Looking to Road Pricing to Extinguish Transit’s Five-Alarm Fire
For cities to save their transit and respond to the uncertainty in mobility due to COVID-19, they need to challenge the status quo and enact forward-thinking approaches. Road pricing, coupled with innovative technologies and imaginative policy applications, equips cities with numerous potential solutions to quickly respond to crisis and change.
Nadine is a Marketing and Social Media Intern at ClearRoad. She is currently a graduate student of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, focusing on international development and planning’s role in social justice.
The “Five-alarm Fire” in the MTA
What started off as a promising year for New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) — upward trajectories for operating surplus, service reliability, and ridership — had turned into a mass transit freefall virtually overnight when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Five months later, the MTA faces a “Five-alarm Fire” as described by the MTA Chief and transit workers union president.
The cataclysmic ridership drop at the nation’s largest transit authority is unprecedented, matched only by the staggeringly bleak financial picture: the MTA loses $200 million each week with a $16 billion deficit projected through 2024. Having already burned through the $3.9 billion in aid from the prior CARES act, the MTA is calling on the federal government to release an additional $12 billion in funding merely to stay afloat for the next year.
Government’s inability to anticipate or adequately respond to the challenges and disruption brought about by COVID-19 — stifled by arcane processes and opaque power structures — is painfully illustrated by the precariousness of our transportation systems. Recovering as a country will require quick responses, proactive measures, and an openness to new solutions and paradigms than the status quo.
The Dark Future of Failed Transit and Our Changing Mobility
The gloomy image painted of a transit system in decline provides a glimpse into a dark future for cities across the globe: tepid economic recovery, worsening inequity, and environmental catastrophe.
Allowing the MTA to “burn,” alongside transit more generally, sets the entire country up for a long and painful economic recovery post-COVID. New York’s Metropolitan Area accounts for 8% of the country’s GDP, with expansive public transit integral to its economic viability. In New York City alone, around 56% of the population relies on public transit; prior to COVID, MTA ridership was at approximately 5.5 million a day. Currently, New York City has an alarming 19.8% unemployment rate, which assuredly would worsen with reduced transit service. On the other coast, San Francisco has cut bus lines in half following similar reductions in system revenue. In the city, bus ridership skews poorer than in New York, reducing economic opportunity even more.
More than half of U.S. households face severe financial hardships due to the pandemic, concentrated in majority Latino and Black communities. The weakening of the public transit backbone in cities across the U.S. would again disproportionately impact these communities as minority and underrepresented populations make up for more than 60% of public transit ridership in the U.S.
Paired with sustained avoidance of public transportation, the jolt of car purchases is a deeply concerning trend for mobility post-COVID. While we previously dove into the looming carpocalypse, climate impact, and “tale of two cities” outcomes, the pandemic is also triggering cascading and multilayered crises, leaving the future highly uncertain. For one, environmental and climate change concerns have fallen by the wayside as the effects of the pandemic and economic collapse take center stage. Related to transportation, though traffic is returning to pre-COVID levels, trends around rush hour peaks have been “weird,” and the lasting effects on mobility patterns are still ambiguous. Moreover, the federal funding requested for public transit assumes concrete outcomes and timelines that should probably be considered speculation: a working vaccine and its wide public adoption, a quick economic rebound, and a wholesale return to pre-COVID behaviors.
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
The pandemic has brought pressing transportation issues to the fore, with cities needing to respond sufficiently to this unprecedented crisis. Yet reverting to “normal” and replicating the same ol’ solutions only doubles down on the systems and structures that led to the current predicament, leaving cities susceptible to the next big disruption. This crisis presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for governments to push for sustainable solutions and impose changes to their transportation-related systems and structures.
Prior to the crisis, New York was on its way to becoming the first city in the U.S. to implement Congestion Pricing, to both provide a sustainable (and “lockboxed”) funding source for the MTA and manage worsening traffic. Given that the President blocked implementation in February, it is confounding that pushing for Congestion Pricing approval is not a priority for solving the “five-alarm fire,” despite enough anticipated revenue to support a $15 billion bond, alongside increasing average speed by 15% and reducing emissions by at least 7%.
Generally, road pricing initiatives are ripe for exploring ways to solve transit funding deficits, incentivize transit use, and address the massive uncertainty in the transportation and mobility sectors post-COVID. With imagination and versatility, cities can adopt road pricing policies based on context and need: from imposing targeted delivery fees in response to the massive uptick of freight and delivery services, to off-peak travel incentives to smooth out car usage throughout the day.
What Needs to Change
Cities are held back by a lack of vision and, even worse, a lack of action; implementations are often delayed and outdated, trailing far behind the present crisis. Getting transportation projects built is long and cumbersome: approvals require years of consultation and traffic study upon traffic study. As we wait, mobility patterns change and other crises unfolds — requiring another round of studies around a new baseline and more recent technology solutions. Rather than looking ahead towards sustainable, quick, and responsive solutions, the transportation status quo looks backward, equating to a constant game of catch up, cycles of deficit and federal lifelines, and slow adoption of alternative solutions.
ClearRoad has successfully deployed its Road Pricing platform in as little as two weeks, allowing cities to test out new pricing programs through piloting in key segments. The lightweight technology also allows for scalability and a quick ramp-up of policies for a shorter timeframe between study, implementation, and actual results. By empowering governments with the technology similar to that used by Uber and Lyft, cities can respond to any crisis or changes to policies synchronously and tap into a myriad of solutions to traffic, funding, and mobility problems. Instead of relying on federal stimulus and multi-year implementations, or waiting for post-pandemic norms to reveal themselves, city governments should take this time to tap into their social & mobility goals and begin shaping what they want their transportation to be.
The Status Quo is Transit’s Slow Burn
Cities waiting for a federal funding miracle to rescue mass transit (and city officials hoping to avoid having to make tough choices) are playing with fire. Government agencies of all shapes and sizes are suffering, each clamoring for a federal bailout, and claiming, generally though not always with merit, that their need is the greatest, the service they provide is most essential, and the impact of lost funds is the most devastating. Negotiations at the federal level for the next stimulus package have dragged on through the summer months and, while there have been glimmers of hope, with election day approaching, each passing day makes an agreement less likely to come before cities’ crucial deadlines. Even if federal funding gets approved, it may mean the MTA’s “five-alarm fire” is temporarily contained but the pandemic’s enduring effects will trap the MTA and other public transportation systems in a slow burn.
With alternative approaches and platforms like those ClearRoad is deploying and exploring, barriers to implementation are low for meeting the immediate needs of this time of flux. It is not too late to ensure cities come out of this pandemic with public transportation intact and processes and systems more sustainable and better prepared for future shocks.
