The vast majority of Americans rely on a remarkably costly and inefficient means of getting around. They purchase and maintain automobiles that they use to commute to work and carry out daily business, often sitting behind the wheel all alone, often battling traffic congestion. They pay taxes and fees to help pay for a pervasive network of streets and highways, built and maintained by public agencies with dedicated revenue and reliable budgets. In contrast, mass-transit systems are chronically underfunded, serve only limited areas and segments of the population, and are subject to frequent though unpredictable cuts in funding. Despite the social and environmental benefits of mass transit, as well as growing demand that is reflected by the highest ridership since the 1950s, in most places the prospects for its expansion and improvement are uncertain at best.1 Although in theory, integrated, multimodal transportation systems have broad expert and popular support, U.S. policy makers seem to be a long way from an effective strategy for realizing them.

Implementing and sustaining a new approach to transportation in the United States requires much more than shifting appropriations and priorities—it requires the reconstruction of fundamental institutions, including the public organizations and bureaucracies responsible for transportation. If mass transit continues to be financed and managed separately from and in competition with infrastructure for motor vehicles, there is little chance of achieving a more sane and stable balance. However, as an integral function of new institutions designed to support mobility and accessibility with the most appropriate technologies, mass transit could become a significant component of more efficient and equitable local and regional transportation systems than the ones we have today. There are a few exceptions to the overall pattern of anemic, neglected mass transit in the United States, and they coincide with regional institutions that transcend modes. In particular, the extensive and heavily-used mass-transit systems of metropolitan New York and the San Francisco Bay Area benefit significantly from toll revenue generated by local bridges and tunnels.

Institutions are defined by their durability, frequently outlasting any of the physical structures they might produce. Economic and political upheaval can reduce or overcome institutional resistance to change and upset the established balance of power, thereby making significant changes in the administration and financing of transportation services and infrastructure much easier to achieve than under ordinary circumstances.2 Policy makers may now have a rare opportunity to transform transportation policy in the United States. Understanding the status quo, including the assumptions, patterns, and relationships that sustain it, is a crucial first step. This essay traces the development of passenger transport in metropolitan America. It also draws upon the history of four independent public agencies to suggest possible models for place-based systems that link and integrate different modes of transport. Facilities that were originally built by the Port of New York Authority, by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, by the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, and by the California Toll Bridge Authority are now generating revenue that supports complementary mass transit serving the traffic corridors where it is generated. In each case, forging these intermodal links required significant political pressure, but they nevertheless demonstrate the potential for supporting integrated transportation systems with local toll revenue.

Establishing Patterns and Policies

Timing was crucial for the political development of transportation financing and administration in the United States more than a century ago. Automobiles appeared on the scene just as a nationwide “good roads” movement was gaining momentum, and its leaders lobbied aggressively to secure subsidies for local and regional road systems. This coincided with a general enthusiasm for public enterprise that was an important component of Progressive Era politics. Support for publicly funded road systems was part of that enthusiasm, which propelled the adoption of gasoline taxes by all forty-eight states between 1919 and 1929.3 Even as mass production reduced the price of automobiles and their popularity surged, the institutional framework for providing infrastructure to accommodate this celebrated new technology was already taking shape. And it was fully, securely public. Gas taxes were paid in small increments, easy to collect, distributed by state officials advised by expert engineers, and protected from “diversion”—at first politically, later legally. Promoted as fair and legitimate, this source of funding for roads and highways was popular among local and state officials and easily adaptable to the collaborative, business and development-friendly “associative state” ideal in the 1920s. Highway engineers, automobile manufacturers, and major industrial and business organizations have supported government-subsidized “free” roads in the United States ever since, not only because they served their financial interests, but also for ideological reasons. Influential policy makers, including U.S. presidents from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama, have viewed road-building as one of the appropriate ways in which government could promote economic growth and employment opportunities without undue interference in market mechanisms or established business practices.4

In contrast, the institutions of mass transit underwent a very different process of development. Just a few decades made an enormous difference in long-term patterns and outcomes. Electric streetcar systems were built by private firms beginning in the late 1880s and 1890s, a period of governmental spending limits and retrenchment preceding the Progressive municipal-reform movement. Their investors enjoyed actual or effective monopolies, and their transit operations were often an integral part of more lucrative electric power companies or speculative real estate development. Early on, however, the relationship between cities and the street railways they chartered turned antagonistic. A record of corruption and poor service hurt transit executives politically, even as they were suffering from escalating financial difficulties. A combination of factors, including overcapitalization, rising costs, and a rigid, politically sensitive rate structure (specifically, the sanctity of the 5¢ fare) contributed to their decline and often to financial ruin during the 1920s and 1930s. Not the least of their problems was the decoupling of transit systems from other enterprises that they originally supported or complemented.5 Even in a stable context streetcar systems often lost money, and as the level of service declined so did their reputation and political standing.

