There are a two main issues with Matt's point. First, borrowing is only free as long as interest rates stay near zero. Since we continue to run budget deficits, the debt we incur now will still be around when rates rise. It's not free forever. Sure, the economy--and with it, tax revenue--may be higher in the future. That's plausible, but (second) if the returns are so high, cities can borrow the revenue, backed by future revenues as collateral. It's not just the federal government that can borrow at historically low rates. Every level of credit borrower is seeing historically low rates. Cities could sell more muni-bonds to take care of this. States and cities with balanced-budget mandates could repeal those mandates. It is an emergency after all. If cities and state legislatures don't think it is worth deficit spending, then that's there prerogative.
Life is all about opportunity costs. Rich cities--the engines of our economic growth--have the fiscal capacity to rectify their mass transit problems (higher taxes). Taking money that could go to poor black families in rural Mississippi to spend a disproportionate amount of money subsidizing better-off mass transit riders seems wrong.
Thanks Matt for another thought-provoking piece. Best of luck...and I look forward to continue reading.
I really enjoyed his other Substack piece recommendations, considering it would be overly cost prohibitive to regularly follow a large group of Substack newsletters, I hope he regularly provides similar recommendations every now and then.
A bit late to the thread, but there’s a fantastic 99% Invisible episode about how making buses more functional/enjoyable could do a lot to save public transit - https://castbox.fm/vd/227493439
It's kind of a throwaway line in this post, but I think the rural bias of Congress plays a larger role than financial considerations. There are entire states that lack mass transit and a lot of urban areas that don't really have mass transit, especially in the West and Southwest. I've in big cities on both coasts and there is just not comparison; one necessitated car ownership and the other obviated it.
Sure, BART would get a bailout, but four generations of my family live in the Bay Area and I can count on one finger how many of them have ever set foot on it. It's easy to see mass-transit as not just a big-city problem, but a problem that affects four or five cities.
I'm not arguing that the federal government shouldn't be concerned with mass transit, but I can easily see how large portions of the country would look at it as big-city bailout with nothing in it for them. Cue the "your children and grandchildren will be paying for it" vs. "cities are economic engines" arguments.
What would be a good trade? If Congress put together a quid pro quo kind of bill that bailed out mass transit and did X to address a national, non-urban problem, what would X be?
Elaine Chao is probably too far right to really be effective at it. I think you want somebody who knows transit but is still kind of unpopular with liberal politicians. Maybe Andy Byford or David Gunn?
I got the impression that the argument to put Elaine Chao in charge of the program in the last paragraph was a mildly trollish and somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of capping off the article. In reality, her documented hostility to transit makes me think that she wouldn't want the job. Therefore, I doubt that you could buy Mitch's support just by bringing her onboard. To make it bipartisan, you'd need to put something in the legislation that he actually wants - maybe a big shiny new bridge or convention center or some other white elephant for Kentucky.
I do not know what the political strategy should be, but it should take account of the economic rationale of mass transit: to reduce the cost of agglomerating people. And there are three things that make the economics of mass transit special. 1) People do not “demand" as much agglomeration as is economically optimal because some of the benefits accrue to others. 2) Automobile drivers do not individually bear the cost of the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that they occasion. And 3) drivers do not individually bear the cost of the congestion they occasion.
All three are reasons to subsidize mass transit, although only 2) is an argument for a Federal subsidy.
I believe I will generalize Matthew's Elaine Chao argument. If you want responsible government of large municipalities and constrain excessive project spending you should elect Republicans and not the people who can't say no to public service, construction and transportation unions for political reasons. Not sure why Republicans would want to save Democrats from themselves. But they might do it for the credit of doing it.
Wondering how to fit improved bike transit into all of this. I went from working in my local CBD where I traveled about 25 minutes (half walking, half light rail) to driving to a near suburban office park that is a 15-40 minute driving commute depending on the traffic. I really hate the driving but currently there would be no mass transit option that wouldn't take over an hour each way. I can bike to my office (about an 8 mile route) in about 35-40 minutes which would be acceptable, but then there is weather, and how to transport a change of clothes and other possessions, but really the biggest barrier is that the roads are in pretty terrible shape, and bike lanes appear and disappear for at least 60 percent of the ride and are not protected in most places. If we ever go back to the office I hope to try biking more often, but it seems like improving bike commuting offers some bang for the buck at least it feels like it when you are in Amsterdam and everyone is biking everywhere. I get that it would take a big cultural shift, and that climate is a major factor (here it's more the heat in the summer that is the impediment which is easier to overcome than snow) but is there some normie way to improve and pitch bike commuting that doesn't seem totally tone deaf and goofy and layered in virtue signaling etc.
