Transit creates more jobs than roads

No Texas cities are studied

Jon Boyd, Sep 16, 10.

A new report on transit spending and job creation leads some bloggers to imagine the convergence of the goals of increasing transit service and fiscal stimulus.

“What would happen if 20 metropolitan areas shifted 50% of their highway funds to transit?” writes the Transit Equity Network, “They would generate 1,123,674 new transit jobs over a five-year period — for a net gain of 180,150 jobs over five years — without a single dollar of new spending.”

Noah Kazis of Streetsblog New York City describes the methodology of the report, Transit=New Jobs: the impact of increasing funding for transit:

According to the report, written by University of Missouri-St. Louis researchers Todd Swanstrom, Will Winter, and Laura Wiedlocher, every dollar spent on funding transit creates more jobs than spending on roads. Specifically, each billion dollars spent on transit creates 36,108 jobs while the same figure can only buy 30,319 road jobs. That means that by reassigning some federal spending from roads to transit, Congress could boost employment without adding a cent to the deficit.

The multiplier for highway spending was taken from a model contracted by the Federal Highway Administration and adjusted downward by the authors to exclude the cost of land acquisition, while the transit formulas were taken from a report by the American Public Transit Association.

The report also shows how the feds could create even more jobs by making sure those transit dollars go to operating budgets rather than capital projects. A billion dollars in transit capital projects creates 23,788 jobs, the authors say, less than road funding. But spending a billion dollars on operations generates 41,140 jobs.

The research team measured the amount of transit spending within the Transportation Improvement Plans (TIPs) of twenty metropolitan areas, and job generation. They created policy prescriptions for TIPs. They also performed case studies of Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Portland, and St Louis.

The group found that the average percentage of transit relative to the TIP was 37%, though their chart reveals a wide array of percentages:

They found a relationship between higher transit spending and job generation, the number of jobs created for one year per billion dollars of transportation spending:

Shifting fifty percenty of spending from highways to transit would generate 1.1 million new jobs, a net increase of over 180,000, the report claims.

Last, the researchers applied the same kind of analysis to Transportation for America’s proposal for reauthorizing SAFETEA-LU, and concluded it would generate nearly 1,3 million jobs, or a net increase of nearly 800,000 over the current law.

(Chart source: Transit=Jobs report)