Transit as if People Mattered

It’s all unquestionably true: urban mass transit is in a shambles. It isn’t working the way it was “supposed” to. On the surface, the central problem appears to be money. Most urban transit systems, rail or bus, are enormously expensive, requiring massive government subsidies just to keep them operating, and billions of dollars more to expand or renovate them. Revenue from passenger fares covers only a small fraction of the cost, and taxpayers are getting tired of making up the difference, not necessarily because they oppose transit, but because they feel they’ve been had by planners, administrators, and elected officials.

In the 1960s, when the development of urban mass transit became part of national government policy, visions of sleek, shiny, efficient transportation systems were offered to voters in return for a few pennies of their tax dollars. Twenty years later, voters may not know what makes a transit system work right, but they do know that massive cost overruns, construction delays of months and years, and endless repetitions of the refrain “We need more money from you people” by public officials wears a little thin. Taxpayer discontent has transferred to municipal governments and state legislatures, which are now starting to rebel against state and federal dictates. Last November, for example, the Boston-area transit system ran out of money and narrowly escaped being shut down completely for the remainder of the year. Local governments had refused additional money, and the Massachusetts legislature, in special session, reluctantly agreed to provide $41 million in supplementary funds, thus saving the system for the moment. But all parties to this particular crisis — the taxpayers, the transit system, local governments, and the state — know that the problem is far from solved, and the taxpayers justifiably feel frustrated and resentful.

At the national level, the Reagan administration has indicated its skepticism, at least rhetorically, about continuing the present degree of federal involvement in mass transit. Reagan has said, “There’s no reason for someone in Sioux Falls to pay federal taxes so that someone in Los Angeles can get to work on time by public transportation.” Federal tightfistedness with transit subsidies, if real, would be a marked reversal of federal policies in the ’60s and ’70s, when local authorities were encouraged to seek federal grants for transit and to think of them as “free.” The Reagan view appears to be that transit is a problem to be solved by state and local governments; if he follows through on this philosophy, these entities, no longer able to hide transit costs under the cloak of “free” money from Washington, will have to figure out other ways to provide urban mass transit.

One alternative, of course, would be to abandon altogether the complex of planning and subsidies in urban mass transit in favor of a spontaneous market system. In all likelihood, however, the market alternative will be the last to be tried, for the commitment to present concepts of urban mass transit on the part of officials and planners remains strong. For the next several years at least, government at all levels will continue to “find” money in increasing quantities to keep transit systems running, until the day when the tension mounting between taxpayers and government requires a complete reevaluation of the entire concept of mass transit.

Most contemporary transportation planners, public and private, make their decisions in the context of the past. They resist top-to-bottom reexamination of the concepts which underlie transit policy, and their resistance is understandably bolstered by virtually universal misconceptions surrounding the history of urban mass transit in the United States.

According to Federal Assistance for Urban Mass Transportation, a booklet published by the Urban Mass Transportation Authority (UMTA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation, “a 12-passenger horse-drawn carriage... along Broadway in New York City” in 1827 was the first urban mass transit conveyance. “From that humble beginning,” the booklet continues, “America’s urban mass transit grew through the remainder of the 19th century into the 20th, transit has almost never been private in any real sense, and to the extent it operated subject to market forces at all, it was affected adversely by direct competition from government. In the early 1900s, mass transit in major cities consisted mainly of trolleys powered by electricity which ran fixed routes and were attached to overhead wires. Many of these systems provided cheap transportation, but they were not private. They usually were an adjunct to the city’s electric power company, which was “private” in the same way that American Telephone and Telegraph is private today; in other words, it was a monopoly public utility. In most cases, the electrified trolley systems by themselves were not financially successful, and the losses were absorbed by the power companies that owned them. Perhaps the best-known example of this was Pacific Electric’s “Big Red Car” trolley system in the Los Angeles area which connected towns and cities from Newport Beach in Orange County all the way to Redlands in San Bernardino County, an enormous distance even by Southern California standards. Between 1912 and 1952, the Big Red Cars showed a profit only eight times, but they kept rolling because Pacific Electric could afford to pick up the deficit.

moving millions of passengers via a patchwork of private transit operators. In other words, says UMTA, in the bad old days we had all these uncoordinated private systems running amok, providing transportation systems apparently at random, with no unity, no direction, no plan, until the federal government brought centrally-planned civilization to the barbarians.

