, I'm a big fan of David. But there's a but. But that also doesn't follow the experience that we've seen. In other places that have moved fare free, you see an increase in ridership. That's a really important part of what will take place here in the district as well. but here's where DC will be different than other places. We're not just making it fare free. Remember, we're also putting in place a $10 million a year fund to improve service and delivery so that you have a more reliable, a more frequent, a better experience when you're on transit.

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Charles Allen: We are adding now a dozen lines. It'll run 24 hours a day that we don't have right now. Those are big service improvements. I've argued all along, it's not just about making it fare free. You've got to also improve service. if you don't address both sides of the same coin, you are really missing the boat.

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Sean Rameswaram: To free or not to free? That is the question. The answer is down the road, down the tracks, down the bike lane, the dedicated bus lane, the waterway. David Zipper is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's on Twitter at David Zipper. Amanda Llewellyn drove this bus. Matthew Collette, Jolie Myers, Laura Bullard, Miles Bryan, Paul Robert Mounsey were along for the ride. Next up on our City Limit series, Crime. Everyone says it's up, but is it really? Or is that just our perception? And how is that perception morphing our cities? It's Today Explained. Thank you. We'll see you next time.

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Sean Rameswaram: Thank you for listening to Today Explained. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to our show and follow us on social media. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @todayexplained. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at [email protected]. And if you'd like to support our show, you can make a financial contribution to Vox at bit.ly/givepodcasts. Today Explained is a production of Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our executive producer is Matthew Collette. Our senior producer is Amanda Llewellyn. Our producer is Jolie Myers. Our editor is Laura Bullard. Our engineer is Paul Robert Mounsey. And our host is Sean Rameswaram. Thanks for listening.