Safety and Liability Jersey Transit, which nearly disappeared in 1969. A number of dynamics led to this collapse. Most important of them was the explosion of suburbanization unleashed by the Defense Highway Act of 1953 and the creation of the Mortgage Guarantee Insurance Corporation (MGIC) in 1957. The Defense Highway Act lead to the creation of 49,500 miles of mostly toll-free freeways which radically restructured the distribution of the U.S. population. The MGIC made the federal government the sole provider of mortgage insurance, universally stabilizing investments in newly-purchased housing throughout the country. The MGIC program allowed many or most “qualified” homeowners to purchase homes almost anywhere, and insured the first $100,000 of their mortgages.
Cities in each subregion were easily connected by a mix of fixed route bus and rail services. Before this suburbanization, when farming and other industries were booming in rural areas, most of the non-rural population was concentrated in cities of various sizes – typically one major urban area surrounded by a small cluster of medium-sized cities and large townships. With this structure, the handful of cities in each subregion were easily connected by a mix of fixed route bus and rail services. Because most of the passengers resided and/or worked in these cities, ridership levels were high on both services between these cities and within them. Routes were not fragmented to provide service to the low density areas in between (other than at some stops “along the way”). So thick was the ridership on these services that intercity bus routes were referred to as “trunk lines.” Within the cities themselves, their dense populations were served primarily by a network of buses and streetcars – both of which enjoyed heavy ridership. Suburbanization ended this neat, simple and efficient framework. When our population began to spread out, it became impossible to support the “intermediate areas” and their lower ridership with farebox revenue – just like it was always impossible to serve every nook and cranny of our rural population with any form of public transportation. At the same time, the cities expanded into “metropolitan areas,” as the cities became ringed with suburbs, which over time, included enclaves further and further away from the city. The ability to serve 32 • National Bus Trader / May, 2021
these growing enclaves with buses became increasingly impossible. As urban populations began to spread out, the streetcar networks began to vanish. Only a handful – like those of San Francisco – remain today, even while 40 years ago “light rail” services were reintroduced to replace them – often with low ridership, and requiring extraordinary subsidies to cover the balance of operating costs not paid for by the riders. The “alternatives analysis” process introduced by the Ford Administration in 1975 was designed to put a stop to the light and heavy rail “new starts” – largely in places where bus ridership was thin. It failed. Otherwise, suburbanization effectively killed self-supporting transit service.
Accompanying the collapse of transit was an explosion in traffic. Social Programs and Structural Changes The collapse of urban transit services also coincided with a huge influx of lowerpaid wage earners, replacing and exceeding the higher-wage earners who abandoned the cities for the suburbs. The result was a severe deterioration of urban areas – even while many or most cities still maintained some “high-end” neighborhoods. Accompanying the collapse of transit was an explosion in traffic, as many employment centers remained in the “inner cities.” On roadways connecting the suburbs to the cities, traffic expanded to intolerable levels. The response was to build more and more roadways. In many cities, 80 percent of the land was paved with a combination of roadways, freeway interchanges and parking lots. To address the overall deterioration of our urban areas, former President Johnson created the Model Cities Program in 1964, a program within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A major component of this Program was the creation of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA). UMTA’s major thrust was to pay for 80 percent of the cost of buses (and other capital items) purchased by transit agencies or municipalities, resuscitating these agencies. However, in 1967, when Johnson created USDOT, he immediately moved UMTA from HUD to USDOT. He created operating assistance. (Some grants were “block” grants while others [called “formula” grants] reflected demographics and other factors.) A decade later, 50 percent of transit operating costs were provided by some combination of federal, state and local funds. Sixty-two percent of these funds translated immediately into wage increases.
Regardless, transit funds flowed from a transportation bureaucracy at the federal level to a transportation bureaucracy at the municipal or subregional level. (In oddball cases like Rhode Island, which has a statewide transit system, the funds still flowed to a state transportation bureaucracy.) A year later, in 1965, President Johnson also created MediCare, which contained a transportation component (non-emergency medical transportation [NEMT] service). Soon after came Medicaid and its transportation component. He never managed to shift NEMT service into USDOT. Still today, NEMT service remains a part of the Department of Health and Human Services. As a consequence, transportation funds for MediCare, Medicaid and VA transportation flow from a healthcare bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. to a healthcare bureaucracy at the state, county or municipal level. While much criticism can be, and has been, leveled about efficiency and waste in public transit (and especially in complementary paratransit service), at least those in charge, at all levels, are “in the field.” The exact opposite is true of non-emergency transportation services (NEMT, Medicaid and VA services). This distinction is compounded by the fact that all non-emergency services are door-to-door or curb-to-curb “demand-responsive” services – exponentially more complex to operate, particular where there is no coherent system design (see https://transalt.com/content/principles-paratransit-system-design/). As noted, this complexity encouraged most transit agencies to contract out their version of these services (complementary paratransit service) the instant the ADA required all of them to provide it. That many or most disabled individuals were eligible for both complementary paratransit and NEMT service only made the complexity worse. Regardless, if the transit industries’ alleged “professionals” could not handle the operation of such services, it is hardly a wonder why healthcare agency professionals – even genuine professionals in their field – could not begin to. The consequences of this failure should be obvious: Envision placing your city’s transit agency or state DOT in charge of the ballet. The next installment in this series will explain how the non-emergency transportation sector’s decades of failure in the provision of its services led to the profusion of brokers. It will explain how the infusion and expansion of brokers led to hundreds of billions of dollars a year of taxpayers’ money squandered by fraud and waste. This sad tale may represent the worst that contracting can be. It will also illustrate how
