Living Car Free - Public Transport Creates More Jobs

Public Transportation Creates More Jobs


Smart Growth America has taken a look at the stimulus and discovered something that might not seem so obvious: dollars spent on public transportation generate twice as many jobs as the same amount of money spent on highways and bridges.

The data tell us that every billion dollars in public transportation investments made as of October 31 2009 produced roughly an additional 8,000 job-months compared to highway projects. ARRA transportation funds have so far gone disproportionately to highways. If the total road + public transportation funding in the just-passed House jobs bill were invested equally in public transportation and highways, the same outlay would produce 71,415 additional job-months, equivalent to year-round employment for 5,951 additional people.

Public transportation helps preserve urban areas and raise property values along their travel corridors. It brings much less pollution than individual vehicles and saves riders over $9000 a year compared to driving. And public transportation dollars create twice as many jobs as highway dollars.

All very good reasons why more transportation money should be going into public transportation. The next time you see the name of a politician attached to a new highway project, make sure to remind them than their state or district could have been cleaner, greener, more desirable, and better employed by spending that money on public transportation.

http://tinyurl.com/yahb3qq

I absolutely agree on this. Public transport helps create more jobs. At the same time it lessens air pollution by reducing the number of vehicles on the road.

I sent the link to the page where that story originated to all of my congressmen. I keep all of their web sites in my bookmarks folder to make it easy to contact them. Each site has a place to send messages. I just type the first message and copy and paste it into all of the other message boxes. My browser is set up to auto-populate my contact information fields. That makes it really fast to send the messages too.

Public transportation helps preserve urban areas and raise property values along their travel corridors. It brings much less pollution than individual vehicles and saves riders over $9000 a year compared to driving. And public transportation dollars create twice as many jobs as highway dollars.

All very good reasons why more transportation money should be going into public transportation. The next time you see the name of a politician attached to a new highway project, make sure to remind them than their state or district could have been cleaner, greener, more desirable, and better employed by spending that money on public transportation.

http://tinyurl.com/yahb3qq

It's strange that if you talk to many city politicians, they all seem to understand the cost of not having good public transportation and a bicycling infrastructure. They see the benefits to city streets decaying more gradually, Less pollution. Yada Yada. Right now there are many US cities trying to get some initiatives going. But there seems to be a number of factors holding them back: taxpayers who are reluctant to pay more taxes (even if it makes their lives more painful); cities that are so spread out that public transportation tends to be very very costly to maintain.

It's probably really hard for city governments to turn these things around with all the money that is currently tied up in car infrastructure.

I created a post very similar to this one not too long ago. LOL! I don't think many people responded since everyone here either uses a bike to get around or drives. I happen to like pubic transportation and it enabled me to become car and bike free. The bicycle is just for pleasure today.

The government funds for transportation is only for capital expenditures. New trains or buses or railroads receive government assistance but cities don't have any more money to be starting new lines. What states need the money is for day to day operation costs since many governments are cutting back on public transit to balance their budgets!

The government funds for transportation is only for capital expenditures. New trains or buses or railroads receive government assistance but cities don't have any more money to be starting new lines. What states need the money is for day to day operation costs since many governments are cutting back on public transit to balance their budgets!

I can understand wanting to not spend more than you take in. But some infrastructure and operating costs are essential to the survival of a nation. You can't work if you can't get to work. This seems like a pretty obvious tenet....