Of course, the widespread adoption of automobiles, enabled by large public investments in roads and highways, represented the final nail in the mass-transit coffin. By the 1950s, the vast majority of transit companies in the United States had abandoned their streetcars, often replacing them with bus lines that continued to lose money even though they were less capital intensive. State public-utility commissions, which took over the regulation of transit firms in the 1920s but had little inherent interest in maintaining the local service they provided, released many of the operators of these unprofitable and unpopular enterprises from their obligations. The vitality and success of transit was severely limited by institutional characteristics that originated in the very different context of the late nineteenth century.6

By the time municipal officials began attempting to revive bankrupt transit companies or to develop new publicly financed systems, they did so with a degree of well-justified trepidation. They knew that revenues from fares were inadequate to support daily operations as well as to pay for necessary capital investments in infrastructure and rolling stock. Even as state highway departments accepted responsibility for building and maintaining a comprehensive infrastructure to accommodate private automobiles, municipal officials had to choose between spending large sums to prop up mass transit or just letting it languish and die. Little or no outside assistance was available for these operations—this in striking contrast with the urban, rural, and suburban highway systems that regularly received massive infusions of state and federal aid.

By the mid-twentieth century, there was a deep and virtually unbridgeable institutional chasm between transportation technologies that was rooted in the disparate histories of road and rail. In cities, where automobiles and streetcars vied for space and right-of-way on the same crowded streets, the consequences of this divide were especially stark, with drivers winning priority over transit riders. The divide extended well beyond the commuter-oriented facilities in metropolitan areas that are the focus of this essay to affect the outcomes of policy for freight and long-distance travel as well. The institutional development of transportation in the United States positioned modal systems in competition with one another—and in the process defined the very concept of separate modes.7 As rapidly expanding state and federal highway systems brought more regional traffic into cities and financed high-capacity “freeways” that cut swathes through established urban neighborhoods, city governments still had the primary responsibility for local streets that were increasingly choked with traffic. City officials throughout the country tore up or paved over rails to make more room for the relentless crush of private automobiles. Transit was stuck in a losing position, marginalized in the competition for space as well as for state and federal funding.

During the boom years following World War II, it became apparent to many social critics and urban planners that the widespread abandonment or neglect of mass transit was a disaster for the residents of metropolitan areas, who suffered from the persistent congestion and environmental degradation associated with sprawling development and streets jammed with motor vehicles. By the 1960s, a public backlash included significant pressure in favor of revitalizing mass transit. In larger cities, particularly those with powerful business and financial interests invested in central business districts, new public agencies were created to take over and rehabilitate or replace mass transit. Transportation authorities were created in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago to meet the challenge of saving existing systems. In other cities, including Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, Washington, and San Francisco, large public investments in rapid-transit systems were intended to provide high-quality service to suburban commuters.8 However, the expense of establishing rail systems de novo and providing competitive service in the face of decentralized regional-development patterns was spectacularly high. Today, many of the most ambitious transit projects of this period are frequently cited as examples of misguided public policy, waste, and mismanagement.9 Little has changed since David Jones observed in 1985 that “the transit industry has become structurally obsolete: its form suits the functions and markets that transit served at the turn of the century . . . changes in transit’s basic way of doing business are necessary if mass transit is to play a significant role in the future of urban transportation.”10

To overcome this obsolescence, the varied benefits of transit for property values, congestion relief, environmental quality, and economic development—that is, its benefits to places—must be reflected in its financing and management. Certainly, one of the fundamental problems of mass transit was and remains its position within the larger institutional structures of transportation. When mass transit shifted to the public sector in the mid-twentieth century, it became the orphaned stepchild of cities just as they were facing disastrous budget shortfalls and social and political crises. Highways, in contrast, were the protégé of an expanding, prodigal federal government that favored rural over urban interests with its representational structure and empowered state engineers with its procedures. Efforts to secure federal subsidies for mass transit ran contrary to the patterns and priorities of this system, particularly when they came from gas tax “diversions,” even though the fees and taxes paid by urban drivers had effectively been diverted away from urban areas to fund the construction of rural roads and highways all along. Nevertheless, there are a few important cases in which efforts for cross-modal integration defied the prevailing pattern of institutional separation between automobile facilities and mass transit. They avoided the need for constant appeals for state and federal transit subsidies by using local transportation revenues where they are actually generated, steering clear of many of the complexities and problems of intergovernmental competition and interference. These examples of cross-modal integration are sketched below in the hope that they can provide models for systems elsewhere capable of serving places rather than technologies.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and PATH

The creation in 1921 of the Port of New York Authority (later, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) was a critical development in the deployment of public corporations to finance and operate bridges, tunnels, and other transportation facilities. This agency had a broad mission to expand and coordinate the infrastructure of North America’s largest port, which encompassed the territory of two states and was suffering from decentralized management, redundancy, and inefficiency. Large investments were needed to modernize its facilities, not only to accommodate ships and cargo, but also to provide for local and regional transportation and warehousing. The new agency could levy property taxes as well as collect fees for the use of its facilities, but it was its capacity to use its resources to finance new projects that turned it into a regional power. Under the leadership of Julius Henry Cohen, it established a general reserve fund that made its revenues available to secure all of the agency’s debt, regardless of which project it was initially issued to fund. This made it relatively easy to finance the construction of new facilities, even when their potential profitability was uncertain. Port Authority revenue bonds paid for the Arthur Kill bridges and the George Washington Bridge in 1926, as well as the Bayonne Bridge in 1929. Its officials started collecting tolls in 1931, when the Washington and Bayonne spans opened to traffic and they acquired the lucrative Holland Tunnel. The entrepreneurial initiative and independence of the agency inspired the creation of hundreds of new transportation agencies in subsequent decades. Its success also popularized the term “authority,” which is now understood to designate public corporations distinguished by their reliance on user fees and their capacity to issue revenue bonds.11

