When thinking about successful mass transportation in the United States, Americans will inevitably imagine big cities like New York and Chicago — a stereotype shaped by the sorry state of public transit throughout the rest of the country. But what if there was a way to bring that kind of world-renowned rail and bus infrastructure to thousands of smaller cities dotting the country?
Turns out, there is — and all it would take is the stroke of a pen.
According to a new joint study conducted by American and Chinese researchers and published in the journal Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, federal funding of transit systems is the single strongest factor impacting transit ridership and availability.
The study took a look at the development of 417 urban areas in the US across 2010 to 2019, using three models to isolate and measure the impacts that different funding sources had on rider numbers and supply in small, medium, and large metropolitan areas. (The US Federal Transit Administration classifies small urbanized areas as having populations between 50,000 and 199,999 residents, while large urban areas have populations of 200,000 or more.)
