We cannot forget that the whole origin of public transit in the US is because governments were picking up after the chaos left by private companies in the 1900s after they up and left. Finished with their short-term land speculation and facing increasing structural barriers such as sprawl-oriented and car-centric policies, many streetcar companies stopped operations, leaving people stuck without ways to get around. The government stepped in, recognizing its role in ensuring people are able to get where they need to go.
Much like libraries, the post office, and our public roadways, public transit is a public good where the government has a crucial role. Time and time again, Congress has enshrined in federal law that fostering the development and revitalization of public transportation systems is in the economic interest of the US while also meeting national goals for air quality, energy conservation, international competitiveness, and enhanced mobility for elderly, disabled, and disadvantaged populations in both urban and rural areas.
Yet, like clockwork, in the President’s Budget for FY27 released last Friday, the Trump administration has again proposed to cut the federal role in public transit. This is the latest in a long line of attacks from the administration: a leaked proposal from November 2025 to cut all federal transit funds, and freezes on transit grants to intimidate political rivals in Colorado, New York, Illinois, and many more places, just to name a few.
Even before Trump’s second term, key current US Department of Transportation appointees such as Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury wrote Project 2025 proposals to decrease federal investment in transit and shift it to the private sector to fund and provide. In Trump’s first term, the administration requested similar cuts and slow-rolled the distribution of funds they did have control over. This affects millions of Americans who take transit every day and all of us who benefit from a robust system. Ultimately, cuts would leave us without a crucial, affordable option to get around.
Amid these attacks, legislators need to stand up for their constituents and instead increase federal transit investment in budgets and the next surface transportation reauthorization. The country deserves and needs to fill the gaps of decades of transportation policy that has favored an unsustainable, unaffordable, and choiceless transportation status quo.
Public transit has immense public benefits
In addition to helping folks get around, public transit investment comes with numerous public benefits. Decades of research have shown that transit increases productivity, helps anchor regional economies, and reduces poverty and unemployment. It is a key low-cost transportation option that makes places more affordable to live in and promotes upward mobility. Every billion dollars invested in transit generates five billion dollars in economic activity and over 40,000 jobs. This holds for rural and urban areas alike, yet transit service across the US lags behind its global peers.
It makes sense that the government should invest in transit to support affordability and the economy, but the benefits stretch even further than that.
Transit is also crucial for public health. In small cities and rural areas, transit can be a lifeline and prevent people from missing crucial healthcare appointments, especially for aging adults or people with disabilities. It reduces social isolation and provides food access, which are crucial for our health. Transit also promotes better air quality, increasing levels of physical activity, and decreasing injuries from motor vehicle crashes.
Investing in transit is also a crucial part of the government’s role in addressing climate change. In our report, Freedom to Move, we show that a system with improved transportation options and reduced driving could save up to $201 billion in energy infrastructure and $128 billion in public health costs through 2050, presenting a more effective climate solution than the current car-dependent model.
Public transit comes with public accountability
Of note, transit is a public service, so a transit agency’s goal is to serve all its customers, whether they’re rich or poor, whether it’s on the maximally profit-inducing route or not. Transit agencies come with accountability mechanisms such as boards, public engagement, and crucial regulations like Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that are already under attack by the Trump Administration. These public processes are a crucial place where communities across the country are able to provide important input on what they need.
In this era of destruction of science and democratic processes, transportation policy has been weaponized as a tool of retribution for Trump’s authoritarian agenda. It is increasingly crucial to preserve the public processes that allow for democratic participation in transportation policy processes. As my colleague Steven Higashide puts it, “[transportation policy] can be part of the antidote, demonstrating the ability of government to improve our lives and fueling the organizing we need to win a more democratic society.”
Engaging the private sector requires strong civil servants
Throughout the past century, it was public investment that kept people moving despite the tides of private sector financing. More recently, when the COVID-19 pandemic brought havoc to our transportation systems, it was federal investment that helped keep transit running–a successful, bipartisan effort that recognized how essential transit was for essential workers, and by proxy, all of us.