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Port Authority’s road-, bridge-, and tunnel-building epitomized the automobile-oriented approach to urban redevelopment. By the late 1950s, it had large surpluses and too much traffic clogging its bridges and tunnels. It also had significant public-relations problems, particularly with New Jersey commuters who blamed its ambitious construction program for putting private commuter railroads out of business. The one remaining trans-Hudson rail system, the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, was decrepit and ill-maintained, and the operator was threatening to shut down entirely just as traffic congestion between New York and New Jersey was becoming a major problem. This situation contributed to a general perception that the Port Authority was an imperial organization whose officials were overly concerned about the bottom line.

In 1958, newly elected New York governor Nelson Rockefeller confronted Port Authority officials with the demand that they take over the failing commuter railroads and the significant financial liabilities associated with their operation. Despite the opportunity this presented to improve the agency’s public image, it took the full political influence of Rockefeller as well as New Jersey governor Robert Meyner to overcome their reluctance. As part of a 1961 deal related to Manhattan construction projects—specifically, authorization for the ambitious plan for the World Trade Center (WTC) complex—Port Authority officials agreed to assume responsibility for the rail system. Automobile tolls from trans-Hudson bridges and tunnels were dedicated to underwriting capital investments as well as operational deficits. In 1962, the Port Authority began building a modern rapid-transit system through a wholly owned subsidiary, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH). As much as 10 percent of Port Authority annual reserve was dedicated to supporting PATH operations. The benefits of this deal for the Port Authority soon became obvious: improving transportation service helped the agency politically and bolstered the value of the WTC, avoiding a traffic crisis in downtown Manhattan that would have hindered its further development.12

Despite periodic protests about the need for capital improvements and expansion of service, PATH has been generally successful and well regarded, particularly in comparison to other, poorly maintained New York transit systems during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2001, the Port Authority implemented an “aggressive” variable toll schedule on its automobile facilities and at the same time announced a long-term investment program to bolster its transit operations and facilities, including improvements to Manhattan terminals as part of reconstruction projects at the WTC site. It also contributed funds for capital investments to improve bus and ferry facilities and for the construction of a new trans-Hudson tunnel for rails.13

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Metropolitan Transit Authority

Maintaining local transit service within and between New York’s boroughs proved to be more challenging and complex, and the city’s other major mass-transit operator, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, has a more ambiguous record than the Port Authority. Under the jurisdiction of an underfunded city department, the publicly operated subway system was in a state of disrepair and decline by the 1950s. In 1954, the state legislature created the New York City Transit Authority to take responsibility for the system. Its proponents argued that it could achieve more businesslike operation by removing responsibility for the politically difficult task of setting fares away from elected officials. The new agency raised nearly $1 billion to invest in rehabilitating deteriorating facilities and rolling stock. Ridership started to increase by the end of the decade, reversing long-term trends, although the system continued to require major operational subsidies.14

The improvement of the transit system inspired efforts to expand service and to find new revenue. One obvious potential source of funds was the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA). The TBTA had been created in 1933 and was closely associated with its powerful executive, Robert Moses, who used its toll revenue to leverage the construction of a massive automobile-oriented transportation empire that transformed New York City. After three decades, the TBTA had financed and built seven major bridges and two subaqueous tunnels, all of which generated significant toll revenue. Moses operated the agency on strict business principles, investing aggressively in new facilities that could be expected not only to pay for themselves, but also make a profit. These projects largely fulfilled or exceeded expectations, and by the mid-1960s, the TBTA had significant financial reserves and surplus revenues.

While Moses and his road-building efforts won praise and inspired emulation in an earlier period, by the 1960s, they had more critics than supporters. Among those critics were powerful business and political leaders including Governor Rockefeller, who had an interest in the continued development of Manhattan and its residential suburbs. It was apparent that Moses’s automobiles-only approach was reaching its limits and that congestion in Manhattan was beginning to hamper economic growth and restrict property values. Not only was city-operated transit service in dire need of reliable subsidies, so also was the state-operated Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which had been rescued from failure in 1965. Rockefeller and his chief transportation advisor, William Ronan, brokered a deal that merged the TBTA, the New York City Transit Authority, and the LIRR in a new Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Appointments to the new MTA were made primarily by state officials, in contrast with the TBTA or the Transportation Authority, which had been more closely connected to and dependent upon city government.

