Let's Go! Here's One Way

Good news, although it's close to three weeks late. Let's go!

In that vein, here's this short thread from Yonah Freemark, senior research associate in Metropolitan Housing and Communities at the Urban Institute:

I made some estimates for what it would cost to achieve the Biden transition plan's goal of providing high-quality transit service in every urban area across the US with more than 100,00 residents.

What would providing every city with high-quality, zero-emissions public transportation look like? (link to article on the Urban Institute)

Key finding: It's possible to improve transit throughout the US to levels at minimum equivalent to those in the Chicago urban area at a cost of ~$17 billion more per year in operating costs. A feasible federal expenditure that would massively improve transit.

Such a change would make all-day, frequent bus service available to urban areas representing roughly two-thirds of the US population. It would be particularly transformative in poor communities that don't have the local tax base to afford improved transit. (emphasis added)

I don't know if this is completely accurate — since we're not able to audit the Pentagon — but one commenter said that amount is "plus or minus 1 week of Defense Department spending." 

If climate change is real (and it is), and transportation accounts for the largest part of U.S. greenhouse gas output (and it does), we should spend that money. 

Decreasing our country's greenhouse gas emissions is, in fact, part of a defense strategy, and the Department of Defense itself acknowledges that climate change is a national defense issue.

One thing I love about this part of Biden's plan and Freemark's analysis, if it could be made to happen, is that it gets around our particular Minnesota state logjam, which is partly caused by the Republican Party that holds our State Senate and refuses to vote for transit funding in any real way, and partly caused by a stupid amendment to our state constitution that limits transportation funding to roads and bridges. If the money comes from the feds, it doesn't matter what Minnesota Republicans or the state constitutions says.

Note that Freemark's estimates are to bring all those bus systems up to Chicago levels of service, which is not as good as Washington, D.C. or New York City levels. He adds this: "increasing the quality of transit service…to New York City levels would cost less annually ($45.6 billion) than the $48 billion the federal government distributed to highway programs in 2019."

So that gives you another sense of the scale, different from the military budget. But you can also see that it would be less than three weeks of the Defense Department's budget.

And there's also this, described in Freemark's article: Joe Biden’s transit-related plan includes zero-emission options, too. There are about 62,000 internal combustion buses running in transit systems within the U.S. "If the federal government replaced 6,000 of those buses annually with electric vehicles, it would need to allocate a relatively modest $3 billion for the purpose, assuming bus purchase costs of about $500,000." 

And then in 10 years we'd have an all-electric bus fleet. No more particulate pollution and less noise pollution from buses in all of those high-density transit corridors!