If there was a way to tie a bailout to efficiency reforms (a gigantic if), that would be the best thing to do.
Since there's not an enforceable way to do that, is the second best thing what would in practice amount to a no-strings-attached bailout?
Looking at NYC's recent proposed tax on parcel delivery to support the MTA, if these systems are vital to city functioning cities will find ways to fund them, and having (relevantly: substantially richer than the country average) cities internalize the cost of bailing out their own transit systems is the best way to try to force reform down the road, especially given that we know that the scale of the inefficiencies (at least 2x, in nearly all American cities, I think based on Matt's prior writing) far exceeds the scale needed to avoid a death spiral.
It strikes me that there is an interesting confluence of policing and transit when it comes to instilling confidence in the safety of public transit. If you care to search YouTube you can readily find viral videos of Transit Police, aka Nazis, dragging righteous commuters off the subway for the terrible 'crime' of refusing to remove their feet from seating. I find this interesting because there is a readily understandable explanation of why you shouldn't do that. I mean they might only have stepped in dog crap on their way to the subway. On the other hand they might also have stepped in spittle carrying an antibiotic strain of tuberculosis or some other infectious disease. So you shouldn't put your damned feet on seating.
I fully expect that America, in particular, will have issues arising from the enforcement of perfectly sensible laws that make transit safe to use. We shall see.
You seem to argue transit is safe based on the marketurbanism.com article.
But that article doesn't make that argument at all. It argues the reason the subway wasn't responsible for the spread of the virus was because people stopped using it because they perceived it as risky. Not that riding the subway was safe.
> There are two reasonable explanations for the likely fact that coronavirus spreads more along roads than rails. First, subway-dependent people may have cut their travel more than car-dependent people. Since travel brings us in contact with others at our destinations (stores, jobs, restaurants), the excess drop in travel may have made subway people safer precisely because the subway seems so dangerous.
> Second, and less obviously, subway-dependent people likely have more geographically-determined circles of contact. Car owners can move freely well beyond their immediate neighborhood. In the language of networks, non-car owners are more likely to approximate “neighbor flooding”; car owners to approximate “uniform gossip” (hat tip to Wesley Chow for this conceptual framework). That is, if a grocery store in a low-car-ownership neighborhood becomes an infectious spot, it is likely to infect a bunch of people who will all “reinfect” each other at the drug store and the park. In a car-oriented context, by contrast, infected grocery customers would drive off to different pharmacies and parks and infect other people.
I would submit that all evidence suggests that transit was and remains a significant risk environment for Covid. It would be miraculous if it were not. Particularly when few were wearing masks. That alone may account for differences found in other countries with mass transit systems most of whom simply did a better job of containment. Watching the re-emergence of Covid in New York also supports this. It isn't the wealthier neighborhoods who are less likely to take mass transit where cases are increasing is it?
This problem doesn't go away with Covid either. Other diseases may follow. It is probably safe, if you mask and follow other basic guidelines, to use mass transit for this particular disease. But unless they are enforced stringently then confidence evaporates. Suggesting mass transit isn't somehow a major risk point for transmission doesn't help achieve that at all.
"All evidence" suggests transit is a major way that COVID spreads? There is really no evidence tying COVID to transit besides that one sloppy study that Matt mentioned. Many other countries (Japan, South Korea) continued with super high rates of transit use throughout the pandemic and it did not lead to a massive outbreak. Many places in the U.S. have ended up having far worse outbreaks than NYC, and many of them don't even have transit. There is strong evidence that wearing a mask and not talking drastically reduces the changes of transmission, which is how most people use transit these days. The resurgence in NYC (which is still small compared to many places in the US with zero transit) is far more likely to be linked to indoor dining and other gatherings where people talk, eat, and don't wear masks.
The fact you can mitigate risk during a risky activity does not mean transit use is not associated with disease spread. When people were draped all over each other, not wearing masks on packed subway platforms, are you really going to suggest that COVID spread wasn't happening?
You can explain to people that you can mitigate the risk away, but empirically people are right to be wary of enclosed public transit.
Safest thing is to stay home, of course. But empirically transit is safer than almost any other indoor activity right now because of high mask compliance, stronger air filtration than buildings, and the tendency for people to not speak when riding transit. Those mitigating conditions do not occur in restaurants, offices, doctors offices, or even indoor COVID testing sites.
