Making Sense of Transit Policy

The essentials of a good transit policy are obvious to anyone who studies the problem with an objective eye and a respect for facts. Now that HRT has new leadership, perhaps a true business approach will result. Taking a break from the light rail myth series, which will continue with three more episodes, let’s look at the transit business case.

Follow up:

When approaching transit as a business, the first rule is to look at what your customers want. Low-income and transit-dependent people that are the base of ridership, want the following:

• frequent, reliable service
• longer service hours
• multiple, convenient lines
• express routes for long distances
• good information
• high level of security

So let’s start by providing it. There are those who say that the city cannot afford it. Yet, for the tiny percentage of the money they are willing to squander away on light rail transit, you could gold-plate every bus, red-carpet every bus stop, and provide airline-style steward service en route.

Good service brings out the demand among the basic rider group. The next target should be the optional riders. They can be attracted to bus service by improvements in service and facilities. These improvements plus innovations such as intersuburb service, reserved lanes, and dedicated busways offer great potential to increase patronage from optional riders.

Poor public transit systems management is characterized not by number of families who want an automobile; it is the number of families who are buying a second, a third, and a fourth. Automobiles are expensive. Many families would rather have one car for general needs and rely on public transit. The fact that they are willing to incur the huge costs of extra cars is powerful proof of the failure of transit managers to keep in touch with the needs of their customers.

Besides improving bus transit to make it competitive with automobile use, two other steps are necessary to create a sound transit system. Both are designed to reintroduce market solutions:

1. Automobile users do not pay the full costs of the roads it takes to service them during peak hours, or of the pollution and congestion costs that each driver imposes on others. For 30 years, economists have been urging the virtues of congestion pricing, which means that drivers would pay a variable toll for road use according to time of day or degree of congestion. The revolution in technology is making this option increasingly feasible by means of nonstop electronic toll collection, and urban officials should pursue it assiduously.
2. Competition must be reintroduced into transit. One reason for the decline of transit is its usual organization as a government or government-enforced monopoly. Low-income people, in particular, are victimized by this because they have nowhere else to turn. The healthy winds of competition should blow, allowing entrepreneurs who want to meet people’s needs to design and implement systems of shuttles, jitneys, or bus lines to meet them.

In the end, good transit policies are within the reach of every official. But they are not to be found in the realm of high-tech glitz.