What a Public Transit ‘Moonshot’ Would Cost the U.S.

What would it take for the United States’ urbanized areas to have world-class public transit on par with cities like London, Paris and Madrid?

A lot more spending by every level of government, for one thing. And some big shifts in policy and culture for another. But it’s not as much as a skeptic might assume, and it’s substantially less than what the country already spends on maintaining its highways, according to a new report from Transportation for America, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

The report defines world-class transit by comparing the populations of metropolitan regions against the size of their transit fleets. The cities with the best transit service have an average of around 130 transit vehicles per 100,000 people — Singapore has 125, for example, while Barcelona has 163. The ratio in America’s biggest cities is much lower. In the New York region, which has by far the biggest transit system in the country, there are 88 vehicles per 100,000 people; in D.C. it’s 61; in Philadelphia, 36; in the Twin Cities, 21; in Montgomery, Ala., just seven. Not every American city needs service frequency on par with European capitals, where subways arrive every few minutes during peak hours. But every urbanized area could have “great” public transit service with more investment, the report says.

The report comes at a time when most American transit systems are struggling to make basic operational ends meet and working to prevent layoffs and service cuts rather than thinking about ambitious expansions. The COVID-19 pandemic caused financial problems for most systems, but ridership was lagging even in the decade before the pandemic began. Other parts of the developed world prioritize transit far more than the U.S.

“Right now I think we’re in a dark period for transit. It’s pretty obvious to say that,” says Corrigan Salerno, a policy manager at Transportation for America and lead author of the report. But, he says, “It’s not always going to be this way.”

The U.S. could build out world-class transit if it invested an average of $229 billion a year for the next 20 years, the report says. That’s an extra $2.4 trillion on top of what’s already being invested — about two-and-a-half times the current baseline investment. It would also demand changing the way capital projects are managed and permitted to reduce time and costs, building in-house design and engineering expertise at transit agencies, and aligning land use rules with transit investments. Currently, U.S. governments are projected to spend $6.3 trillion on highways over the next 20 years — substantially more than it would cost to build world-class transit, according to the report.

The prospects for an immediate “moonshot” on public transit expansion are not good. Investments in public transit were dwarfed by investments in highways under the last major infrastructure bill, and the Trump administration has entertained the idea of eliminating federal transit funding altogether. Congress is scheduled to negotiate the next transportation funding package this year, but the politics of the moment don’t suggest a major expansion of transit is in the offing. Salerno acknowledges this, but says the report is meant to be a “starting point” for conversations about what it would take to overhaul transit in the U.S. The highway system has reached a point of “diminishing returns,” he says, with more and more money required to maintain the existing system without significantly expanding mobility options for more people. Big investments in transit, on the other hand, could help more people afford to live in high-demand areas or forego the growing costs of car ownership, while promoting a transportation system with a smaller impact on the climate.

“Giving more people the option to live transit-oriented lives,” Salerno says, “would be an enormous opportunity.”