New York transit’s financial problems were not over, however. The legislation that created the MTA earmarked toll revenues to secure bonds for capital investments in the subway system. These earmarks were based on the assumption that the MTA would continue to receive significant operating subsidies from the City of New York, but a major, long-term financial crisis during the 1970s led to drastic cuts in the city budget. Mass-transit subsidies were sacrificed early on. Although the MTA received significant amounts of new revenue from bridge and tunnel tolls, much of this was legally restricted to ambitious expansion projects, many of which never actually came to fruition because of cost overruns and delays. The entire system began to decline and patronage fell once again. By the 1980s, there were severe problems with safety and reliability as well as physical deterioration. The solution to New York’s transit crisis came from the state legislature. The 1981 Transportation Systems Assistance and Financing Act, brokered by New York developer and MTA chairman Richard Ravitch, authorized major investments in rehabilitation and modernization by allowing more flexible use of toll revenue. A combination of state-guaranteed bonds, federal subsidies, and MTA-issued revenue bonds made up for years of underfunded operations and maintenance. Service and patronage began to improve once again in the 1990s, and the revived system contributed to the city’s general economic recovery at the turn of the twenty-first century.15

The Golden Gate Bridge, Buses, and Ferries

The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was conceived and authorized to build a daring and financially risky bridge in the 1920s even as the New York Port Authority was being organized on the opposite coast. After more than a decade of campaigning by local boosters, the bridge district was incorporated in 1928 with the power to issue bonds secured both by future revenues and by local property taxes. The bridge’s primary intended purpose was to encourage suburban development and tourism in the rural region to the north of San Francisco. Although it initially fulfilled these hopes, by the end of the 1950s, congestion during peak hours had turned the bridge into a traffic bottleneck and an impediment to growth.

As with many other toll facilities, Golden Gate Bridge revenues far exceeded capital and operational costs, and the bridge district accumulated large financial reserves. During the 1950s and 1960s, officials sought state authorization to use toll revenue to finance either the construction of a second automobile deck on the bridge, or a new, parallel bridge to serve a growing commuter population in the North Bay area. However, San Francisco’s 1959 “freeway revolt” inaugurated an era of resolute opposition to any project that would bring more traffic into the city, and neither bridge-district officials nor state engineers had the power to overcome it. San Francisco city and county leaders, backed by a growing environmentalist lobby, opposed any new facility that would contribute to already-severe congestion downtown.16

Initially, bridge-district officials opposed any involvement with mass transit because of predictably high operating costs, as well as fear of a reduction in bridge traffic and therefore toll revenue. However, a much bigger threat to the agency’s security loomed: the original construction bonds were scheduled for retirement in 1971, and many expected the bridge district to be dissolved once the bridge was paid for. Because its officials had a reputation for poor management and corruption and because Golden Gate Bridge tolls were consistently higher than those of other bridges in the area, there was tremendous public pressure to turn the bridge over to the state’s Department of Transportation. Influential businessmen, including Edgar Kaiser, and politicians, including Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, favored this course of action. Nevertheless, bridge-district officials led by San Francisco attorney and ferry-boat enthusiast Stephan Leonoudakis managed to ensure the perpetuation of the bridge district beyond the retirement of its debt by promising to use toll revenues to finance and operate mass transit. The appeal of this promise for transportation-starved suburbs overcame the agency’s unpopularity, and bridge officials struck a deal with local and state politicians to authorize new operations.

Renamed the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District in 1969, the agency revived ferry service between San Francisco and Marin County, took over Greyhound commuter bus routes across the bridge, and began operating local bus service in Marin and Sonoma counties. Since then, significant state and federal subsidies have supported capital investments in bridge-district mass-transit facilities. However, financial security has often taken precedence over mass-transportation operations in bridge district policy, resulting in cutbacks in routes and service. Nevertheless, toll revenues provide for more than half of the total cost of transit operations in the Golden Gate Corridor.17

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, ART, and the MTC

Another still-evolving San Francisco Bay Area toll/transit connection provides a promising institutional model for multimodal transportation in metropolitan areas. In this case, several agencies have been pooling resources and planning in collaboration to achieve a more efficient and effective regional transportation system. The California Toll Bridge Authority, renamed and reorganized as the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) in 1997, represents the financial lynchpin of this effort. The state legislature created the original agency in 1929 to finance and build a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, and to purchase and take over the operation of all private California toll bridges and integrate them into the state highway system. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936, and toll revenues were ample to retire its construction bonds in 1952, eighteen years ahead of schedule. Highway advocates and local boosters wanted to use bridge tolls to finance a new span linking San Francisco and Alameda County, and they succeeded in passing legislation to extend the toll on the bridge beyond the retirement of its construction bonds.

However, disagreement over the location and later the advisability of a new bridge stalled progress and ultimately defeated the proposal. In the meanwhile, rapid-transit advocates were developing plans for a new bay crossing in the form of an underwater tube to carry commuter trains. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) district was created in 1957, its executive committee chaired by Alan Browne, the Bank of America’s vice president for municipal bonds. BART leaders not only had an interest in downtown development, they also recognized a financial opportunity when they saw one. They proposed using toll revenue to pay for a subaqueous tube from Oakland to San Francisco, a critical part of the proposed BART system. Toll Bridge Authority officials agreed to support the proposal in exchange for permission to abandon electric railway service on the bridge’s lower deck, in order to make way for more toll-paying motor vehicles. At the behest of BART officials and with the active intervention of Governor Brown, the state legislature authorized the use of Bay Bridge tolls and reserves to secure $130 million in revenue bonds for the tube.

