Contracting for Bus and Demand-Responsive Transit Services A Survey of U.S. Practice and Experience: Special Report 258 (2001) / Chapter Skim
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2. Public and Private Provision of Transit in the United States
2. Public and Private Provision of Transit in the United States
Pages 27-45
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From page 27... ...
Also described are key legislation and public policies that have influenced transit service contracting in recent decades. Early Experience: Private, Regulated Transit Service Genesis of Local Transit Regulation Long before electric streetcars and motor buses, horse-drawn vehicles provided urban transport on a for-hire basis.
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From page 28... ...
The degree to which such licensing rules actually benefited urban travelers by ensuring sufficient service and fair pricing rather than benefiting the hackney operators by protecting them from competition is unclear, although the former benefits were their ostensible purpose. Similar regulations were applied to successive forms of horse-drawn urban transportation.
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From page 29... ...
Because most roads at the time were unpaved, rail traction by getting wheels out of the mud greatly increased the speed and reliability of urban transportation and reduced the need for horse power and its associated costs. However, the street railways required greater capital investment than the omnibuses.
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From page 30... ...
Although the electric streetcar, coupled with changes in the urban environment, revolutionized transit, most cities entering the 20th century continued to use franchises as the main means of regulating service. Regulation of Private Transit Services: 1900 to 1960s Rise of Electric Street Railways The widespread introduction of electric streetcars at the close of the 19th century was a watershed event for American cities.
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From page 31... ...
Most cities awarded franchises for specific routes and charged operators franchise fees and levies for maintenance of bridges and road surfaces around the tracks (Smerk 1992, 8-153. Yet frequent requests for fare concessions by streetcar companies were poorly received by a public that was growing weary of poor service quality.
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The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 called on electric power companies to divest themselves of ancillary holdings, including transit companies. Yet electric companies had already been divesting their transit operations voluntarily, having eamed higher returns from the generation and distribution of electricity to the public than from the provision of transit service (Iones 1985, 4~50; Hilton 198S; Saltzman 1992,37-381.
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From page 33... ...
While suburbanization had been taking place in the United States since at least the 19th century (fostered by the streetcar, commuter railroads, and earlier forms of mass transportation) , the private automobile—coupled with rising incomes, changing lifestyles, and the new federally funded urban freeways allowed for increasingly dispersed settlement patterns that proved difficult for private transit operators to serve profitably (Lave 1985,3; Smerk 1992,18; Levinson 1996; Saltzman 1992,26; St.
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The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 (later redesignated the Federal Transit Act) provided loans and grants for transit capital acquisition, construction, and planning activities.
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As a remedy, Congress included a provision in Section 13c of the Urban Mass Transportation Act requiring that the condition of existing transit workers not be diminished through transit projects initiated with federal funds (see Box 2-1~. This provision remains in effect today.
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The statute generally requires that provisions addressing five specific matters be included in such protective arrangements: preservation of rights, privileges, and benefits under existing collective bargaining agreements; continuation of collective bargaining rights; protection of employees against worsening of their positions in relation to their employment; and assurances of employment to employees of acquired mass transportation systems, priority of reemployment to those workers laid off or terminated, and paid training and retraining programs. In its grant application, a transit agency must estimate the impact on employees and specify the protections proposed.
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Increasingly, transit was viewed as an important means of reducing metropolitan air pollution and alleviating highway traffic congestion, prompting many systems to offer services from distant suburbs into cities and increasingly from suburb to suburb (Meyer and Gomez-Ibanez 1981~. In amendments to the Urban Mass Transportation Act and other legislation during the 1970s, the federal government agreed to provide funds for urban and rural demand-responsive transit systems, as well as for alternative forms of public transportation, such as vanpools and express buses.
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From page 38... ...
of the 1964 Urban Mass Transportation Act (Section Be) had allowed public transit agencies to contract for services, the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982 expressly required federal grant recipients to develop their transit service programs in consultation with the private sector.
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A few transit agencies in large cities, including Denver and Los Angeles, began contracting for service on portions of their networks; Denver was required by state law to contract for transit service. Throughout the country, many small and rural communities had long contracted for transit services, in part because they dicl not have specialized transit organizations and because they had routinely contracted for many other government services (Teal 19871.
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, which required accessible fixed-route transit systems and complementary paratransit services for people with disabilities, further expanded the use of contracting for demandresponsive services. lYs interest in these services grew, many transit agencies fumed to the private sector to provide them, sometimes using brokers to obtain specialized paratransit services from several private companies in the area.
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By the 1970s, most urban transit systems in the United States were publicly controlled either owned outright by state and local governments or planned and subsidized by the public sector. Private operators remained, but mainly to provide contract services to public transit agencies.
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,82 percent of transit agencies with $1 million or more in annual passenger revenue were still privately owned in 1964.
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Transit Service Contracting: Cream-Skimming or Deficit-Skimming? Report DOT-T-89-13, Urban Mass Transportation Administration, Washington, D.C.
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Estimating the Cost Impacts of Transit Service Contracting. Report UMTA-CA-06-0220-1, Urban Mass Transportation Administration, Washington, D
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From page 45... ...
of the Federal Transit Act. Transit Cooperative Research Program, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
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