I mean, what's the theory here? That coronaviruses are aware of what forms of activity liberal people approve of and politely decline to infect people during those activities?
I'm all for a data-oriented approach, but unless you reject the idea that breathing the exhalations of another person with coronavirus is the primary transmission vector, then *of course* a crowded, stuffy subway car is a major risk. We don't need studies on that any more than we need studies on whether handing two year olds razor blades is a good idea.
Except that much of public transit has favorable air exchange rates that keep it from being as bad as all this. You have to have good ventilation these days. It seems likely to me that the standing room only rush hour trains are still pretty significant risks, but that's still a minority of lines a minority of the time.
The theory is the overwhelming evidence that masks and not talking reduce the chance of transmission by a very significant amount, which is why transit isn’t nearly as much of a concern as indoor dining and other types of gatherings (where people get together indoors, talk, and don’t wear masks or remove them to eat) that are causing COVID to spread.
Transit cars in most systems are also better ventilated than most office buildings or restaurants (there’s a long NYT article explaining this)
A well-run transit system also isn’t constantly packed (especially now), but the 6-foot social distancing rule probably doesn’t apply to the same extent when there’s mask compliance and people aren’t talking
Ugh, sorry, I had typoes in my reply and since you can't edit, I thought I could delete and repost and solve it that way, clearly I failed!
In terms of substantive comments: I haven't been on NYC subways in 20 years, but BART and Caltrain in the SF area both routinely had people packed in shoulder-to-shoulder during rush hour, an easy order-of-magnitude closer to each other than most indoor dining spots or office buildings. And I don't know how good their ventilation is, but based on personal experience, the ventilation isn't good enough to avoid, clearly, getting stuffy, humid, and gross.
This isn't to say that I think the indoor dining or office buildings are safe, either: clearly they are not. Clearly all of those things are not safe. I would believe that some subways if people are well spaced are relatively safe. But subways with that spacing of people are also, I suspect, not particularly useful.
A lot of the towns on the Schuylkill River were really hopeful about getting rail service to Philadelphia from Reading in the next few year, but I think Covid has killed that possibility. It's a bummer.
I wonder who the other six people are besides myself who will be listening in to your Wednesday panel. I have to confess, the engineer in me loves that shit.
There are a two main issues with Matt's point. First, borrowing is only free as long as interest rates stay near zero. Since we continue to run budget deficits, the debt we incur now will still be around when rates rise. It's not free forever. Sure, the economy--and with it, tax revenue--may be higher in the future. That's plausible, but (second) if the returns are so high, cities can borrow the revenue, backed by future revenues as collateral. It's not just the federal government that can borrow at historically low rates. Every level of credit borrower is seeing historically low rates. Cities could sell more muni-bonds to take care of this. States and cities with balanced-budget mandates could repeal those mandates. It is an emergency after all. If cities and state legislatures don't think it is worth deficit spending, then that's there prerogative.
Life is all about opportunity costs. Rich cities--the engines of our economic growth--have the fiscal capacity to rectify their mass transit problems (higher taxes). Taking money that could go to poor black families in rural Mississippi to spend a disproportionate amount of money subsidizing better-off mass transit riders seems wrong.
Thanks Matt for another thought-provoking piece. Best of luck...and I look forward to continue reading.
I really enjoyed his other Substack piece recommendations, considering it would be overly cost prohibitive to regularly follow a large group of Substack newsletters, I hope he regularly provides similar recommendations every now and then.
A bit late to the thread, but there’s a fantastic 99% Invisible episode about how making buses more functional/enjoyable could do a lot to save public transit - https://castbox.fm/vd/227493439
Just another example of public sector unions messing sh up for everyone too.
It's kind of a throwaway line in this post, but I think the rural bias of Congress plays a larger role than financial considerations. There are entire states that lack mass transit and a lot of urban areas that don't really have mass transit, especially in the West and Southwest. I've in big cities on both coasts and there is just not comparison; one necessitated car ownership and the other obviated it.
Sure, BART would get a bailout, but four generations of my family live in the Bay Area and I can count on one finger how many of them have ever set foot on it. It's easy to see mass-transit as not just a big-city problem, but a problem that affects four or five cities.
I'm not arguing that the federal government shouldn't be concerned with mass transit, but I can easily see how large portions of the country would look at it as big-city bailout with nothing in it for them. Cue the "your children and grandchildren will be paying for it" vs. "cities are economic engines" arguments.
What would be a good trade? If Congress put together a quid pro quo kind of bill that bailed out mass transit and did X to address a national, non-urban problem, what would X be?
