Yglesias: Taking the Bus to a Public Transport Stimulus

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Xposted to Agent Orange, My Left Wing, …

I have been following a “problem” with the stimulus, involving the “break ground in 3 months” guideline. That is, since we have had an eight year assault against public transport from the White House, with special focus on rail projects, we don’t have a lot of energy-saving public transport projects that can break ground in 3 months.

Robert Cruickshank discusses this on the California HSR blog: Obama and Congress to Screw Up the Stimulus.

However, Matthew Yglesias has a smart answer to this: Fast-Acting Transit.

More detail, after the fold.

The problem? Going from start to the finish of planning to breaking ground on most rail projects is normally measured in years, not months. Even my proposal to electrify STRACNET (Part 2, on its connection to HSR, and Part 3, on Sustainable Power) to provide a nationwide electrified rail system in under a decade would be devoting its first year to the process of planning and private railroads putting together their bids to be the first routes electrified.

And then the worry is, via eugene:

Given how much money has been committed to various bailouts – the overall stimulus could reach $1 trillion – that’s going to make it politically difficult to push the kind of large investments in transportation, like a national high speed rail network, that we need to both recover from this economic crisis and provide long-term growth for the economy the way New Deal projects did in the 1930s.

So, here’s the idea, from Matthew Yglesias:

One example that comes to mind of pro-transit stimulus that would be extremely fast acting would be to tell cities that you’re creating a pool of funds that will be available to finance expansions of bus services. Because it costs money to operate a bus (you need to pay the driver, etc.) pretty much everywhere is offering less bus service than they have the capacity to deliver. But given extra money, you could do the logistical arrangement very quickly. I think that expanding service on metros, light rails, and commuter rail systems would be a little more complicated but still easy to do on the stimulus time frame.

Indeed, since a large part of our concern for a possible GM bankruptcy is the cascade effect, where suppliers currently reeling from the recession are hit with a loss of a big part of their business, and go into bankruptcy … and then with difficulty in getting Debtor-in-Possession financing, fold … and then Ford has to close down lines for lack of suppliers … which puts Ford under financial stress, which then spreads the stress to even more suppliers.

Ah, but create business for some part of the motor vehicle industry, and it makes for a more resilient domestic auto sector.

Yes, buses. Money can be available to upgrade old buses to new, more fuel efficient, and/or less CO2 emitting, buses … and, of course, with the part of the stimulus that involves offering more bus service, we can get maximum benefit from these more fuel efficient buses.

Of course, the program for energy saving public transport capital investments should be written broadly for any energy saving public transport infrastructure, so that a transport system with a project ready to break ground can go ahead and pursue it … whether that be bus, trolleybus, light rail, suspended light rail, mass transit, regional rail, or whatever … but allowing public authorities to upgrade to the most fuel efficient available new buses is something that can certainly “break ground” in under three months.

And, indeed, shouldn’t be restricted to “conventional” public transport infrastructure, it should include Plug-In Hybrid Electric School Buses (Progressive Blue) (h/t A Siegel).

Matthew Yglesias also makes another important point: we should make every effort to have the stimulus spending go to as low a level of government as feasible. Get it to cities and counties wherever feasible, rather than states. This is especially important for transport stimulus:

… things will likely go much better in this regard if money is offered directly to cities or transit agencies rather than all being laundered through state capitols. State government is almost always structured so as to bias political power away from large cities, so structuring stimulus funds entirely through state governments will probably result in a lot of spawl-enabling investments rather than investments that allow us to use our already-build areas more intensively and efficiently.

In addition to this, there is another kind of spending on longer term projects that can be started very quickly. That is planning. One reason we have so many road and bridge projects ready to go is that in most states and many urban areas, we have departments that have dedicated funding for highway planning. By contrast, planning for expanding transit and regional transport by some dedicated transport corridor tends to be project by project.

That means that there are stacks of plans “on the shelves” to help us burn gas and drive our economy deeper into addiction on imported crude oil, but the availability of projects that can be pulled off the shelf and put into motion for transporting people with less or no oil dependency … in many states, the cupboard is bare.

Why is the cupboard bare? Because planning takes money. It takes people working on plans to get preliminary plans in place, to perform economic and environment impact statements, to get them assessed … its not free. There’s a certain amount of idea spinning us folks on the blogs can do … and then it needs political action to start pulling scraps of money out to get the formal planning process started.

“It takes money”, of course, means “its stimulus spending”. To be specific, if the planning is done by public transport agencies, where available, county or city transport authorities, elsewhere, and by the state department of Transport, for counties that do not have any planning capacity of their own, this is a relief on state and local budgets that are under tremendous stress, and which will start having to cut-back unless more money comes in.

Indeed, with much dedicated planning functions funded by gas taxes and focused on highways, getting planners across the country to work on transport plans that must be more fuel efficient than transport by road is a useful public education investment in and of itself.

In essence, “hiring out” salaried staff to perform work on the Federal Government’s dime for one or two years will help short-circuit that vicious circle, where a declining economy leads to falling state sales tax revenue which leads to spending cut-backs which leads to more economic decline.

And having a stock of plans ready to go, with their economic and environmental impact assessments completed … that is a tremendous benefit when we have an opportunity to engage in infrastructure spending.

So in addition to the two above, I’d add a third: an Energy Independent Transport Projects Bank, with money available to support plan development everywhere in the country. As the title suggests, it would be a bank of projects.

How much? Certainly billions … this is going to be developing plans everywhere in the country.

If optimists are right, then the improved state and local tax revenues as the economy recovers strongly in the coming year will mean that the very best of the project plans can be put into place, with substantial Federal assistance.

And if the pessimists are right, we will have a wide ranging collection of projects ready to break ground for the upcoming rounds of stimulus spending.