The remainder of the BART system was financed with $500 million in bonds secured by property taxes in a three-county district, which voters approved in 1962. Although construction commenced two years later, unexpected costs and design changes made refinancing imperative midway through the project. San Francisco legislators sponsored a bill in 1967 to increase toll-funded subsidies for the entire system, but, despite strong support from Bay Area business leaders, it was defeated. Instead, in 1969, voters approved a half-cent sales tax in BART district counties to provide the additional funds needed to complete construction.18 Construction costs were not the most difficult financial problem that BART officials had to address, however; operational expenses posed a much bigger financial challenge after the system opened in 1973. The prospects for BART improved with the passage of the California Transportation Development Act in 1971, which allowed a portion of state gas taxes to be used to cover mass-transit operational costs. Local sales taxes were extended to subsidize operations once the system began service in 1973, and again in 1977 as a permanent source of revenue. Nevertheless, the link that was created between the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the BART system with the financing of the transbay tube set a compelling precedent. In 1975, the state assembly authorized the use of toll revenue in excess of the operational and maintenance costs of Bay Area bridges for transit operations “to alleviate automobile-related congestion and pollution and to diminish the need for state expenditures on new bridge facilities.”19 The fund was administered by the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), an agency that had been created in 1971 to fulfill federal regional-planning requirements.

Although very weak initially, the MTC evolved into one of the most influential metropolitan-planning organizations in the country, in part because of its control over toll bridge revenues. Seventy percent of Bay Area voters approved a measure in 1988 that extended and reinforced the connection between bridge tolls and mass transit, authorizing a $1 increase in tolls on seven Bay Area bridges. Part of the money generated by the increase was slated to fund major extensions of BART in the East Bay, as well as a connection to the San Francisco International Airport. More significantly, a long-term commitment to toll-funded transportation was included in legislation authorizing seismic retrofitting of Bay Area bridges in 1997. Quentin Kopp, chairman of the Senate Committee on Transportation, sponsored the legislation, which eliminated the California Toll Bridge Authority and devolved control of its revenue to the MTC, while maintaining ownership and responsibility for operations with the state Department of Transportation. The MTC was strengthened by a closer connection between tolls and transit in the Bay Area and vice versa. In 2004, MTC officials supported a bill to put Regional Measure 2 on the ballot, which voters approved by a comfortable margin. This resulted in another $1 increase in bridge tolls, generating approximately $125 million annually to support a “Regional Traffic Relief Plan” that focused primarily on improving mass transit in the bridge-traffic corridors. Not only did BART receive new funds for a seismic retrofit of the transbay tube and operational subsidies for expanded nighttime service, but a variety of other transportation agencies and programs also benefited, including ferry and bus operations.20

The use of bridge tolls to support mass transit has been consistently popular in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a region plagued by traffic congestion, there is general recognition that improved transit affords benefits to transit riders and drivers alike, and fosters receptiveness to the use of tolls for traffic management as well. The complementary relationships among the BATA, the MTC, BART, and other Bay Area transportation agencies could provide a template not only for regional transportation collaboration, but also for more effective and appropriate regional planning and coordination.

Reconstructing Transportation

Even though institutions linking revenue-generating facilities for automobiles with mass-transit systems that serve the same traffic corridor are rare and remarkable, independent public corporations responsible for metropolitan-area transportation service are not at all unusual. Such agencies, including authorities, commissions, and districts, proliferated over the course of the last century and now comprise an enormous segment of local and regional government in the United States. Many were established to build bridges, tunnels, and turnpikes during the 1950s. Another generation of public corporations took over transit systems, including buses, subways, and whatever street railways remained during the 1950s and 1960s, many of them benefiting from federal programs to support transit established by the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964.21 Combining the resources and obligations of these entities, or creating new public agencies that merge these responsibilities, facilitates the financing and operation of multimodal transportation systems. While this is a simple idea, it would certainly not be easy to achieve. The officials of toll-funded, financially independent agencies have an inherent interest in protecting their bottom line. The leaders of all of the entities discussed here fiercely resisted modifying their mission to include mass transit, which by the 1960s had become a guaranteed financial liability. In addition, public corporations, especially authorities, have many drawbacks; they originated with Progressive Era efforts to remove public enterprise from the vicissitudes of electoral politics, and they are often criticized for political imperviousness and domination by business and financial interests. Still, it is possible to structure such agencies in ways that facilitate meaningful public input, transparent decision making, and democratic accountability, while maintaining the financial independence and efficacy that have made them so appealing to advocates of public enterprise.22