There were serious problems plaguing urban mass transit before the involvement of UMTA, but the problems stemmed from no lack of government intervention. The whole idea that mass transportation was a mishmash of private chaos is 99 44/100 percent pure myth. Urban mass

The nation’s “patchwork” of these quasi-private systems began to change after 1935, when Congress passed antimonopoly legislation requiring municipal public utilities to divest themselves of their transit adjuncts. Since most of the transit systems were financially uncertain at best, city governments were reluctant to take them over directly, preferring instead, when possible, to sell them to operating companies which were permitted to run the systems without competition.

The action of Congress in 1935 precipitated transit crises all over the country, which were taken advantage of by General Motors, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Mack Manufacturing (of Mack trucks), Phillips Petroleum, and Standard Oil of California. These five corporations banded together to give financial backing to National City Lines, Inc., a small midwestern bus operator, which began dealing with city governments to purchase trolley systems and convert them to bus systems—featuring, not surprisingly, buses built by General Motors and Mack, running on Firestone rubber, and fueled by Phillips and Standard of California. In the course of more than 20 years, National City Lines and other similar front companies used over $9 million from the five corporations to buy up and convert scores of transit systems in cities located in 16 states, including Los Angeles, Oakland, Salt Lake City, El Paso, St. Louis, Tampa, and Baltimore. Interpretations of the reasons behind the group action vary. Cities were expanding in the ’30s, adding geographical area beyond the range of their trolley tracks, and GM, which had experienced little success in selling buses to cities prior to 1935, apparently saw an opportunity to encourage the conversion of transit systems from electrified trolleys to gasoline (later diesel) powered buses. Darker interpretations suggest that GM and the other companies had no real desire to sell buses and related equipment, but wanted rather to destroy the trolley systems, forcing transportation consumers into private automobiles—built by General Motors, running on Firestone rubber, and fueled by gasoline from Phillips and Standard of California.

Whatever the true motivations, the result helped hasten the decline of trolley systems. Tracks and overhead wires were ripped up and torn down. Bridges and tunnels constructed for trolleys were abandoned. The primary mode of mass transit became the bus, and virtually every major city —even those with rail systems, such as New York, with its old subway system, and Washington, with its new Metrorail —now relies heavily on buses to haul passengers within the city itself. In smaller cities, of course, the bus is the only means of mass transit. And in virtually no city of significant size are buses operated by private enterprise in any true sense. Of the 279 urban areas in the United States with populations of 50,000 or more, only 34 have privately-owned bus systems (of which only four operate in the top 100 cities in population). These private operators are under contract to the city, which grants them a virtual monopoly over city transit.

Urban mass transit is often cited as a classic example of an area in which private enterprise doesn’t work; in fact, where it can’t work, and in which government must step in to provide a needed service. In some cases, however, governments and “private” companies operating under exclusive government contracts have stepped in to prevent market alternatives from ever taking hold. In the early 1970s in Harlem, the predominantly black section of New York City, Dr. Thomas Matthews started his own financially successful bus system to carry patients between hospitals and their homes; the city shut his system down. At about the same time, in Orange County, California, a small group of young counterculture types painted an old school bus pink and began hauling housewives and children to and from shopping centers; the county transit district stopped that. And in San Mateo County, California, when a bus company started a commuter bus service from the suburbs to San Francisco, the state Public Utility Commission quickly put an end to it — at the insistence of Greyhound Bus, which presumably wanted the state to leave all the driving to them. A market system of urban transit can work, but making it work involves rethinking the entire basis of present day urban mass transit policy, particularly of transit planning.

The way things ought to be

The “psychohistory” of urban mass transit is not significantly different from the psychohistory of all attempts at public planning, particularly urban planning, over the past 80 or 90 years. Conventional planners view cities as disorganized, chaotic jumbles which must be “put right.” They determine that people in cities are not behaving in their own best interests and therefore must be given different, more correct, more rational environments if they are to be truly happy and fulfilled. This has been the basic planning premise behind such concepts as urban renewal, redevelopment, and open space, and it’s the basic premise behind urban mass transit planning. And, of course, there are always individuals, companies, and organizations who benefit from the implementation of such a view and encourage it to the point where the resulting system takes on a life and momentum of its own, even if the planners have second thoughts.

Undoubtedly the leading opponent of the “City-as-Chaos” view has been Jane Jacobs, who believes that most urban problems are attributable to and have been exacerbated by the implementation of conventional planning wisdom, and who further believes that cities, left to themselves, generate their own spontaneous order. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities she writes:

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success.... This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. Instead the practioners and teachers of this discipline (if such it can be called) have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behavior and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanitaria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities — from anything but cities themselves.

