Public transportation access and quality

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure it addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in public transportation access. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Access to transportation: Indexes for transit trips and transportation costs. These estimates are available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Location Affordability Index.

• Environmental quality: Examine air quality. These data are available from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index.

• Safety from trauma: Number of deaths due to injury per 100,000 people. These data are available from the National Center for Health Statistics’ Mortality File and the CDC’s WONDER database.

• Navigating the trade-off between ridership and coverage: When designing a network to encourage ridership, transit agencies concentrate a smaller number of more frequent routes along the streets that are most supportive of transit (e.g., with dense land use and pedestrian-oriented design). In contrast, when designing for coverage, transit agencies create a larger network of less frequent routes that provide at least some service to the most people. As all transit agencies face this tradeoff, communities should aim for consensus on how their transit agency should address these competing goals (see Human Transit’s resource). While both approaches have benefits, experts generally advise that transit agencies prioritize providing service to areas that either (1) support high ridership or (2) have a high proportion of households without access to a vehicle. To the extent that it is politically feasible, agencies should deprioritize service to areas with auto-oriented land use and relatively high car ownership, except when transit can provide a clear time advantage over driving.

• Serving trips outside of the traditional “9-to-5” commute: Since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, public transit ridership has rebounded to between 70-80 percent of pre-pandemic levels. However, early indicators suggest that this rebound may be the result of ridership growth during nights and weekends and on routes linking residential and commercial areas. In contrast – and in a reversal of its pre-pandemic strength – ridership on traditional 9-to-5 commuter service has been slower to recover. Many office workers, to whom this service is typically targeted, continue to work from home. As such, transit agencies should assess whether improving service to non-office destinations and during early-morning, late-night, and weekend hours would better match current travel patterns in their service area. If so, allocating more resources to these service types may be an effective strategy for increasing ridership.

• Assess whether network design serves equity goals: Transit agencies have a variety of competing and often contradictory goals. They may face pressure to allocate service evenly across their region, particularly when agencies receive funding from residents and municipalities throughout their region. However, allocating service evenly across geography may not best serve those who rely on and use transit the most. As such, when politically feasible, transit agencies should prioritize service to areas with transit-supportive land use and low levels of car ownership. Those who rely on transit also need quality service for non-commuting trips (e.g., running errands) and during off-peak times, so ensuring reasonably frequent service for these trips should also be a priority.

• Examine fare enforcement practices and penalties for fare evasion: In many transit systems, law enforcement officers have traditionally conducted fare enforcement. This approach has come under increased scrutiny given the history of violent interactions between police officers and riders. As such, experts advise that unarmed customer service and social welfare personnel are generally better situated to conduct fare enforcement than law enforcement officers. Also of concern are penalties for fare evasion, which are often out of proportion to the violation. Not paying a parking meter, for comparison, is not a criminal offense. Steep financial penalties, in particular, can disproportionately harm low-income riders and riders of color. To address these concerns, transit agencies may consider decriminalizing or lowering fines for fare evasion, offering reduced fines or payment plans for low-income individuals, or creating an alternative to paying a fine for resolving a citation, like community service. (see TransitCenter’s Safety for All report.) At the same time, agencies can “harden” their systems to prevent fare evasion through infrastructure, such as taller fare gates or “tap-to-exit” programs.

• Allocate funding, road space, and signal priority to benefit target populations: Transit agencies should examine whether the way they allocate their budgets advances their goals around equity. For example, spending on dedicated bus lanes may benefit riders who rely on transit more than extending commuter rail service deeper into suburban communities. That said, transit funding is often inflexible, and it may not always be possible to shift funds to meet an agency’s equity goals. City, county, and state governments should also examine how space and priority are allocated on roads used for transit service (e.g., physical space, traffic signal priority). Since transit moves people more efficiently than individual motor vehicles, by advocating for road designs that prioritize transit, local leaders can move more total people and improve the quality of transit service, benefiting both riders who rely on transit and the public more broadly.

• Agency senior management and board members: Senior transit agency leaders make high-level decisions around service provision and resource allocation. These leaders play a key role in setting an agency’s vision and advocating for support from other local leaders and state and federal government partners. Depending on a transit agency’s board structure, it may be advantageous to recruit board members with connections to key funders, like state legislative bodies or departments of transportation.

