Matthew Yglesias: If your commute is a nightmare, blame Congress

America s mass transit agencies are teetering on the brink of collapse The money they got from Congress to help them through COVID- is running out but ridership remains below what it was before the pandemic Lower fare revenue plus higher wage costs equals a bigger deficit Unless state governments fill that gap agencies will need to dramatically curtail institution Yet utility levels are one of the primary determinants of ridership Hence the increasing exposure of a death spiral where revenue shortfalls lead to system cutbacks which lead to lower revenue which lead to operation cuts and so on State legislatures should try to avoid this doom cycle even though finding the money may be arduous But there is a deeper issue here beyond the question of less funding versus more or higher versus lower levels of institution the declining labor productivity of transit agencies The tasks performed by transit workers have remained basically the same for decades even as wages have risen to keep up with economy-wide trends The agencies themselves deserve chosen blame for not finding solutions to modernize operations and improve efficiency But Congress itself is a major culprit specifically and sorry to wonk out here Section c of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of This provision as Marc Scribner of the Reason Foundation points out makes cost-saving reforms formidable if not impossible Various background In the early s multiple private transit companies were being taken over by state or city governments The rise of the automobile had reduced greatly the commercial viability of these networks yet then as now they were seen as significant constituents services Private transit companies were widely unionized at the time but community sector unions were rare There was a quaint-sounding by contemporary standards concern that taking agencies general would serve as a form of union-busting So the law required that agencies which receive federal funding which was essentially all of them to protect collective bargaining rights guarantee re-employment of workers who lost their jobs and safeguard employees against a worsening of their positions The upshot is that not only do transit agencies face all the usual obstacles to making their workforce more efficient they are in plenty of respects prohibited from doing so For example there are basically two strategies that a transit agency can provide bus operation The standard way in the U S is that the transit agency owns and maintains the buses and employs the drivers In the rest of the world however it is more common for the transit agency to act as a contractor It draws up the facility map and frequency it wants and lets private companies bid on the job As a striking paper published in notes by fully switching to a contracting model U S transit agencies could reduce bus operating costs by with no reduction in utility That sounds like an almost ridiculously large cost saving Yet the product doesn t stem from any magic privatization fairy dust it s only that union contracts pay bus drivers and other transit employees above-market wages So transit agencies could privatize in order to avoid the union premium and save money Or they could deprive workers of their collective bargaining rights and save money Except that under federal law they can t authentically do either of those things In the longer term of class there is incredible promise in autonomous driving Right now in San Francisco Phoenix and Los Angeles it s workable to ride in a driverless taxi It will soon be practicable in other cities Creating a driverless car that works is a challenging engineering challenge A self-driving train by contrast is fairly trivial it turns on tracks and does not need to steer around objects or even engage with other vehicles except to have an crisis stopping function Precisely because the driverless train is a much simpler matter the device is neither new nor particularly exotic The subway systems of Dubai and Copenhagen are fully automated and the Paris Metro is partially so Automated train systems are used in a multitude of U S airports Automated trains provide a kind of double dividend they are both cheaper to operate and since they can drive safely with less spacing between them allow for more frequent facility The challenge of module is that there is an upfront capital cost associated with automation In a sane world given the large transit investments the federal ruling body has made in the last half-decade various priority would have been given to spending on things like automation It wasn t But that doesn t mean state and local governments can t do it themselves The obstacle again is that six-decade-old federal law under which workers can only be replaced over a very long time horizon through attrition This also helps explain why no transit agency is at the moment partnering with driverless car companies despite the clear benefits of doing so An automated bus is a harder technical challenge than an automated train but a more bounded one than a driverless car it follows a fixed passage for example A driverless bus would also allow agencies to maintain institution during late-night hours when demand is lower but staffing costs aren t Neither of these actions is a panacea for transit s challenges in a post-pandemic world But they are alternatives to a death spiral in system or an ever-growing succession of subsidies Of program it sounds na ve or even outlandish to call for a last dose of bridge funding paired with a improvement of the Urban Mass Transportation Act and a mandate to cut operating costs But in the hypothetical world where Republicans authentically cared about the efficiency of leadership and Democrats indeed cared about the quality of inhabitants services that s what Congress would do Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter He is author of One 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