In metropolitan areas, transportation facilities such as highways, bridges, and tunnels have proven their potential to generate revenues far in excess of their capital and operational requirements. As the cases described in this essay suggest, toll revenues (or congestion fees) do not have to be restricted to the sole purpose of accommodating more vehicles. They can also support integrated transportation systems that serve a single corridor or one well-defined area. The fact that tolls are associated with a specific place makes their use for transit appropriate and compelling—especially since the legitimacy of transit’s claim to gas tax revenue has always been contested. In congested transportation corridors, transit can function in concert with automobiles. Drivers who are not deterred by tolls or fees can subsidize a system that reduces congestion by providing inexpensive transportation for everyone else. With this arrangement, tolls enhance mobility across modes: they can be directed toward supporting place-based systems that provide broad access across the socioeconomic spectrum and even have an overall progressive economic effect. Transportation authorities have the potential to transform transportation finance, harnessing automobile-generated revenues to invest in more sustainable and equitable place-based transportation programs that integrate private automobiles with rail and bus systems, and even with bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways. Recent proposals to rededicate toll revenue for mass-transit facilities include PlanNYC 2030, which would funnel congestion-pricing revenue to buses and subway systems serving Manhattan; a plan to transfer the Dulles Toll Road to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in order to finance a major extension of the Metrorail system; and the creation of a Massachusetts Surface Transportation Authority with control over a variety of revenue-generating facilities. Still, most toll facilities are controlled and managed at the state level, and their revenues go to maintaining or financing roads exclusively. Devolving their management to local or regional agencies with clear mandates to support mass transit could be a pragmatic first step toward integrated multimodal systems.

There may presently be a rare window of opportunity to reorganize and reconceptualize transportation financing and administration in the United States. The sorry state of the nation’s “crumbling infrastructure,” and particularly its transportation infrastructure, has become a familiar refrain.23 From the mid-1980s until very recently, leading transportation-policy analysts have focused on securing new sources of revenue, arguing that increasing gas taxes to meet current needs is not politically viable. In 1991, the same bill that authorized the use of a portion of federal gas tax revenues for urban mass-transit operations also established a program to explore the potential for tolling on federally funded interstate freeways: the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) created a “congestion pricing” pilot program under the Federal Highway Administration. In 1995, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), included $59 million to fund a “value pricing” program through 2009.24

So far, the thrust of these programs has been to promote private financing and operation of revenue-generating facilities through “public–private partnerships,” including long-term leases.25 President George W. Bush’s appointees to the federal Department of Transportation were ardent advocates of imposing tolls on existing as well as new highways, bridges, and tunnels to support their transfer to the private sector.26 But the most compelling potential benefits of expanding the use of tolls, including encouraging the efficient use of existing infrastructure, could just as easily be realized through public agencies. Despite various problems with toll-facility privatization and the backlash generated by unpopular deals, interest in tolling seems to transcend ideological and geographical boundaries. This federal program could be adapted and reoriented to encourage local and regional programs that link congestion pricing and other tolls directly to mass-transit systems. The time may be right to use toll revenue to fund affordable transit, to manage congestion, and to promote environmental quality, as well as to build and maintain infrastructure for automobiles.

With a resurgent Democratic party at the helm of the federal government and economic crisis spurring changes in fiscal policy, there will be enormous new public investments in transportation infrastructure. The $52 billion authorized in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009 is likely to be just a down payment on what is to come. Rather than attracting private capital, the major concern now seems to be which infrastructure should get priority for public investment. In the transportation sector, camps have already been staked out along familiar lines. Federal officials, state engineers, and various industrial groups are leading the campaign for “shovel-ready” projects, mostly the roads and highways that are the primary product and purpose of state transportation departments. They argue that these projects are proven not only to put people to work, but also to produce tangible and immediate physical benefits. Planners and environmentalists of various stripes are arguing that mass-transit and rail projects provide just as much or more economic bang for the public buck, and that the chance to reduce automobile dependence and change development patterns and behavior should not be missed. Pundits and editorialists on both sides seem to be paying little if any attention to the long-term implications of this spending for the institutions of infrastructure financing and administration. There is more at stake than simply the distribution of federal dollars: no matter how funds are divvied up, they will inevitably have long-term institutional effects. Without careful attention, the status quo will be perpetuated and reinforced. Yet strategic federal investments could do much more than simply pay for infrastructure: they could also establish new relationships, patterns, and priorities, securing them by building new institutions.

It may seem natural for the debate about transportation infrastructure to be divided along the lines of modal preference, with conservatives and free-market advocates supporting traditional automobile-oriented projects, and environmentalists and social-justice advocates calling for investments in mass transportation. But this alignment is by no means inevitable.27 It represents patterns that were established early in the twentieth century during another critical period of technological, economic, and social transformation that are now deeply inscribed into political culture, policies, and organizations at all levels of government. Institutions manifest history—they perpetuate the values and relationships at the time of their creation and at critical moments in their development. They shape the decision-making process and determine who must be supplicants (mass-transit riders) and who has entitlements (drivers). With regime change in Washington and an economic crisis spurring enormous new federal spending, it is critical that policy makers heed the long-term institutional implications of their actions. By changing the way transportation policy is defined and implemented, they could realize improvements that endure far longer than anything made of concrete and steel.

