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...

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…