• City and county governments: City and county governments typically manage the design and build out of the roads on which transit operates. As such, city and county public works and engineering staff are key partners for transit agencies interested in changing roadway designs and traffic signalization to better support transit. Similarly, local planning staff can be key partners to transit agencies in ensuring long-range land use planning encourages transit-supportive development.

• State government: State governments are often key funders for transit agencies, though the amount of financial support states provide for public transportation varies widely. In limited cases, state department of transportation staff may be key partners in designing state-owned roadways to better serve transit.

• Labor representatives: Typically, a significant portion of a transit agency’s staff are unionized, notably operators and mechanics. As in other government contexts, policy changes need to be socialized with labor leaders to build buy-in. Additionally, as an agency’s unionized staff are typically front-line staff, they can be a key source of feedback on how prospective policy changes may affect operations. Labor shortages during the pandemic proved that, rather than a trade-off, spending on labor may go hand in hand with improving service. As one example, higher pay and improved benefits can prevent vacancies that led to canceled service across the country.

• Transit riders groups: Transit riders are a key constituency for transit agencies. Riders can provide insightful feedback on an agency’s service and can serve as advocates on behalf of the agency, both to non-riders and to outside government leaders. However, accurately assessing rider sentiment and leveraging rider support to conduct advocacy can be challenging. Both internal riders advisory councils and external riders advocacy groups can assist agencies in better understanding and acting upon rider perspectives.

• Neighborhood-level representatives: While transit agencies typically provide service at a regional scale, transit agency decisions can have hyper-local impacts. Neighborhood-level representatives, like city council members and place-based organizations (e.g., a business improvement district), can serve as liaisons to area residents. These partners can help disseminate information on behalf of a transit agency, as well as serve as conveners, bringing community members to the table to provide feedback to an agency.

• Identify and communicate the purpose of community engagement: Community engagement activities can be conceptualized along a continuum from informing the public to empowering it to make decisions (see IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation). Experts recommend that transit agencies use a framework for identifying the engagement activities most appropriate for any given outreach campaign. Using a community engagement framework supports agency staff in clarifying the public’s role and the extent of the public's influence in a project or service change. Clearly setting these expectations with community members can build greater trust between the transit agency and the general public. Likewise, staff should recognize that those who live near a proposed transit project may not be the same people who will use that project to travel through the area and should conduct outreach appropriately.

• Use quick-builds to improve service and address opposition to long-term projects: Transit agencies and their local government partners should consider using low-cost, “quick-build” strategies to rapidly improve transit service along key corridors (e.g., designating bus lanes with paint and signage). This approach allows agencies to make significant improvements to service even when funding for larger-scale capital improvements is limited. Separately, quick-build installations can serve as temporary pilot projects to test and iterate on a roadway design before a more significant investment is made, especially when a proposed change is controversial. As pilots give community members the opportunity to experience an intervention before it is made permanent, they can be an important strategy for building support for controversial projects.

• Ridership: Ridership, frequently measured as unlinked passenger trips (i.e., each time a passenger boards a vehicle), is among the most important metrics for a transit agency. While meaningful in aggregate, this metric is most useful when disaggregated by day, time, route, and direction. With these data, transit agencies and their partners can better understand who is using which service and where they are going. To gain a deeper understanding of rider travel patterns, agencies could utilize anonymized cell phone data or rider surveys as a supplement.

• Reliability: A common metric for reliability is on-time performance, which is typically operationalized as the proportion of stop or station arrivals that occur within a set buffer around their scheduled arrival times (e.g., within 5 minutes). To assess the role of vehicle maintenance on reliability, agencies may also track the mean distance between vehicle failures. Finally, agencies may use customer satisfaction surveys to assess riders’ perceptions of service reliability. These metrics are valuable, as reliability is directly linked to both rider experience and overall transit ridership.

• Safety: To measure safety on transit, many agencies have traditionally used crime and/or security incident rates per passenger boardings. While these data are typically easily accessible, they should be interpreted with caution, as crimes on transit often go unreported (especially sexual harassment). When possible, agencies may supplement these data with rider surveys that measure feelings of safety on transit. To the extent possible, these data should be collected with demographic data, as different social groups experience safety on transit differently.