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1. Transit ridership has been growing steadily since 1995 and dramatically since 2007, both in total numbers and relative to private autos. Nevertheless, as this essay goes to press, transit budgets and services are being reduced dramatically throughout the country; see American Public Transportation Association, 2008 Public Transportation Fact Book, 59th ed. (Washington, D.C., 2008). More detailed statistics are available in the “National Transit Database of the U.S. Federal Transit Administration,” available online at http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/ (accessed 6 April 2009).

2. The nature of institutional change has been the subject of lively theoretical debate among political scientists and economists. However, whether understood in terms of “punctuated equilibrium” or “incrementalism,” resistance to change is a fundamental characteristic of institutions, which include the rules, procedures, ideas, and organizations that shape decision making and the outcome of policy. For a recent discussion, see Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Ann Thelen, “Introduction,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, ed. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Ann Thelen (New York, 2005). See also Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo et al. (Cambridge, 1992); and Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The New Institutionalism, 2nd ed. (New York, 2005).

3. John C. Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1961): 435–59; R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, “Financing a Second Era of Internal Improvements: Transportation and Tax Reform, 1890–1929,” Social Science History 26 (2002): 623–51.

4. On the development of road and highway policy in the United States, see Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987); Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989, rev. ed. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York, 2005); Michael R. Fein, Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956 (Topeka, Kans., 2008); Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994); Howard L. Preston, Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885–1935 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991); and John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.,1971).

5. The 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act forced divesture of electric power companies from transit, accelerating an ongoing trend that extended to real estate development companies as well; see George M. Smerk, The Federal Role in Urban Mass Transportation (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 43. On the origins and problems of the 5¢ fare, see Winstan Bond, “The Flawed Economics and Morality of the American Uniform Five-cent Fare,” in Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Colin Divall and Winstan Bond (Burlington, Vt., 2003), 49–78. For an analysis of how this worked out in a specific urban context during the 1920s, see Robert C. Post, “The Fair Fare Fight: An Episode in Los Angeles History,” Southern California Quarterly 52 (1970): 275–98.

6. Important studies of public policy and the rise and fall of mass transit in the United States include David W. Jones, Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis (Bloomington, Ind., 2008); Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); Glen Yago, The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and U.S. Cities, 1900–1970 (New York, 1984); Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Mass Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1880–1912 (Philadelphia, 1983); Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900–1940 (Philadelphia, 1981); and Charles W. Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1880–1912 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

7. For the institutional and political history of these transportation sectors, see Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul F. Barrett, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Columbus, Ohio, 2006).

8. Smerk, 260–77; Zachary Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore, 2006); Jonathan Richmond, Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail in Los Angeles (Akron, Ohio, 2007).

9. Critical studies include Alan A. Altschuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, D.C., 2003); J. Allen Whitt, Urban Elites and Mass Transportation: The Dialectics of Power (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Andrew Marshall Hamer, The Selling of Rail Rapid Transit: A Critical Look at Urban Transportation Planning (Lexington, Mass., 1976); and John Robert Meyer, John F. Kain, and Martin Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

10. David W. Jones, Urban Transit Policy: An Economic and Political History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1985), ix.

11. Jameson W. Doig, Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (New York, 2001); Keith D. Revell, “Cooperation, Capture, and Autonomy: The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Port Authority in the 1920s,” Journal of Policy History 12 (2000): 177–214; Jameson Doig, “‘If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly . . .’: The Wilsonian Dichotomy and the Public Authority Tradition,” Public Administration Review 43 (1983): 292–304; Laurence S. Knappen, Revenue Bonds and the Investor (New York, 1939).

12. Jameson W. Doig, Metropolitan Transportation Politics and the New York Region (New York, 1966); Michael N. Danielson and Jameson Doig, New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 171–255. See also Doig, Empire on the Hudson; Brian Cudahy, Rails under the Mighty Hudson: The Story of the Hudson Tubes, the Pennsylvania Tunnels, and the Manhattan Transfer, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002).

13. Mark Muriello, “Toll Road Applications: Perspectives from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,” in International Perspectives on Road Pricing (Washington, D.C., 2005); Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the Year Ended December 31, 2007 (New York, 2008).

14. Doig, Metropolitan Transportation Politics; Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman, Governing NY City: Politics in the Metropolis (1960; reprint, New York, 1965).

15. Danielson and Doig, 171–255; James K. Cohen, “Capital Investments and the Decline of Mass Transit in New York City,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 23 (1988): 369–88; James K. Cohen, “Structural versus Functional Determinants of New York’s Fiscal Policies Towards Metropolitan Transportation, 1940–1990,” Social Science History 15 (1991): 177–98; Mark Seaman, Allison L. C. de Cerreño, and Seth English-Young, From Rescue to Renaissance: The Achievements of the MTA Capital Program, 1982–2004 (New York, 2004). See also Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus, Ohio, 1993); and Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York, 1970). For a recent reassessment of Caro’s treatment of Robert Moses, see Jon C. Teaford, “Caro versus Moses, Round Two: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 442–48.