She continues:

Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs…have gone to great pains to learn what the saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses in them. They take this with such devotion that, when reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside. [Emphasis in original]

Twenty years after Jacobs wrote those words, reality has intruded with considerable force in at least one area of urban mass transit: modernistic rail systems such as San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and Metrorail in Washington D.C., both of which have exceeded planners expectations only in terms of cost, but which otherwise have been characterized by construction delays, equipment breakdowns, and labor problems, while failing to appreciably alter transportation patterns or alleviate traffic congestion. The planning passion for fixed rail systems has died down, at least for the moment, as a result of these experiences; the next large-scale system is likely to be built in Canada rather than the United States. This is not meant to imply that fixed rail transit systems are inherently unworkable — Walt Disney built a monorail 25 years ago and seriously proposed building an expanded, private, profit-making version for the Los Angeles area — but rather to suggest that these systems have been especially prominent victims of the planner syndrome so thoroughly skewered by Jane Jacobs.

But transit planners are still having a field day with the traditional staple of mass transportation, the bus. Today’s urban buses are classic examples of what is known in the military procurement business as “gingerbreading”: the piling on of adornments and complex mechanisms seemingly for no other reason than the sheer beauty, wonder, and technological fascination of it all. Even specialty features which have a clear function, such as hydraulic lifts for wheelchair-bound passengers, have been so cluttered with gimmickry that to operate them not uncommonly results in the mechanical failure of other components of the bus. Since 1977, most new buses purchased by cities have been what’s known as “Advanced Design Transit Coaches,” sleek, aerodynamic, faintly intimidating vehicles which look as though they have recently rolled out of a 1939 New York World’s Fair artist’s rendering of The City of the Future. In concept and reality, they represent nothing less than a massive scam on local governments and the taxpayers.

A single Advanced Design Transit Coach can sell for as much as $160,000. By contrast, a single full-sized school bus sells for about $25,000. Both are designed to carry a large number of passengers simultaneously from Point A to Point B. Where does the additional $135,000 go?

Mainly, it goes to fulfill the dreams and wishes of federal transit planners, who have virtually full control over the type of bus purchased by city governments. Back in the days when General Motors and its friends were taking over and converting trolley systems, the city governments made the decisions and there was at least a minimal incentive for GM to be cost-efficient and competitive. No such incentive presently exists, for the Urban Mass Transit Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation holds the business end of a stick from which dangles one of the most appealing carrots ever designed.

In the late 1960s and ’70s — and unless the Reagan administration makes an unexpectedly abrupt policy reversal, this will hold true for the ’80s — UMTA was in the business of making city governments offers they couldn’t refuse. If a city wanted a new or renovated transit system, it could apply to UMTA for up to 80 percent of the needed funding. UMTA was happy to oblige—after all, modern urban mass transit is something people ought to have—and all it wanted from the cities was agreement that the new buses conform to the specifications written by UMTA.

UMTA’s basic specifications are contained in what is informally called The White Book, a 200-page “guideline procurement document” (UMTA’s modest phrase) plus 19 separate addenda. The level of detail to which this “guideline document” delves is typified by the following excerpt pertaining to seats:

The upper rear portion of the seat back, seat back handhold, and upper rear surface of the modesty panels located immediately forward of the transverse seats shall be padded and/or constructed of energy absorbing materials. During the 10g deceleration of Section 2.3.2.3. the HIC number shall not exceed 400 for passengers ranging in size from a 6-year-old child through a 95th-percentile male.*

Not surprisingly, there are only three manufacturers of Advanced Design Transit Coaches in the United States: General Motors, Grumman (makers of Flxible coaches—that’s right, there’s no “e”), and Neoplan, a German company which is building a manufacturing plant in Colorado. These companies are barely affected by what individual passengers might or might not want in a bus, or by what the city governments might want, since UMTA subsidies mean UMTA specifications. But the companies care a great deal about what UMTA wants, and they spend a great deal of time thinking up new features for their buses and lobbying UMTA to incorporate them into the specifications. It was this procedure which resulted in the recent Grumman-Flxible debacle in New York City. Grumman had developed special lightweight bus frames and sold the concept to UMTA. The city bought over 600 new Flxibles, put them on the streets, and their frames promptly cracked. Grumman has now taken the extraordinary step of buying television ads, complete with actor Telly Savalas, to assure prospective passengers that its buses really are safe.