Elaine Chao is probably too far right to really be effective at it. I think you want somebody who knows transit but is still kind of unpopular with liberal politicians. Maybe Andy Byford or David Gunn?
I got the impression that the argument to put Elaine Chao in charge of the program in the last paragraph was a mildly trollish and somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of capping off the article. In reality, her documented hostility to transit makes me think that she wouldn't want the job. Therefore, I doubt that you could buy Mitch's support just by bringing her onboard. To make it bipartisan, you'd need to put something in the legislation that he actually wants - maybe a big shiny new bridge or convention center or some other white elephant for Kentucky.
I do not know what the political strategy should be, but it should take account of the economic rationale of mass transit: to reduce the cost of agglomerating people. And there are three things that make the economics of mass transit special. 1) People do not “demand" as much agglomeration as is economically optimal because some of the benefits accrue to others. 2) Automobile drivers do not individually bear the cost of the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that they occasion. And 3) drivers do not individually bear the cost of the congestion they occasion.
All three are reasons to subsidize mass transit, although only 2) is an argument for a Federal subsidy.
I believe I will generalize Matthew's Elaine Chao argument. If you want responsible government of large municipalities and constrain excessive project spending you should elect Republicans and not the people who can't say no to public service, construction and transportation unions for political reasons. Not sure why Republicans would want to save Democrats from themselves. But they might do it for the credit of doing it.
Wondering how to fit improved bike transit into all of this. I went from working in my local CBD where I traveled about 25 minutes (half walking, half light rail) to driving to a near suburban office park that is a 15-40 minute driving commute depending on the traffic. I really hate the driving but currently there would be no mass transit option that wouldn't take over an hour each way. I can bike to my office (about an 8 mile route) in about 35-40 minutes which would be acceptable, but then there is weather, and how to transport a change of clothes and other possessions, but really the biggest barrier is that the roads are in pretty terrible shape, and bike lanes appear and disappear for at least 60 percent of the ride and are not protected in most places. If we ever go back to the office I hope to try biking more often, but it seems like improving bike commuting offers some bang for the buck at least it feels like it when you are in Amsterdam and everyone is biking everywhere. I get that it would take a big cultural shift, and that climate is a major factor (here it's more the heat in the summer that is the impediment which is easier to overcome than snow) but is there some normie way to improve and pitch bike commuting that doesn't seem totally tone deaf and goofy and layered in virtue signaling etc.
If there was a way to tie a bailout to efficiency reforms (a gigantic if), that would be the best thing to do.
Since there's not an enforceable way to do that, is the second best thing what would in practice amount to a no-strings-attached bailout?
Looking at NYC's recent proposed tax on parcel delivery to support the MTA, if these systems are vital to city functioning cities will find ways to fund them, and having (relevantly: substantially richer than the country average) cities internalize the cost of bailing out their own transit systems is the best way to try to force reform down the road, especially given that we know that the scale of the inefficiencies (at least 2x, in nearly all American cities, I think based on Matt's prior writing) far exceeds the scale needed to avoid a death spiral.
It strikes me that there is an interesting confluence of policing and transit when it comes to instilling confidence in the safety of public transit. If you care to search YouTube you can readily find viral videos of Transit Police, aka Nazis, dragging righteous commuters off the subway for the terrible 'crime' of refusing to remove their feet from seating. I find this interesting because there is a readily understandable explanation of why you shouldn't do that. I mean they might only have stepped in dog crap on their way to the subway. On the other hand they might also have stepped in spittle carrying an antibiotic strain of tuberculosis or some other infectious disease. So you shouldn't put your damned feet on seating.
I fully expect that America, in particular, will have issues arising from the enforcement of perfectly sensible laws that make transit safe to use. We shall see.
You seem to argue transit is safe based on the marketurbanism.com article.
But that article doesn't make that argument at all. It argues the reason the subway wasn't responsible for the spread of the virus was because people stopped using it because they perceived it as risky. Not that riding the subway was safe.
> There are two reasonable explanations for the likely fact that coronavirus spreads more along roads than rails. First, subway-dependent people may have cut their travel more than car-dependent people. Since travel brings us in contact with others at our destinations (stores, jobs, restaurants), the excess drop in travel may have made subway people safer precisely because the subway seems so dangerous.
> Second, and less obviously, subway-dependent people likely have more geographically-determined circles of contact. Car owners can move freely well beyond their immediate neighborhood. In the language of networks, non-car owners are more likely to approximate “neighbor flooding”; car owners to approximate “uniform gossip” (hat tip to Wesley Chow for this conceptual framework). That is, if a grocery store in a low-car-ownership neighborhood becomes an infectious spot, it is likely to infect a bunch of people who will all “reinfect” each other at the drug store and the park. In a car-oriented context, by contrast, infected grocery customers would drive off to different pharmacies and parks and infect other people.