In this, finding the right role for the private sector in public transit is tough. There is a fundamental mismatch of goals between making profit and the mobility of all people that requires careful design to align. To bring these together, we need skilled government staff who are able to navigate technical nuances and stand up for the public interest. Proposals for the private sector’s role come in a variety of flavors:
Privatization, or the ownership and operation of transit services by the private sector, poses significant risks. Removing guardrails from the public sector and hoping for public benefits is wishful thinking. Privatization often foregoes greater oversight on things like safety and civil rights, mechanisms for public accountability, and ultimately is no panacea for the country’s large transit needs.
- The rare closest example of this in the US is Brightline, a private company that owns and operates an intercity rail line between Miami and Orlando. Of note, Brightline has still received nearly half a billion dollars in public subsidy, relies on this and cross-subsidy from real estate investments to cover its net losses ($549 million in 2024), and is a sub-sub-subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi state-owned investment firm Mubadala Investment Company. Yet, despite financial and safety challenges, overwhelming demand for transit continues—Brightline still provided 3.1 million rides in 2025.
- Outside of the US, when places like the United Kingdom privatized most of their bus services, banning municipal companies outside of London, the result was an “expensive, fragmented, unreliable, and dysfunctional bus service” that the country has been trying to reverse for years.
Public-Private Partnerships (P3) describe a wide array of private sector participation where the devil is in the details. The strongest push for these comes from a desire to increase the involvement of private capital when public dollars aren’t enough. On the plus side, P3s can sometimes save costs and allow projects to be built that would otherwise not happen. On the negative side, P3s often fail to do so, resulting in excess complexity, cost overruns, and longer timelines or, as was the case in Denver, lower reliability and rider satisfaction. Ultimately, the risks are smaller than full privatization because of more public sector involvement, but the devil is in the details.
P3s are complex and come with tradeoffs that rely on initial negotiation of a long-term concession agreement. In lieu of project delivery capacity, P3s require a savvy government staff to negotiate successfully and ensure project implementation. In the case of the A, B, and G lines in Denver, $450M in private financing supplemented $1,750M in public funds, which ultimately got the project built. This was in exchange for locking the transit agency into less control over services and 29 years of high “availability payments” to the private sector.
“We have to live with those contracts, for now.” – Patrick O’Keefe, Denver Regional Transit Districts Director
Lastly, contracting out to the private sector for narrowly building new capital projects or operating a service is already a common model. This is often in the name of reducing costs, with mixed results. Some prevalent applications are in rural areas for dial-a-ride, vanpool, and commuter bus services.
However, whether contracting out is beneficial or not depends on numerous factors. Similar to P3s, research from the Transit Costs Project points to the lack of investment in strong government staff as a key factor in raising transit costs. In essence, when agency staff don’t have the experience or time to manage these contracts, we get higher costs, delays, and overruns.
In any of these forms, increased privatization as an excuse to absolve governmental responsibility for transit is a recipe for leaving us stuck, and the complexity of these arrangements highlights the importance of investing in a government workforce savvy enough to ensure public benefits. And whether it’s supplemented by private dollars or not, the fact is that the clearest way to improve transit across the country is for the public to invest in it.
We deserve better transit
We already have a very privatized transportation system—an expensive, privately-funded system of car ownership that is to blame for transportation being the US’s second-highest household expense, costing households over $13,000 per year. Public transit ensures we have another option—one that isn’t so “pay-to-play,” one that supports our communities big, small, rural, and urban, one that is rooted in democracy.
We call it public transit for a reason. Being able to get where we need to go is something we all should be able to do. Transit offers an affordable, accessible, and sustainable option for getting around, while simultaneously contributing to the economic vitality of our communities. As Congress prepares its next federal surface transportation reauthorization and debates annual budgets, now is the time to make sure they know to keep the ‘public’ in public transit.