May 2, 2025 • 15 mins
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government stepped in with aid to keep mass transit agencies afloat. But that money is running out and ridership hasn’t rebounded.
On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Sri Taylor and Aaron Gordon join host David Gura to discuss why advocates now fear many transit systems are on the verge of a so-called “death spiral” — a vicious cycle of less funding, low ridership and cuts to services that could impact everyone’s commute.
Read more: A $6 Billion Shortfall Has US Mass Transit Facing a Death Spiral
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Just over five years ago, the onset of the COVID
nineteen pandemic brought the world to a halt. Schools were closed,
offices were empty, and without commuters, the number of people
taking public transit plummeted it. New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority
has been knocked down before, but its current leader says
nothing matches the current pandemic by orders of magnitude. We're
(00:32):
back up to more than a million writers on the
subway and a daily basis, but that's still down some
eighty percent year on year.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
House the fair box is like, you know, a huge
part of the revenue for these systems. So they needed
to get a bailout from the federal government.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Street Taylor covers transportation and public finance for Bloomberg, and
she says over the last half decade, the federal government
supplied roughly seventy billion dollars in aid to transit agency
across the US. A that's helped keep them afloat, but
ridership in the US across the board hasn't gotten back
to pre pandemic norms. It's been a struggle, and that
(01:10):
federal aid money is running out, so free Along with
Bloomberg Data reporter Aaron Gordon, they have been tracking what
could come next for those agencies, and they say the
prospect of riders not returning has some transit advocates sounding
the alarm about a potential death spiral.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
A death spiral is when a transit agency has to
cut service to save money, which makes it less useful
to people who then find other ways to get around
or don't take trips entirely because they can't, which then
leads to less fair revenue for the transit agency, and
then they have to cut more service because revenue's down,
(01:47):
and that's the death spiral.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I'm David Gera and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News today. On the show, as federal funding dries up,
we dig into how mass transit actions across the US
or trying to avoid a so called death spiral. What
that vicious cycle of low ridership, lower revenue, and cuts
to services could mean for America's major cities. The world
(02:18):
shut down during the early days of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and mass transit in the US was no exception.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So public transit agencies weren't exempt from the rule that
everything was just going to start clearing out. People weren't
traveling as much, so Ridership just kind of took a hit.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Street Tailor teamed up with Aaron Gordon, who was also
spent years covering transit. He says the funding the federal
government supplied during the pandemic helped agencies bridge the gap.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It was a very rare instance in US history where
the federal government provided money to transit, not just to
do big, expensive, long term projects, but to run so
servius on a day to day basis. Typically, the federal
government had never done this before, and it was absolutely essential.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So here we are five years hence, is all of
that money gone? Is the seventy billion gone completely? Or
are we at a point where these transit agencies are
beginning to reckon with the fact that it is going
to disappear soon.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It depends a little bit on which agency you're talking about,
whether they spent all their money or not. A select
few agencies kind of squirreled some away expecting that they
would need it, and by the mid twenty twenties, but
for the most part, it's all pretty much gone and
agencies are trying to figure out what they're going to
do now.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
A lot of companies have brought workers back to the office.
I'll say, personally, riding the train day in and day out,
I have my frustrations with delays and them being crowded.
When it comes to ridership, are we back to that
level that we saw pre COVID or are we close
to it?
Speaker 3 (03:48):
People are taking the train again, and ridership has ticked
up since the pandemic, but what hasn't recovered is people
going in as frequently as they used to.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
In the US, most trans agencies are hovering somewhere around
seventy five percent of pre COVID ridership, which if you're
a commuter on a train, you know, especially like Tuesday
to Thursday, which are you know, typically the highest ridership days,
the train probably feels more or less pre COVID, you know,
like maybe it's not quite as crowded as it was.
(04:19):
You know, hard to get this, it's still hard to
get to see there's still tons of people on the train.
It feels like things are more or less back to
normal overall all washes out, So like most transidencies are
about seventy five percent of ridership, which is basically where
some of the most of the estimates were, you know,
in like twenty twenty two of where this would all
shake out. This is a problem for transit agencies because
(04:40):
if they rely on fair revenue to help balance the
budget every year, that's a really significant hit.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
If we took a.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Tour through major cities in the United States, or most
of them or all of them fair dependent, is that
the kind of economic model that they use.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It varies by transit agency. Some are more fair dependent
than others. A lot of the transit agencies, for like
mid size American cities that you wouldn't really think of
as being very transit dependent, but have transit systems that
are very important to the cities. I'm thinking like Boston, Philadelphia,
San Francisco, Atlanta, cities where car dependency is still very
(05:20):
much the norm, but there's also a large population that
uses the transit system to commute every day. Those systems
tend to be extremely fair reliant. New York City gets
a ton of revenue, like billions and billions of dollars
a year from the subway fares, but they also get
a lot of tax revenue too. So it ends up
being about fifty to fifty more or less. So it
(05:42):
depends on the system just how much they rely on
fair revenues. But I would say even for the systems
where it's maybe a smaller chunk of their overall annual revenues,
a twenty five percent reduction in that chunk is still
significant for them.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So if folks aren't riding the train the way they
used to, what are they doing differently? I imagine some
are just staying at home working from home. But are
there's some folks like I know you're a bike rider.
