Transit Funding Argumentative

Transportation
Recently, voters in Nashville participated in a referendum that would have raised taxes to pay for a $5.2 billion transit plan. The voters rejected the measure overwhelmingly, leading to concerns about the city's ability to handle its growth, as its streets and highways are becoming increasingly congested. Post-mortems of the referendum show that a variety of factors contributed to the heavy loss, including muddled messaging and a mayoral scandal that tarnished the image of many key proponents (Garrison, 2018). While public transit in many cities has historically been funded through general revenues, the massive infrastructure investment of public transportation today means that the ability to fund major upgrades to public transit often comes via referenda, pitting short-term and short-sighted individual interests against the interests of the public good. I will argue that the financing of public transit should not come down to referenda or even special taxes, but should come from a general funding model.
One of the reasons for making this case is that transit is a public good – its benefits accrue to all, even to those who do not use it. Putting it up for referenda will typically pit the interests of those who fear increased taxation against the poorer classes who disproportionally benefit from increased public transit. The moral and ethical case in favor of increasing transit is strong, but is not always a persuasive argument in the short-run, and therefore is vulnerable at the polls.
First, the idea that transit is a public good. The benefits accrue to those who use transit, including future users. The Mineta study in 2015 showed that there is a link between service intensity and ridership, meaning that more people ride buses when there are more buses to choose from. Higher rates of service make the friction (i.e. walking, and time waste) lower, which encourages more people to use public transit (Alam, Nixon & Zhang, 2015). Increased ridership has a spinoff benefit, in that it frees the roads for other drivers, reducing congestion. While there is evidence to show that increased spending on transit will not reduce congestion in the long run (Stockton, 2018), that isn't because it doesn't reduce car driving; it means that the rate of increase in car driving is higher than the rate of reduction created by transit. In a city like Nashville with a growing population, a massive one-off transit spend will not reduce transit in the long run; only continued investment in transit can do that. But there are benefits, and they accrue to both riders and non-riders alike, which makes public transit a public good.
The second component of the argument is that as a public good, spending on transit should be determined by public officials based on need, not determined by the general public. First, officials have the ability to model traffic flows, take into account areas of new population growth, and determine years in advance where transit should be increased. If the people who have this knowledge need to convince a city council, or leverage internal political channels to get things done, that is still much easier than translating their knowledge into a couple of catchy slogans to be used in a referendum campaign. Messaging was one of the weak points of the Nashville campaign, for example (Garrison, 2018). But addressing a complex challenge like transportation in a large city should never be distilled down to the ability of a marketing department to outmarket opponents.
The third component is of the argument is that special taxes for transit should not be put on the table; transit should be paid for with general revenues. There are specific political reasons for creating such special expenditures, such as politicians seeking to avoid the ire of anti-taxation activists. But most roadwork and other public infrastructure projects come from general revenues. Nobody questions why we would spend tax dollars on building a new road to serve a new subdivision, or new waterworks, or upgrades to the electric grid, or a new school. The reality is that politicians do the issue of transportation a disservice by segregating it from things like water, power or education. The ability to get around is a central component of modern American society – it is essential to our ability to function socially and economically. Something so central to how our lives are structured should not be treated as a random add-on, but as something of critical importance on a par with other public expenditures.
Put these things together, and you have a clear case that public transportation infrastructure should never be put to referendum, and in fact should be paid for out of general revenues. Transportation is a central component of 21st century American society, and includes multiple different options. Leveraging the capabilities that cities have to plan their structures, and model transportation flows, cities should also have the ability to meet the needs associated with their growth, rather than having some of those needs subject to what ends up as a marketing campaign pitting short term pain versus long term gain.
Ultimately, this becomes a moral issue, because of the way an individual taxpayer's rights to influence how much tax they pay abut against the rights of the many to have a better, less congested city. It is a classic utilitarian (good of many) versus deontological (it is right to raise my taxes to pay for something that disproportionally benefits someone else) argument. I take the utilitarian view. The reason is that a city exists as an entity that is specifically designed to serve the needs of the many, not the few. This is the entire point of the city structure – to handle the aspects of collective living, by and for the collective of all people who live and work in the city. The interests of the individual are not especially important here – those interests are expressed in many other areas of our legal system, and the city's right to raise taxes for infrastructure is not inherently an infringement – if done in good faith, of course – to one's individual liberty.
This view is not shared by all, but we still in this country have a choice to live in a city or urban area with a centralized, democratic government structure, or in an unincorporated or rural area where no such structure exists. One need not except by one's own choice, subject themselves to a system of government at the civic level. Because of that, I feel that if one chooses to live in a city, then one chooses to contribute to the betterment of that city. Ideally, that means contributing to critical civic infrastructure of all types, including public transportation, and that is why I argue against putting public transportation infrastructure up for referendum, which inherently subverts the best interests of the people living in a city in favor of individual interests, which to me runs counter to the entire idea of living in an organized community.


References

Alam, B., Nixon, H. & Zhang, Q. (2015) Investigating the determining factors for transit travel demand by bus mode in US metropolitan statistical areas. Mineta Transportation Institute. Retrieved June 17, 2018 from http://transweb.sjsu.edu/research/investigating-determining-factors-transit-travel-demand-bus-mode-us-metropolitan

Garrison, J. (2018).6 reasons why the Nashville transit referendum lost big. The Tennessean. Retrieved June 17, 2018 from https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2018/05/02/nashville-transit-referendum-6-reasons-why-lost-big/571782002/

Stockton, N. (2018). Why traffic-choked Nashville said "no thanks" to public transit. Wired. Retrieved June 17, 2018 from https://www.wired.com/story/nashville-transit-referendum-vote-plan/