METROPOLITAN TRANSIT
AMONG U.S. industries, none has a darker future than municipal transit. In only ten years, the transit companies in U.S. cities have lost almost half the 23 billion fares they carried yearly. At the same time, operating costs have soared (wages and equipment up almost 100%), and operating income (before bond interest and stock dividends) has plunged from $149 million to $41 million. Since 1947, 40 major companies have gone broke. Because of the rapid deterioration of transit facilities, downtown merchants are losing trade to the suburbs, office workers are quitting jobs in downtown business districts, and in the most heavily congested areas real-estate values are going down and urban blight is going up.
What is bankrupting transit is, to a great extent, U.S. prosperity. The rising standard of living means less need for the cheapest form of transportation. The five-day work week has cut Saturday transit traffic by 40% in most cities, and television keeps many riders home at night. But the biggest competition comes from the private automobile. While gasoline and tires were rationed during World War II, the transit companies prospered. But since 1945 millions of U.S. workers have turned their backs on the bus lines—including even bus drivers themselves. In San Francisco recently, a delegation of motormen and conductors, who get free passes on the transit system, demanded that the company provide a parking lot for the cars they drive to their jobs. (They did not get it.) Of 600,000 daily commuters to Los Angeles, an astonishing 480,000 somehow make it through traffic in 320,000 cars. But transit's problem is more than competition from automobiles. Even in New York City, where the shortage of parking space forces most workers and shoppers to ride the subways and buses, the municipally owned transit system is running a deficit of $4,000,000 yearly, although some of the bus lines are making money.
As passenger traffic and income fell, many hard-pressed companies boosted fares, cut services, or did both. They could hardly have done more to lose passengers. Without exception, fare increases turned passengers away, and started a vicious circle. As more bus riders turned to private cars, city traffic jammed up tighter, buses moved more slowly. Slower speeds forced companies to buy more equipment and hire extra drivers to meet schedules; thus the transit companies them selves helped to make traffic still worse. (A Chicago cable car in the 1890s crossed the Loop only 50 seconds slower than a $20,000, 200-h.p. bus does today.)
Cost-cutting also ended the motor-man-conductor teams on streetcars, pushed onto the busy bus driver the added chores of change-making, direction-giving, etc. Nerves frayed by traffic, many drivers became rude and disagreeable, thereby turned still more customers away. Said the Houston Post: "Management and drivers . . . seem to be taking turnabout tapping nails into the coffin."
For a sick industry, drastic cures have been proposed, from outright federal subsidies to local tax relief. e.g., Spokane has agreed to bail out its transit company with $53,000 yearly by lifting a street-use tax and snowplowing bus routes.