Here is part of the problem as I see it. We have decided that much of the economic meltdown is from consumers spending more than they make. So our government does public service announcements and studies to show that the people need to stop spending more than they make and only spend what they can pay for. It’s called cash in and cash out accounting system. The old system of consumerism has been derided by many and has even been condemned in these very forums as being the major cause of our problems. I think most of us agree that consumer spending more than they made was a problem don’t we?
In the very next breath we suggest that the government needs to spend money it doesn’t have to create jobs to transport people who aren’t working to jobs that no longer exist? Is that a do as I say not as I do thing? Wouldn’t the government be following their own advice if they worked on getting people back to work so more people would be contributing their share of the tax money rather than increasing the taxes on those who are still working making life even more difficult for them?
I know we are between a rock and a hard place but spending more when you are already heavy into deficit spending simply is a hard pill to swallow. Sounds more like Atlantic City or Las Vegas when you double down because you are already deep in debt. The tax payer has already been asked to spend trillions of their grandchildren’s money to make sure Wall Street executives can get monster bonuses and so big banks can buy out other banks and increase the interest rate they charge to the very people they borrowed the money from. LA announced an additional 1000 workers will be laid off in addition to the 2000 they already planned on cutting. They can’t meet payroll for services like Police and Fire so I don’t see how anyone can ask the tax payer to spend more on rail transportation when they can’t afford other basic services. It may need to be done but it will be a hard sell I believe.

see how anyone can ask the tax payer to spend more on rail transportation when they can’t afford other basic services. It may need to be done but it will be a hard sell I believe.

It is a hard sell I agree.

However, a broken city like Detroit is going to spend hundreds of millions on a new lightrail in the middle of a slum with the hopes of attracting venture capital and the jobs that come with it. What do you think Detroit should do to bring back the tens of thousands of jobs it lost? Build a new highway? Spend less on public transportation? (this worked in driving the middle class out of the city!)

Detroit has seen first hand the BILLIONS of dollars lightrail attracted in cities and they want the same. Can you blame them? Should they wait until the government defeats the "War on Terror" and is flush with cash?

Come on!

Spain is spending billions on high speed rail because they seen first hand the wealth it created with each new stop. No they don't have the money. I created a post on the PBS program for this very topic. You can visit the station sites and see for yourself the economic driver rail can do to an improvished town.

What's bankrupting our country is not public transportation but two wars we can no longer afford. After these wars are lost, there will be more to fight and hundreds billions more spent on military weapons so we can attact countries Iran. Keep in mind, we're not there to take their oil but to free their people. You though we were getting off easy but I fully expect out nation to be at war for the next 50 years. Get Ready.

One more comment, there was never money for public transit when Bush was president during the good times. Do you remember how he tried to bankrupt Amtrak?

It is a hard sell I agree.

However, a broken city like Detroit is going to spend hundreds of millions on a new lightrail in the middle of a slum with the hopes of attracting venture capital and the jobs that come with it. What do you think Detroit should do to bring back the tens of thousands of jobs it lost? Build a new highway? Spend less on public transportation? (this worked in driving the middle class out of the city!)

Detroit has seen first hand the BILLIONS of dollars lightrail attracted in cities and they want the same. Can you blame them? Should they wait until the government defeats the "War on Terror" and is flush with cash?

Come on!

Spain is spending billions on high speed rail because they seen first hand the wealth it created with each new stop. No they don't have the money. I created a post on the PBS program for this very topic. You can visit the station sites and see for yourself the economic driver rail can do to an improvished town.

What's bankrupting our country is not public transportation but two wars we can no longer afford. After these wars are lost, there will be more to fight and hundreds billions more spent on military weapons so we can attact countries Iran. Keep in mind, we're not there to take their oil but to free their people. You though we were getting off easy but I fully expect out nation to be at war for the next 50 years. Get Ready.

One more comment, there was never money for public transit when Bush was president during the good times. Do you remember how he tried to bankrupt Amtrak?

