The big transportation stories these days are all about gas prices and killer commutes, but the real news lies in the fast-growing popularity of mass transit. What we need now is for our leaders to notice.
More people are riding buses, trains, trolley buses and subways than at any time in the last 40 years, according to a recent report from the American Public Transportation Association. Americans last year took 9 billion trips on mass transit, compared with 6.5 billion in 1972. And the increase is building quickly: Ridership rose 4.5 percent in 1999 over 1998.
The last time this many people were riding mass transit, as The Washington Post report noted, was when Ike was in the White House. And we all know what happened after that: Our feverish love affair with the auto came into full flower.
We built interstates, we paved parking lots, we chopped up neighborhoods: Why let a little thing like a functioning community get in the way when you’ve got a road to build? Or, as that consummate developer and roadbuilder Robert Moses put it, “When you’re operating in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.”
Unsurprisingly, the meat-axed metropolises suffered consequences: People moved to the suburbs. And now in turn the people are suffering the consequences: a brave new world in which it takes longer to drive across town than it did in the horse-and-buggy days–and it’s a lot harder on the blood pressure.
A study last year by the Surface Transportation Policy Project found that suburban mothers spend more than an hour a day driving, the equivalent of almost 17 days per year behind the wheel. That’s more time than the average parent spends dressing, bathing and feeding a child. Yet still our metropolitan areas spill outward. Little wonder a Princeton Survey Research Associates poll several months ago had 26 percent of urban and suburban dwellers across the country listing sprawl as their community’s worst problem–more than crime or any other issue.
No doubt gas prices are contributing to people’s transportation choices at the moment. Even the spell that supersized sport utility vehicles have cast upon us is affected. Ford Motor Co. recently announced it will cut production of the mammoth Excursion by a quarter for the 2001 model year, citing “poor consumer demand.” Similarly, the Mitsubishi Montero Limited’s 2001 model “has been turned into a more socially acceptable version of its once brutish self,” wrote Post auto writer Warren Brown, noting the “lighter, less thirsty unibody design.”
But transit ridership surged before gas prices did, and looks to be a much broader and deeper phenomenon. In perhaps the most significant finding of the American Public Transportation Association research, transit ridership is now increasing faster than automobile use. Motor vehicle travel rose 2 percent last year, compared with mass transit’s 4.5 percent.
As is so often true, the people are ahead of the policymakers. Despite all this evidence, mass transit has been getting a smaller share of federal money, and highway-building a bigger one, as states struggle to deal with congestion. Though study after study shows that highway-building alone can never provide a long-term solution, “in the last two years, the portion of federal funds going to new and wider roads grew by 21 percent, just as the portion of funds going to transportation alternatives fell by 19 percent,” the Surface Transportation Project found. This malapportionment occurred as transportation funding reached a record $33 billion. Yet, “Less than 7 percent of this money has gone to funding buses, trains, bikeways or sidewalks, even though polls and surveys show citizens want greater investment in transportation options.”
Indeed, one 1999 Hart Research poll in Washington state had suburban voters favoring transit over road-building by more than three to one, when asked how state funds should be used to reduce traffic and improve safety and convenience.
One of the great benefits of mass transit is that it entails most commuters to spend at least some time every day on foot, which is good for the health of people and their communities.
“Transportation is the invisible thread that connects us all, but that no one is talking about,” transportation consultant Janette Sadik-Khan told a Washington seminar on urban issues recently.
Even if they’re not talking about it, people are changing their transportation habits, and quickly. The policymakers will soon have to follow their lead.
———-
E-mail: overholserg@washpost.com
