Climate 411

Chicago Transit Authority has laid off 1,067 workers and has drastically cut service. Photo courtesy of Flickr user: TheeErin

Over the last several months, we’ve written occasionally about the need to solve the impending transit funding crisis. For longer than that, we’ve worked around the country, but especially in California and New York, to find new and innovative ways to advance transit service. Lately, we’ve also implored Congress to provide emergency funding to keep drivers employed as legislators have considered jobs bills. 

So far, our efforts as well as the work of our allies, to keep drivers driving, mechanics working, the transit system available—and ultimately keep some of the worst tailpipe emissions in check—have been frustratingly unsuccessful.   

New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and countless other metropolitan regions are facing a transit disaster. Grappling with huge budget deficits as a result of public funding cuts, transit agencies are slashing service, laying off workers, and raising fares.  

• In New York City, the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which operates the city’s buses and subways, as well as suburban rail lines, bridges and tunnels, is facing an $800 million deficit as a result of cuts in state aid and low payroll tax revenues. They expect to layoff 1,130 employees (out of their 70,000 person staff), including 500 station agents. The MTA has ended free fares for students and has reduced salaries by 10%.
• In Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority has laid off 1,067 employees in order to balance a $300 million deficit.
• In San Francisco, the city expects to see a second fare increase in 4 months in order to balance a $12.1 million deficit, with additional service cuts. SFMTA plans to lay off 230 employees, 175 of which are bus and Muni metro drivers. 
• In Washington, D.C., where trains are bursting during rush hour, WMATA plans to lay off 60 employees and eliminate another 90 positions that are not filled. They also expect service cuts and fare increases to fill their $40 million budget gap.
• Just this weekend, in Sacramento, CA, the local newspaper reported that the regional transit agency is planning to put 300 workers on notice that they’ll likely be laid off as the agency grapples with a two-year $25 million deficit. Service after 8pm and on weekends could be cut as well. This deficit has been made worse as a result of state policymakers’ decision last year to shift the state fuel tax, designated for transit operations, to other important state services, which have been jeopardized by the overall state budget crisis.

And here’s an example of how these cuts add up, changing people’s commuting choices. Quoted from the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco resident MPR Howard, who has lived in San Francisco and ridden Muni for 28 years, will now be back behind the wheel:  

I will not be renewing my Muni disabled pass…. I will be putting my 45-year-old car (a 1965 Dodge Dart) back on the road. She may not be pretty or environmentally clean, but at least she gets me from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time. I’ve given up on Muni. 

Confirmed U.S. Public Transportation Industry Layoffs, 2009-2010

* = Transit Manufacturer

** = Rescinded after passage of 10% provision in supplemental appropriations bill

Projected Upcoming Layoffs

 Prepared by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Legislative Department. Updated March 1, 2010.  For more information, contact Jeff Rosenberg at jeffr@atu.org, courtesty of Scott Bogren at the Community Transportation Association of America (bogren@ctaa.org).   

Yesterday, President Obama became the latest among a growing number of D.C. policy leaders to promise a jobs bill that includes transportation funding. While the day-to-day details of when a bill will emerge, how it will be funded, and what it will include are all still developing, a jobs bill seems more certain than ever.

This brings us to one place where we think jobs funding should be targeted: transit operations. A jobs bill that directs a one-time slug of cash to fund transit drivers and mechanics could save some important jobs.

Service cuts affect riders and transit operators.

These are jobs that ultimately help protect air quality and reduce greenhouse gases by providing people real choices in transportation.

Transit agencies across the U.S. are hurting. This past Saturday,dozens of San Francisco Muni riders were stranded at the station. In response to a $129 million budget deficit for fiscal year 2009-2010, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) cut more than half of Muni’s bus routes and one rail line. And while San Francisco has been hit the worst of any American city in terms of fare increases, and is second behind Atlanta’s MARTA in terms of projected deficit as a percentage of operating budget, transit cuts and lay offs are widespread and not confined to urban areas.

These transit service cuts and fare increases also impact transit employees. Transit operators and maintenance crews have lost their jobs. AC Transit, which serves California’s Alameda and Contra Costa Counties, has cut almost 190 bus driver and maintenance positions. In Colorado Springs, CO., state and local budget cuts have eliminated an entire bus service–and more jobs.

Over the years, the federal government has helped pay for buses and rail, but not the drivers and mechanics to keep those services operating. That funding responsibility is left to states and local governments. With the economic crisis, state and local budget cuts have hit transit operations hard. Federal help for operations in a jobs bill is sorely needed.

Transit operating jobs are exactly the kinds of jobs that a stimulus ought to fund—good jobs that provide hardworking men and women with a living wage while providing a needed public service.  In San Francisco, Muni bus drivers earn between $36,000 and $58,000 per year, depending on seniority, and these drivers and their families rely on this income. A federal jobs bill that includes transit operations funding would immediately put drivers and maintenance staff back to work.

It’s not just driver jobs that are at stake. Transit is critical for riders who use it to get to work. The number of employed workers who need it is growing as gas prices and general cost of living increases. Since 1995, public transportation trends have done nothing but increase. In 2008, Americans took 10.7 billion public transportation trips, the highest number since 1956. In the same year, as transit ridership increased nationally by 4 percent, vehicle miles traveled actually reduced by 3.6 percent.

A jobs bill with Federal funding for transit operations would help staunch the bleeding away of good transit jobs. It would buy time while states, counties and cities figure out other ways to close their budget gaps and develop sustainable funding for transit drivers and mechanics. It would keep the buses and trains rolling at a time when America needs them the most.

FreedomWorks, a conservative inside-the-Beltway grassroots organization run by former House Majority Leader Dick Army (R-TX), recently released its Top 10 Reasons to Oppose Cap and Trade.

Their unsound arguments are standard fare for the climate skeptic cognoscenti. They rely on studies from hyper-conservative organizations with a history of catering to industry, while omitting more widely accepted studies, such as those from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It’s also clear from their list that they don’t have a specific problem with a proposal to cap global warming pollution, but rather with climate action in general—suggesting that they believe nothing should be done to address this crisis.

We respond to each of their arguments after the jump.

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Claim:

“This [economic] crisis puts the nail in the coffin for climate change.”

— Bill Kovacs, vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s division for environmental and regulatory affairs, October 17, 2008.

Truth:

Economic studies suggest not only that capping America’s global warming pollution would result in negligible new economic costs, but also that not acting would result in a huge economic burden on our economy.

Solving global warming and reinventing America’s energy infrastructure isn’t going to be free. It is likely that under a cap, energy prices will go up for some Americans in the short term.

Depending on how the policy is designed, though, these increases are relatively modest and can be offset by changes in energy consumption and through subsidies generated through the cap program to reduce the impact of additional energy costs.