I would submit that all evidence suggests that transit was and remains a significant risk environment for Covid. It would be miraculous if it were not. Particularly when few were wearing masks. That alone may account for differences found in other countries with mass transit systems most of whom simply did a better job of containment. Watching the re-emergence of Covid in New York also supports this. It isn't the wealthier neighborhoods who are less likely to take mass transit where cases are increasing is it?
This problem doesn't go away with Covid either. Other diseases may follow. It is probably safe, if you mask and follow other basic guidelines, to use mass transit for this particular disease. But unless they are enforced stringently then confidence evaporates. Suggesting mass transit isn't somehow a major risk point for transmission doesn't help achieve that at all.
"All evidence" suggests transit is a major way that COVID spreads? There is really no evidence tying COVID to transit besides that one sloppy study that Matt mentioned. Many other countries (Japan, South Korea) continued with super high rates of transit use throughout the pandemic and it did not lead to a massive outbreak. Many places in the U.S. have ended up having far worse outbreaks than NYC, and many of them don't even have transit. There is strong evidence that wearing a mask and not talking drastically reduces the changes of transmission, which is how most people use transit these days. The resurgence in NYC (which is still small compared to many places in the US with zero transit) is far more likely to be linked to indoor dining and other gatherings where people talk, eat, and don't wear masks.
The fact you can mitigate risk during a risky activity does not mean transit use is not associated with disease spread. When people were draped all over each other, not wearing masks on packed subway platforms, are you really going to suggest that COVID spread wasn't happening?
You can explain to people that you can mitigate the risk away, but empirically people are right to be wary of enclosed public transit.
Safest thing is to stay home, of course. But empirically transit is safer than almost any other indoor activity right now because of high mask compliance, stronger air filtration than buildings, and the tendency for people to not speak when riding transit. Those mitigating conditions do not occur in restaurants, offices, doctors offices, or even indoor COVID testing sites.
Doctors offices, restaurants and commercial office space have fared very poorly during COVID.
I mean, what's the theory here? That coronaviruses are aware of what forms of activity liberal people approve of and politely decline to infect people during those activities?
I'm all for a data-oriented approach, but unless you reject the idea that breathing the exhalations of another person with coronavirus is the primary transmission vector, then *of course* a crowded, stuffy subway car is a major risk. We don't need studies on that any more than we need studies on whether handing two year olds razor blades is a good idea.
Except that much of public transit has favorable air exchange rates that keep it from being as bad as all this. You have to have good ventilation these days. It seems likely to me that the standing room only rush hour trains are still pretty significant risks, but that's still a minority of lines a minority of the time.
The theory is the overwhelming evidence that masks and not talking reduce the chance of transmission by a very significant amount, which is why transit isn’t nearly as much of a concern as indoor dining and other types of gatherings (where people get together indoors, talk, and don’t wear masks or remove them to eat) that are causing COVID to spread.
Transit cars in most systems are also better ventilated than most office buildings or restaurants (there’s a long NYT article explaining this)
A well-run transit system also isn’t constantly packed (especially now), but the 6-foot social distancing rule probably doesn’t apply to the same extent when there’s mask compliance and people aren’t talking
Ugh, sorry, I had typoes in my reply and since you can't edit, I thought I could delete and repost and solve it that way, clearly I failed!
In terms of substantive comments: I haven't been on NYC subways in 20 years, but BART and Caltrain in the SF area both routinely had people packed in shoulder-to-shoulder during rush hour, an easy order-of-magnitude closer to each other than most indoor dining spots or office buildings. And I don't know how good their ventilation is, but based on personal experience, the ventilation isn't good enough to avoid, clearly, getting stuffy, humid, and gross.
This isn't to say that I think the indoor dining or office buildings are safe, either: clearly they are not. Clearly all of those things are not safe. I would believe that some subways if people are well spaced are relatively safe. But subways with that spacing of people are also, I suspect, not particularly useful.
A lot of the towns on the Schuylkill River were really hopeful about getting rail service to Philadelphia from Reading in the next few year, but I think Covid has killed that possibility. It's a bummer.
I wonder who the other six people are besides myself who will be listening in to your Wednesday panel. I have to confess, the engineer in me loves that shit.
Hi Matt!! (Say hi back!! Attempt #7)
Hi!