Putting the power of the purse in citizens' hands

If you had your choice of ways to spend public money on transportation improvements, and of ways to increase revenues in order to pay for these improvements, which would you prioritize? If average citizens were able to use a simple model of large, complex budgets to demonstrate their priorities — both how they would prefer to pay (through taxes, fees, tolls, bonds, etc.) and where they’d prefer to see more or less money spent — I’m willing to bet that runaway spending on new highways would be trimmed, and spending on rail and transit systems would expand. Several surveys and election results have revealed a broad preference for more investments in trains and transit, but rarely is the public given the opportunity to match how and how much we’re willing to pay with what we want to get for our investment.

That’s why the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District’s FutureBART module is so innovative and useful. It gives Bay Area residents the power to select among up to seven proposed funding mechanisms (including a bond issue, a sales tax, a regional gas tax, bridge tolls, and fare increases) and shows a representation of how much revenue each one would generate. Once you’ve selected the revenue measures you’re comfortable with, it shows you how much that set of measures would cost your household each month, and gives you a total budget to work with (represented by dollar signs). You can then select what improvement programs you want this money to go to, with the main choice being between repairing and modernizing infrastructure, expanding capacity on existing routes and stations, and adding new routes and service.

To test out the module, even though I don’t live in the Bay Area, I selected all the revenue measures except the higher BART fees and the parcel tax. This combination of measures would cost my household $35.60 per month, an amount I would be comfortable with as someone who uses public transportation almost daily and doesn’t mind paying a fair share for it, especially considering its cost-effectiveness relative to owning, maintaining and driving a car. (Of course, if I lived in the Bay Area without a car, as I do in DC, it would cost me about $10.00 less.) With this amount of revenue, I was able to fund all the proposed maintenance and capacity expansion work, plus the bus & commuter rail service expansions and infill station construction. I would prioritize better serving the congested core over expanding service farther out into the suburbs. 

Even if one were to select all the indicated revenue-raising measures, one would still not have enough money to fund both all the maintenance work as well as any of the major capital expansion projects: BART extensions in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, a second Transbay Tube, and the Western San Francisco BART extension. Therein lies the rub, and hence why most transportation providers and infrastructure maintainers (public as well as private) face a tough choice between building new infrastructure and maintaining and increasing the capacity of existing infrastructure. In most cases, I lean towards the latter: if a company or agency is to commit to building something, it should also commit to keeping it in good shape for as long as it is expected to last.

Imagine if the FutureBART model were applied to intercity passenger trains, or to federal transportation funding policy in general. How, and how much, would you tax yourself to pay for improvements to the national passenger train network? Would you focus this money on fixing up and adding capacity to the Northeast Corridor, on doing the same for short-distance corridors in the Midwest and West Coast, on buying new equipment, or on expanding the long-distance train network with new routes and frequencies?

Thus far, few stakeholders — even rail passenger advocacy groups — have gotten behind any particular innovative ways of raising revenue to invest in upgrading the equipment and infrastructure of Amtrak and the states that are sponsoring shorter-distance services. A dedicated source of funding is obviously needed so that Amtrak and other operators can have multi-year planning and contracting horizons. Why not develop an interactive website that shows a plethora of tax, fee and bond options — and even the option of taking away money from other parts of the transportation budget, or even other departments — and ask the citizens how much we’re willing to pay and through what mechanisms? Either the US Department of Transportation or the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee and/or the Senate Commerce Committee should host such a platform.