Incidents of massive equipment failure aside, however, city governments haven’t much cared what kind of buses they get. With 80 percent of the price paid for by UMTA, cities can have a $160,000 Advanced Design Transit Coach for little more than they would pay for a school bus. UMTA’s carrot-and-stick manipulation of the transit coach market virtually guarantees that huge, complex, expensive buses remain the only game in town. Smaller, cheaper, simpler buses do exist, of course; you see them at airports, hotels, and rent-a-car agencies. But UMTA so far has shown very little interest in these, and the cities, because of the availability of federal subsidies, have no incentive to investigate less expensive alternatives.

*For the curious, the term “HIC” in the specification refers to “Head Injury Criteria.” UMTA’s complete definition of HIC is as follows:

where a = the resultant acceleration at the center of gravity of the head form expressed as a multiple of g, the acceleration of gravity. t1 and t2 = any two points in time during the impact.”

In addition, one can’t help but wonder why the size of adult males can be defined in percentiles, but all 6-year-old children are apparently of identical dimensions.

Fixed schedules, fixed routes

In conformance with Jane Jacobs’s view of city planning, urban transit buses have been designed, built, and sold in accordance with what planners think people ought to ride in. Their view of what passengers ought to do doesn’t stop with the selection of vehicles and equipment. Urban mass transit schedules and routes are equally reflective of someone else’s vision of how human beings should behave in an orderly, rational way.

Urban transit routes and schedules are precisely fixed so that buses arrive and depart from particular places at particular times, day in and day out. This means, of course, that passengers must come to the buses, instead of the other way around. Planners compensate for this by selecting a variety of routes, each with its own time schedule, in an attempt to minimize the inconvenience to the largest possible number of potential passengers. This system works reasonably well at certain times of the day, when large numbers of people all happen to want to go in the same direction at roughly the same time. In most big cities, buses are packed with sitting and standing people during commuter rush hours, but rarely carry more than eight or ten passengers during midday or evening. More people do want to travel during rush hour than at other times, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to travel during non-rush hour periods.

Many of them just don’t want to travel by bus, because the fixed route and time schedule of the bus doesn’t coincide with where they want to go in the time they want to spend to go there. Fixed routes and schedules make sense for crowded streets at rush hour, because most people’s preference for getting to work on time is greater than their preference for going when they feel like it. But for non-rush hours, and for people who don’t work standard shifts, precisely fixed bus routes and schedules tend to discourage bus riding and encourage such substitutes as private autos.

Recognizing this, some cities have experimented with “Dial-a-Ride” systems, usually unsuccessfully. With Dial-a-Ride, a passenger calls a central dispatcher who sends a small bus to pick him up and deliver him to a bus stop on a main transit route. But cities haven’t charged enough for this service to come anywhere near covering the cost, and the sizable investment in a fleet of specialized vehicles, along with drivers and maintenance, has required too many dollars even for city governments to bear. Essentially, Dial-a-Ride systems have been clumsy, expensive, centralized imitations of private jitney systems which operate successfully in Latin America and to a limited degree in some cities of the United States. But with jitneys there is no central dispatching, high overhead, union scale wages for drivers, or heavy initial investment in equipment.

Jitneys (jitney is a generic term which applies to privately owned and operated vehicles which carry passengers for a small fee) can be a viable means of mass transit for riders who are not attracted by large buses running fixed routes and fixed schedules.

Ironically, the closest thing to a large-scale jitney system in the United States operates right under the noses of UMTA’s federal transit planners in Washington, D.C. The D.C. taxicab system is cheap, fast, and efficient—and is relatively unregulated. In other major cities, governments require taxi operators to purchase an operating permit from a carefully restricted supply; in New York City, for example, a taxi medallion costs $62,000. But in D.C., virtually anyone can go into the taxi business merely by owning a car and conforming to a few minimum standards (it’s not unusual to see a 1964 Plymouth cab idling next to a new Mercury cab). There are no meters on D.C. cabs, although maximum fares are set by the city according to the number of zones the cab travels through. It’s not uncommon for a cab driver to stop and pick up a second or even a third passenger after picking up the first, upon determining that they are all heading in more or less the same direction; this happens so fast that no one ever seems to mind. A lengthy wait for a D.C. cab is rare, for there are over 20,000 of them in the city, and the fares, while higher than bus fares, seem not to deter lower-income people from using taxis.

