American Exceptionalism Off the Rails
Why the United States spends so much but gets so little public transit.
by ELIZABETH T. HENDERSON and JARED ABBOTT
After just a few weeks in Madrid, Christine, an American exchange student, was ecstatic about the city’s subway system.
“One of the first things I noticed was Madrid’s metro is much cleaner than New York’s. . . . I haven’t seen a single rat yet! There are no fishy odors coming out of the cracks, and the floors still have their original color, without a shade of brown. And it’s so cheap!” she remarked in an online comment forum.
While Americans might be surprised by public transportation abroad, they don’t need to be told that our public transit here in the United States is coming up short. It’s a grueling reality they face every day.
“It took me four hours to return home. I left around 2 PM and got home after 6 PM,” said Marta, just one of dozens of Los Angeles bus riders who shared their experiences with a local transit advocacy group. “I was feeling suffocated, stressed, and anxious. The bus was overcrowded, and people were standing, and I felt I was going crazy.”
Her story is all too common. While many countries ensure that all their citizens, regardless of where they live, have access to dependable rail or bus services, 45 percent of Americans have no public transit at all in their communities. And when the United States does invest in transit — or health care, or housing — we tend to spend a lot without getting anything like the results of our peer nations.
From the Purple Line project in Maryland (which is now more than $1 billion over budget and four years behind schedule, with an estimated final price tag of $3.4 billion and a completion date of 2026) to the Second Avenue subway line in New York City (just the first phase took ten years and $4.4 billion to build), examples abound of expensive, never-ending transit projects.
While President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure bill represents the largest federal investment in public transit in US history, the $39 billion in funding it allocated to revitalize America’s train and bus systems is less than half of the $89.9 billion the administration originally proposed — and a small fraction of what’s needed to build an ecologically sustainable transportation system. But no matter how much money the government invests in public transit, if we can’t figure out how to build more efficiently, we’ll continue to see the same old story play out.
If we look to our peer nations across the Atlantic, we can see that they’re able to build far more miles of rail transit for a fraction of the cost. Take Spain, whose capital, Madrid, has experienced a transit boom in recent years and has set a global example for efficient rail projects that benefit workers. The per-mile rail cost in Madrid is just $141 million — one-third of the per-mile cost, for example, in Los Angeles ($458 million), according to a July 2021 report by the Eno Center for Transportation.
What explains Spain’s success in keeping costs down? And what can we learn by comparing that success to the state of transit infrastructure in the United States?
The Rail Not Taken
In the 1950s, rather than invest in expanding public transit, the Eisenhower administration codified the power of the booming auto industry in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. America’s transportation infrastructure has been centered around the private car ever since. As recently as 2020, the United States had over four million miles of highways and just under 125,000 miles of rail lines, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. There is a steady stream of government funding for highway projects, but initiatives like rail projects have struggled to find investment.
“You don’t need a sales-tax bake sale to get a highway funded — the federal government just cuts the check,” UC Berkeley’s Climate Program director, Ethan Elkind, told us.
As a result, just 5 percent of Americans use public transit today, partly because, in many regions of the country, hopping on a train or bus just isn’t an option. And though most Americans think public transit could benefit their community, less than half of them support additional spending for public transit, as reported in a 2015 study by the Mineta Transportation Institute.
It’s not hard to understand why.
Since we have such limited experience building public transportation, when we do undertake major projects, their execution is often incredibly inefficient. Transit authorities have difficulty finding experienced managers to work with contractors and oversee projects, which in turn means managers are unable to tell contractors when to forgo inefficient or unnecessary work. And inefficiencies can lead to an increasing number of delays, which then result in projects that are over budget and way behind schedule.
Due to the infrequency of new projects, explains Eric Goldwyn, program director and assistant professor at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, “The staffing [for new projects] often builds on precedents from older jobs . . . so the staffing plan is a little bit anachronistic and doesn’t take advantage of new technologies.”
And the longer a project’s construction timeline drags on, the more public support for it tends to wither. As Elkind explained,
Weak public support means few US politicians have an interest in championing public transit. Even looking to New York City, which hadn’t opened a new subway station since the 1940s before the Second Avenue line, Goldwyn said: “I don’t think you could point to a governor or mayor of New York in the last fifty years and say, ‘That’s the transit mayor.’”
The American Way
The American ethos of competition above all else drives up costs even further. For starters, the larger the project, the more agencies and stakeholder organizations competing for influence and resources, and attempting to undertake a project with so many different actors inevitably leads to higher costs.