16. On San Francisco’s freeway revolt, see Katherine M. Johnson, “Captain Blake versus the Highwaymen: Or, How San Francisco Won the Freeway Revolt,” Journal of Planning History 8 (2009): 56–83; William Issel, “‘Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance’: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” Pacific Historical Review 68 (1999): 611–46.

17. Louise Nelson Dyble, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge (Philadelphia, 2009).

18. Seymour Mark Adler, “Political Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980); Seymour Mark Adler, “Infrastructure Politics: The Dynamics of Crossing San Francisco Bay,” Public Historian 10 (1988): 19–41; Stephen Zwerling, Mass Transit and the Politics of Technology: A Study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area (New York, 1974); U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, An Assessment of Community Planning for Mass Transit: Volume 8—San Francisco Case Study (Washington, D.C., 1976); Karen Trapenberg Frick, “The Cost of the Technological Sublime: Daring Ingenuity and the New San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge,” in Decision-Making on Mega-Projects, ed. Hugo Priemus, Bent Flyvbjerg, and Bert van Wee (Cheltenham, U.K., 2008), 239–62.

19. Statutes of California, 1975 reg. sess., ch. 1229.

20. S.B. 226, 1997 leg., reg. sess. (Calif.). This legislation created the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), which is described in the bill as “the same as” the MTC. There is a variety of information related to Bay Area toll bridges available on the MTC website, at http://bata.mtc.ca.gov/reports.htm (accessed 6 April 2009). For an overview, see Bay Area Toll Authority, Bay Area Toll Authority Long-Range Plan (Oakland, 2006).

21. The Housing Act of 1961 provided the first federal aid for mass-transit planning, demonstrations, and loans, but the 1964 legislation provided for the first direct subsidies and permanent programs; see Smerk (n. 5 above), 86–107.

22. On the history of public corporations, including authorities, and their various problems, see Annmarie Hauck Walsh, The Public’s Business: The Politics and Practices of Government Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Alberta M. Sbragia, Debt Wish: Entrepreneurial Cities, U.S. Federalism, and Economic Development (Pittsburgh, 1996); Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90 (2003): 863– 90; Kathryn Foster, The Political Economy of Special-Purpose Government (Washington, D.C., 1997); Doig, “If I see a murderous fellow” (n. 11 above); Jameson Doig and Jerry Mitchell, “Expertise, Democracy, and the Public Authority Model: Groping Toward Accommodation,” in Public Authorities and Public Policy: The Business of Government, ed. Jerry Mitchell (Westport, Conn., 1992); Susan Tenenbaum, “The Progressive Legacy and the Public Corporation: Entrepreneurship and Public Virtue,” Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 308–30.

23. Some important declarations of infrastructure crisis over the past few decades include Pat Choate and Susan Walter, America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel (Washington, D.C., 1981); Marshall Kaplan, Hard Choices: A Report on the Increasing Gap between America’s Infrastructure Needs and Our Ability to Pay for Them: A Study (Washington, D.C., 1984); Michael Barker, ed., Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure: An Agenda for the 1980s (Durham, N.C., 1984); and National Council on Public Works Improvement, Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works: Final Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, D.C., 1988). The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued its first “infrastructure report card” in 1998, a widely cited publication that has been reliably dire ever since. The original plus its 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2008 updates are all available online: http://www.asce.org/reportcard (accessed 6 April 2009).

24. On ISTEA and the persistence of modal imbalances, see Edward Beimhorn and Robert Puentes, “Highways and Transit: Leveling the Playing Field in Federal Transportation Policy,” in Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform, ed. Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes (Washington, D.C., 2005), 257–86.

25. The results of these efforts are easily observed in toll-financed facilities under various forms of private operation in Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, California, and elsewhere. For information on recent federally sponsored toll-road development, see Benjamin Perez and Steve Lockwood, Current Toll Road Activity in the U.S.: A Survey and Analysis (U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, 2009), available online at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ppp/pdf/2008_toll_activity_white_paper. pdf (accessed 5 May 2009); U.S. Federal Highway Administration, “Tolling and Pricing Program,” available online at http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/tolling_pricing/index.htm (accessed 6 April 2009).

26. There is a vast literature examining infrastructure privatization and user fees. Much of this work is inspired by the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey, an ardent advocate of a market-based approach to congestion management. For an introduction, see National Research Council Transportation Research Board, Curbing Gridlock: Peak-Period Fees to Relieve Traffic Congestion (Washington, D.C., 1994); Gabriel Joseph Roth, ed., Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads (New Brunswick, N.J., 2006); and Charles Robin Lindsey, “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Road Pricing? The Intellectual History of an Idea,” Economic Journal Watch 3 (2006): 292–379.

27. The late Paul Weyrich, patriarch of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, became a dedicated proponent of new light-rail lines, as well as a partisan of rapid transit and even Amtrak; see Weyrich and William S. Lind, “Conservatives and Mass Transit: Is It Time for a New Look?,” a 1995 study prepared for the American Public Transit Association by the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation (available online at http: //www.apta.com/research/info/online/documents/conserve.pdf [accessed 6 April 2009]).

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Louise Nelson Dyble is associate director for research, the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy, University of Southern California. She is the author of Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge (2009).

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