It would not be at all strange in Washington to see a 1964 Plymouth taxi worth $400 carrying four passengers following behind a $160,000 Advanced Design Transit Coach carrying only three passengers. The reason for the taxi being full is the same as the reason for the bus being nearly empty: the taxi ride is more responsive to the preferences of the passengers. Yet if the cab driver sold his cab, bought a bus, and tried to pick up more passengers at standard taxi rates, he’d be put out of business immediately and possibly prosecuted.

If this cab driver weren’t committing a criminal act, and if he weren’t forced to compete with the city operated and subsidized bus system, he and thousands of others like him could probably make a comfortable living providing transportation with one of the many small buses now on the market. He could buy a small passenger van such as those built by General Motors, Dodge, or Ford, holding ten or twelve passengers. Or he could buy a larger vehicle such as the “Pioneer” manufactured by Superior Bus (other bus body manufacturers offer variations on the same design) which is nothing more complex than a steel bus body bolted onto the kind of truck chassis used for bread trucks, milk trucks, and parcel delivery vans. These buses will hold about 25 adults and allow room for standees. They’re considerably narrower and shorter than large transit coaches, and their short wheelbases make them maneuverable on residential streets. They sell for about $20,000 to $30,000, depending on how they’re equipped.

Just as Washington cab drivers can presently buy and equip a car, pay for fuel, repairs, and insurance out of the fares and tips, and take home what remains, an independent, “free market” bus driver could do exactly the same thing on a somewhat larger scale. He or she could finance the purchase of a new bus over a five-year period, costing perhaps $8,000 or $9,000 per year; fuel, maintenance, and insurance would add $10,000 annually; and he could decide to pay himself a salary of $20,000, which is near the top end of the present scale for bus drivers in major cities. Working a five-day week for 50 weeks a year, he could gross the needed $40,000 by carrying an average of 160 passengers per day at an average fare of $1.00.

One way he could reach this goal is to run his vehicle as a fixed fare, fixed route bus during rush hours, when he could carry a full load of passengers for a low fare. He could then operate as a flexible-route, sliding-fare taxi at other hours of the day, charging more for personalized service. A movable sign in a window at the front of the bus, such as those now used in transit coaches, would inform passengers whether he was operating as a bus or a taxi, and to what areas of the city he was willing to go. Conceivably, competition in the quality of service as well as in price could develop among private bus operators. Regular commuters might discover, for instance, that the blue-and-white bus on their route offers stereo music and free coffee at a higher fare than the yellow-and-green bus, which is no more than a rolling box with seats.

If the scenario of thousands of little privately-operated buses zipping around city streets, merrily changing their mode of service from bus to taxi and back again, sounds a little speculative or even bizarre, its roots are far more closely grounded in reality than the visions of urban mass transit conjured up and imposed upon cities by planners. Such a system would likely work well in Washington, D.C. and other eastern cities, while more conventional jitney systems might be more appropriate for other kinds of cities — and even large transit coaches could be economically self-supporting in cities with large populations spread over huge geographical areas.

But today there is no opportunity to discover what mode of transit works best in any given city, for the planners have imposed on all cities massively expensive, monstrously inefficient transit systems whose single most. distinguishing characteristic is their lack of flexibility. They have been conceived and constructed on the basis of what planners think people ought to do. People ought to leave their cars at home and ride around in brand new cushioned chrome-and-fiberglas behemoths. People ought to synchronize their daily schedules of time and place to fit a predetermined transit route. A system of private, cheap, simple, profit-making little vehicles careening around the city, taking people where they want to go when they want to get there? But that would be so…so disorderly!

But as observers such as Jane Jacobs — and economist Friedrich Hayek—realize, there’s nothing at all “disorderly” about thousands and even millions of people simultaneously making their own choices of where, when, and how to travel, what form of transportation to buy, and from whom to buy it. Such a system is spontaneously, and profoundly, orderly. Transportation in cities is, or should be, a consumer product like bread, nails, and shoes; as with bread, nails, and shoes, consumers even now choose among a selection of available transportation alternatives to determine which best serves their wants and needs. But for urban mass transit, the choices have been severely restricted, and the “winner” in this limited marketplace thus far has been the private automobile, which offers to transportation consumers a degree of flexibility that transit planners have never even approached. Instead, the planners have, in Jacobs’s phrase, “shrugged reality aside” and offered a rigid system which everyone is forced to buy but which few buy willingly. ■

Chris Hocker is the publisher of LR.