1. We're still building roads like there's no tomorrow.

Freemark begins by noting that transit ridership is on the decline across the U.S., even as it increases in most of our peer countries. He attributes this decline, in part, to the simple fact that our governments at all levels are pouring vastly more money into expanding road networks than improving transit.

How much more?

Even as the country was adding 1,200 miles of expanded transit service, it added an estimated 28,500 new lane-miles of arterials—roadways like Interstates, highways, and the four-plus-lane “stroads” that constitute many of our cities and suburban areas. This is infrastructure hostile to pedestrians and transit users—and likely to reinforce patterns of automobile dependency and sprawl. That’s roughly 24 times as many new roadway miles as improved transit miles. Who can blame Americans for continuing to drive? Transit offerings simply have not kept up.

1b. Corollary: We're still barely building transit at all.

Much is made by transit opponents of the supposed wastefulness of public transit spending. But how much does it all actually add up to? It turns out the average American consumer contributed just $14.50 in tax dollars per year to transit expansion, the cost of about three lattes. Obviously, more money than that went to operating and maintenance costs for transit, funded both through taxes / fees and direct rider fares. But let’s put these numbers in perspective, as Freemark does:

The average American consumer spent $8,427 on automobile transportation in 2016.

Americans spend more on transportation than our peers in other wealthy countries with higher transit ridership. And that’s just private costs. The amount that we, collectively, spend on our motor-vehicle transportation system is off the charts. Consider the sheer amount of resources—energy, money, and space—required to transport each of us in our own 3,000 pound metal box, and to maintain a city that makes room to move and store all those boxes.

Most drivers have no accurate sense of the costs of different ways of organizing a city, because the amount we spend making driving convenient and appealing is so wildly out of proportion to the amount we spend doing the same for transit or active transportation. In light of that, we’re glad to see Freemark echo the idea of #NoNewRoads—our call to cease expanding America’s roadways—given the clear fiscal and ecological hole we’re digging ourselves into by doing so:

Every reasonably sized city in the country should be identifying corridors for bus rapid transit, reallocating street space for that purpose, and ceasing roadway expansion. The speed of implementing such improvements has been far too slow given the poor quality of most bus service throughout the country and the relatively low cost of making such changes. But that requires cities to take seriously their responsibility to find the means to get people out of their cars. It requires activists to make the case that the era of automobile dominance must come to an end.

2. Buses offer major bang for the buck—when we treat them a bit more like rail.

Just over half of new “quality” transit miles added this past decade were through bus lines: both proper Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) which has dedicated lanes and boarding platforms, and “Arterial Bus Rapid Transit” (aBRT), a growing, inexpensive stepping-stone option which provides bus riders some of the conveniences of rail like level boarding, less frequent stops, and off-board ticket purchases—but without the separate lane.

The expansion in miles of enhanced bus service, however, is not matched by the expenditure, which comes to only 8 percent of transit-expansion funds ($3.6 billion in total). The other 92 percent have gone to various forms of rail.

Buses alone wouldn’t cut it in New York or Chicago, but in most contexts they are a much more cost-effective way to build dedicated transit lines. And the gap between what we were able to achieve in a decade (not nearly enough) with the relatively small share of expenses makes a compelling case that many of America’s cities should take more seriously the prospect of forgoing one glitzy light rail line to build several highly functional bus lines that deliver many, though not all, of the same benefits. (Funding agencies also need to adjust their priorities to make it easier and more appealing to do so.)