RIPTA funding and the Iraq War

"This spring, the Governor presented a budget that clearly underfunded the agency, and the legislative leadership only made half an attempt to remedy the deficiency..."

The Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) and its funding woes continue to be a subject for the news. There’s a certain amount of finger-pointing, and it’s time to clear up some of these issues. What’s the cause of RIPTA’s continuous funding crisis? Well, it largely stems from the Iraq War.

Before 2003, RIPTA had been on an ambitious plan to revitalize a bunch of its important routes. Intense marketing and improved service bumped ridership up a lot, which allowed for increased service, which bumped ridership further. But without the funding for a big overhaul, the planners were engaged in this program in a concentrated way, moving through the system a route or two at a time. With the cooperation of Roger Williams and Salve Regina universities, RIPTA was able to bump ridership and do better marketing to support the increased service over the better part of a year. The Smith Street lines received similar attention the following year, as did service to Bryant.

The RIPTA planners were moving along from one route to the next when suddenly gas prices skyrocketed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Before that, in 2002, over half of RIPTA’s funding was from the gas tax ($29 million out of $56 million), and as prices spiked, RIPTA was hit twice. First, because collections went down as drivers bought less gas, and second, because the cost of diesel went up. So the ambitious plans for service improvements were shoved aside, and our transit system’s seemingly perpetual funding crisis began, and it’s been that way ever since.

The state adjusted RIPTA’s share of the gas tax three times between 2003 and 2009, to hold the budget steady in the face of declining collections. In 2010, to address increased costs and the loss of farebox revenue due to the service cuts of the previous five years, the share was bumped up again, to 9.25 cents per gallon (plus another half-cent of the federal gas tax), where it remains today.

But it turns out that was not a great choice, and gas tax collections have been pretty much flat since 2010, except for the covid collapse of 2020. In real terms (inflation-adjusted), RIPTA’s share of the gas tax is today less than two-thirds of what it was in 2010.

This spring, the Governor presented a budget that clearly underfunded the agency, and the legislative leadership only made half an attempt to remedy the deficiency, leaving the agency primed to make devastating service cuts. A few days ago, the RIPTA board postponed enacting those cuts, in the face of furious opposition from riders, and perhaps a hope that the Governor might find a way to level-fund the agency after all. 

In the last few days, I’ve had the pleasure of reading several sanctimonious calls for RIPTA to “live within its means” on social media. The Governor’s letter to the RIPTA board is only marginally more thoughtful, so in addition to reviewing the history above, let’s refute one of the common arguments for RIPTA and provide a few stronger ones.

First, RIPTA is not a service for poor people. Sensible and well-designed transit is an essential part of life in any modern urban area, which is most of our state. If you want to keep it a nice place, it is simply not feasible to build an area as dense as Rhode Island that uses cars as the exclusive way to get around, and the evidence is available to anyone who travels. Demand has forced even such car-worshipping cities as Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix to embrace light rail and improved buses. Transit improvements have played a key role in the economic powerhouses of Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland (OR). And of course, excellent transit was vital to the growth and flourishing of our nation’s biggest cities.

If, as is certainly true, a good transportation system makes life easier for those who cannot afford a car, so much the better. But good transit is not a program for poor people; it is also for those of us who prefer to let a professional driver worry about the traffic, so we can read or knit or daydream (or write articles about RIPTA) while we move around the state, for people who prefer not to worry about finding or paying for parking, and even for people who enjoy a couple of drinks on an evening out and don’t want to risk driving afterward. Providence and all of Rhode Island deserve real transportation options simply because they will make our city and state better places to live and ease the cost of living for anyone who cares to use the bus.

In other words, there is a very strong positive case to be made for better RIPTA funding, without talking about poor people, and that’s even before mentioning our warming climate. 

In 2021, Rhode Island’s government made a promise to the future. The landmark Act on Climate added ambitious climate goals to state policy. This was important to do, but the test is in the execution, and so far, the state’s leadership has been lacking. Neither governor since then nor our legislative leadership has seen fit to push for transportation policy to meet those goals. The Department of Transportation is still building wider and wider highways, on the theory that less time spent in traffic means fewer carbon emissions. This sounds like a joke, but this is a key part of RIDOT’s climate strategy, along with taking credit for the increasing electrification of cars and trucks.

This is an absurd and insulting position to take. The goal of state climate policy is to help mitigate the warming of our planet, not simply to clear a legal threshold by clever accounting. We will not meet the Act on Climate goals without providing actual low-carbon transportation alternatives to our citizens. We need transit good enough that people will move for it, good enough that building owners will boast about transit access to prospective tenants, and good enough for more people to see it as a viable alternative to driving, at least some of the time.

Not only would this be good for the planet, but it would be good for our state, our economy, and the urban parts of our state, which is a lot of it. It would also be good for people who cannot afford a car, but to mistake that for RIPTA’s purpose is like thinking a dishwasher is for holding up the countertop. Why can’t we have state leaders with the imagination to improve the quality of life here for everyone, and while they’re at it, also help mitigate a planetary disaster by simply providing reliable funding for a vital public service?

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Tom Sgouros is a policy nerd and data scientist, currently working on public finance, immunology, and astronomy projects. And he rides the bus multiple times a week.