FOR MOST urban planners, it is an article of faith that mass transit is not only good but essential — and that more mass transit should be a priority. Total funding on public transit in 2022 (the most recent data available) soared past $84 billion nationwide, an increase of nearly $5.5 billion since 2019. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Transit Administration last year approved $21 billion in new federal subsidies to agencies around the country, touting it as a "record investment in American transit."
Yet no matter how much is spent on public transportation, we are constantly hectored that more is needed. In her State of the Commonwealth address to the Legislature earlier this year, Governor Maura Healey called for doubling the amount spent on the MBTA, in addition to reducing fares for low-income riders, which would add another $45 million to the cost of operating the T's bus and subway lines. On Beacon Hill, in City Hall, and in much of the media, it is taken for granted that public transit is indispensable.
 Public transit in Boston and elsewhere held little appeal for the vast majority of working people even pre-pandemic. Now they're even less interested. (Chart: Committee to Unleash Prosperity) |
"Getting people out of their cars and onto trains isn't just an economic necessity. It's also an environmental imperative," one Boston Globe colleague wrote in 2022. "Transportation accounts for the bulk of the state's greenhouse gas emissions." Hence the neverending push to extend subway and bus lines — or, even more ambitious, to undertake a "massive expansion" of public transit in Greater Boston.
All of which may seem reasonable to those for whom public transportation is always good and automobiles are always bad, regardless of changes on the ground. But in the real world, the glaring truth about public transit is that fewer and fewer Americans want anything to do with it.
As longtime transportation analyst Wendell Cox documented recently for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the share of commuters riding on public transit in the nation's largest metropolitan areas has in virtually every case plummeted since 1960 — and the decline has accelerated since the COVID-19 epidemic. The numbers in Boston are typical. In 1960, public transit accounted for fully 25 percent of commutes in Greater Boston. By 2019 (pre-pandemic), that share had fallen to 13 percent. As of 2022, it was only about 7 percent. In the other metro areas Cox analyzed, the same pattern prevailed. Only in New York does a significant share of commuters use public transportation. Everywhere else, mass transit amounts to little more than a niche means of getting to work.
Last week I called Cox, who heads the Demographia policy firm, to explore the numbers and their implications in more detail. He didn't pull any punches. He marveled at what he called "the absolute delusion of planners" in Boston and elsewhere, who still haven't grasped that COVID-19 caused a permanent revolution in remote work. Since 2019, the number of Americans who generally work from home has skyrocketed by 172 percent, he said. That has led to a massive decrease in both the number of people driving to work and the number using public transportation to commute.
Working with Census Bureau data from the American Community Survey, Cox has crunched the numbers for the eight cities with the largest downtown business districts — Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In every case, the number of people who report working in the city dropped between 2019 and 2022. As a result, so has the number of people getting to work in cars and those getting to work via transit.
Boston's experience is typical. According to Cox, the most recent census statistics show that 108,000 fewer people work in the city now than before the pandemic, 31,000 fewer workers are driving into Boston for work, and 115,000 fewer workers are commuting by T. In the broader metropolitan area outside the borders of Boston, by contrast, the number of people working is up by 56,000. Yet so entrenched has working from home become that close to half a million more people no longer commute — between 2019 and 2022, car rides to the job dropped by 423,000 and public transit commutes by 39,000.
Remote work is here to stay. Cox, citing figures by WFH Research, says that work from home amounted to 7.2 percent of work hours on March 1, 2020, just before the pandemic struck the US economy. Four years later, just under 29 percent of all work hours occur at home — a fourfold increase.
Public transit in Boston and pretty much everywhere else (again, New York is the exception), held little appeal for the vast majority of working people even pre-pandemic. Now their interest has shrunk still further. It is not more urgent than ever that the T be subsidized and expanded, it is less so.
 No, more mass transit isn't a necessity. |
COVID-19 was a terrible tragedy. It caused enormous harm and led to much grief. But it had at least these two silver linings: First, a vast number of Americans have stopped driving to work, with a commensurate effect on carbon emissions. And second, the plunge in transit use makes it clearer than ever that the "need" to expand public transportation is nonexistent. It makes no sense to pump billions of additional dollars into more mass transit that commuters won't use. Environmentalists ought to take the win, celebrate the reduction in car commuting, and move on to other priorities.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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