I don’t believe I said anything about why we were out of money I only said we were out of money. SO where will the funds come from? What the public is being asked to do is exactly what they have been told not to do as a citizen. Don’t spend more than you make, balance your budget. The government under whoever is in charge is saying they don’t want to cut anywhere but they need to spend even more on something very few people have asked for. I know things weren’t better under the last president and they aren’t good under the current one. However we were told that they needed a trillion dollars to keep the jobless rate fewer than 8 percent and that didn’t work. That trillion was tax money they haven’t collected yet. Now they are talking about another stimulus package when the first one hasn’t been paid for. So what is the difference between government spending three times more than it makes and a consumer buying three times more than they make?
Many cities in our area are cutting back on public transportation because of lack of funds. Businesses have closed and with the job losses there is less tax revenue. It will take a lot more than simply saying “we need it” to convince those who have tried to start saving more and spending less in this economy to vote for a new tax increase.
Just a prediction from me but if someone wants the Republicans back in power again the quickest way to do it is to tax the people that are still working at a time when the economy is so bad. When we built the transcontinental Rail Road in the first place it was at a time of great prosperity not in the middle of the civil war. Stop the war in Afghanistan first and then redirect your efforts and convince the people they need or want it and you have a chance. Remember the space program and what we as a nation are willing to support? I just don’t believe you can continue to milk the working class simply because someone wants something. That is the very concept of gross consumerism. Save for nothing, give up nothing and buy whatever you want. Am I alone in feeling like this?

When we built the transcontinental Rail Road in the first place it was at a time of great prosperity not in the middle of the civil war. Stop the war in Afghanistan first and then redirect your efforts and convince the people they need or want it and you have a chance. Remember the space program and what we as a nation are willing to support? I just don’t believe you can continue to milk the working class simply because someone wants something. That is the very concept of gross consumerism. Save for nothing, give up nothing and buy whatever you want. Am I alone in feeling like this?[/SIZE][/FONT]

Agreed. You have to balance the budget.

Here are a couple of other expenditures that might be reduced or eliminated altogether:
Program 2009 Budget request[11][12] Change, 2008 to 2009
Missile Defense $9.4 billion +8.0%
Space-Based Infrared System $2.3 billion +130.0%
Virginia class submarine $3.9 billion +14.7%
Carrier Replacement Program $4.2 billion +23.5%

[FONT=Calibri][SIZE=3]When we built the transcontinental Rail Road in the first place it was at a time of great prosperity not in the middle of the civil war.

One more comment, the Transcontinental Rail Road was started during the middle of the Civil War! I could not believe it myself but it's true! Who would have believed we could have started one of the most expensive rail roads during a war that cost the nation an astounding $6,190,000,000 dollars! After the war, our nation was deeply in debt yet we still borrowed the money to build the worlds largest railroad.

Form WikiPedia:

On January 8, 1863 Governor Leland Stanford ceremoniously broke ground in Sacramento, California, to begin construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley. However construction was slowed, first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snowstorms

There's a good documentary on NetFlix you can rent and it's excellant. I've seen it. It was really the last great public/private works project done almost entirely by hand and animal! There's also a free public domain book at the Guttenberg Library.

One more comment, the Transcontinental Rail Road was started during the middle of the Civil War! I could not believe it myself but it's true! Who would have believed we could have started one of the most expensive rail roads during a war that cost the nation an astounding $6,190,000,000 dollars! After the war, our nation was deeply in debt yet we still borrowed the money to build the worlds largest railroad.

Form WikiPedia:

On January 8, 1863 Governor Leland Stanford ceremoniously broke ground in Sacramento, California, to begin construction of the Central Pacific Railroad. The Central Pacific made great progress along the Sacramento Valley. However construction was slowed, first by the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, then by the mountains themselves and most importantly by winter snowstorms

There's a good documentary on NetFlix you can rent and it's excellant. I've seen it. It was really the last great public/private works project done almost entirely by hand and animal! There's also a free public domain book at the Guttenberg Library.
You are absolutely right about the timing of the CP Railway. And I also think your opinion about the Detroit rail concept is right on.

If you are unemployed and deeply in debt, it wouldn't make sense to borrow money to spend it on dinner at a fancy restaurant. But it might make sense to borrow money to finance college classes that will make you more employable, or for relocation to a region with better opportunities.

Similarly, it probably makes sense for a city like Detroit to borrow money for a dynamic project like the rail line described in the documentary. This is seed money that will hopefully bring new economic life into the area. There are no guarantees, but the railroad sounds like a wise investment not only for Detroiters, but for Michiganders and indeed for all Americans.