They're folks like you're riding bikes in now or taking
their cars through. How is that shift manifested itself?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I don't know. If we've seen a huge shift in
transportation action. Call this mode shift the mode you're using
to get where you're going. What we have found is
much more significantly. If people moved away from the city
during the pandemic thinking remote work would be the future,
and they got called back to the office and they
live further away from their office than they used to,
(06:29):
that probably means they're driving now. But broadly, the mode
choice pre and post pandemic is looking very similar.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
A lot of these transit agencies don't think that ridership
will ever look the same as it used to before
the pandemic came. So is ridership inching back to what
we might consider normal, sure, But for these transit agencies
who are so used to certain levels of ridership for
(06:57):
decades before the pandemic came, they aren't seeing what they
need to see at the fairbox.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
How would you characterize the financial situation of major transportation
agencies across the countries? Is there nuance here or are
some doing better than others? Where it's there kind of
a blanket sense you can give us of how they're
doing financially.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I would say generally there are two categories. As with
most things US transit related, there's New York and then
there's everywhere else. You have to remember that basically one
third of all public transit trips in the US occur
in the New York metro area. So even though it
feels disrespectful of the rest of the country to talk
(07:41):
New York and everywhere else, it really is that way
with transit. So the MTA is actually in pretty good
financial shape all told. Because of some new taxes on
the state level, and also congestion pricing, which has allowed
them to fully fund their long term capital plans. D
Transit is in pretty dire financial shape, and then the
(08:03):
rest of the country is, I would say, in a
similar boat to New Jersey Transit. Their ridership recovery has
been quite poor. They tend to rely on commuters for
most of their rides, whereas the MTA has a lot
of discretionary trips. You know, people take the subway for
all kinds of reasons in New York, whereas in most
other cities, the transportation systems were designed to get workers
(08:25):
to work, and they assumed if you're taking discretionary trips,
you'd probably be driving your own personal car. So they've
had a lot harder time getting people to take their
systems as commuters aren't returning to the office, you know,
maybe more than like three or four days a week.
And also in those other states, it's harder for the
transa agencies often to get financial support from the state
(08:46):
for various different reasons. But buying large transit just isn't
prioritized in the US.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
A lot of these systems have been flashing warning signs
for years now, so the fact that some systems that
are mentioned in the story still haven't gotten it together
or gotten what they've needed or sorted it out. It's
super down to the wire now, so.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Ridership is down, and if it's not coming back, what
options do these transit agencies have left? That's next? Could
you just quickly take us kind of inside a boardroom
at one of these agencies having to make this kind
(09:34):
of decision. I imagine that the calculus is incredibly difficult
and tricky whether or not to cut service, and that
fear that it might kickstart that vicious cycle or that
death spiral.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
There are only so many levers you can pull if
you're running one of these transit agencies. You can raise fares,
but that again is going to discourage some number of riders.
You can cut service, you can try and defer hiring,
or you know, put long term projects on hold. You
can try and do as little maintenance as possible, but
(10:05):
all of those have long term costs and ramifications as
well that could be even more severe than anything you're
doing in the short run. You know, we saw the
cost of deferred maintenance in New York City back in
twenty seventeen twenty eighteen when the subway seemed like was
collapsing every day, and you know, not literally, but every
day you would go down into the station, you weren't
(10:27):
sure if you were going to see, you know, the
platform five six people deep because the trains just couldn't
run because maintenance had been deferred during the Great Recession.
That was a huge reason for it. So I think
the people who run these systems are extremely cognizant of this.
They're not naive. They know that almost anything they do
to try and cut costs and balance the books is
(10:48):
going to have some type of long term costs or
ramifications that they'll have to deal with. Eventually.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
When you cut service, like those drastic cuts service, people
find other ways to get around and they'll get set
in their routines and then they might never come back.
If they hit the roads and you know, they can
get in their cars and they figure that out, then
that could also add to congestion and more traffic and
(11:14):
it's just not good for anyone really.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
But by law, most of these transit agencies have to
present balanced budgets every year. That's kind of the governing
ethos of these public authorities. They're not government agencies that can,
in theory run deficits. They have to present a balanced
budget every year, so one way or another, something has
to give.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
And I wonder sort of how you see this playing out.
Can go back five years we had the government, federal
government stepping in during the pandemic. Is there a world
in which the federal government steps in again to help
out these systems.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
No one we have spoken to for our stories has
any expectation that this administration is going to step in
and help public transit. If anything, the fear runs the
opposite direction, which is previously committed money for projects is
going to be clawed back or never delivered. Certainly, the
administration's posture towards congestion pricing in New York is lending
(12:13):
credence to those fears. Right, the administration is aggressively trying
to cancel that program, revoke authorization for it, which would
have tremendous ramifications on New York City's transportation lands.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
This is this is a program that was designed to
raise revenues to improve the larger system here in the
New York area by raising money from people who drove
their cars into certain parts of the city.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That's right, and in a lot of ways. That was
a program designed so that New York City would not
rely as much on the federal government for money to
rebuild the system.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Essentially, if Trump gets his way and congestion pricing is mixed,
then MTA needs to come up with a plan B
for you know, I guess, how to fund their capital
project for the next however many years, and then they
have to wonder, you know, how many people will actually
(13:04):
want to ride the MTA if we're dealing with CenTra
old equipment and it's always breaking down.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Transagencies are used to dealing with administration changes, but what
they're not as used to dealing with is an historic
drop in ridership at the same time. And so how
they're going to navigate those two things is, I think
something that has very little historical precedence.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
If you look at the demographics, who is hurt the
most when we see a system get into a death spiral?
We see cuts across the system. Can you characterize who's
most likely to be adversely affected by that?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
It's going to be the people who are transit dependent,
the people who need those systems because they don't have
another way to get around. And I think in this country.
The first thing that comes to mind when most people
here transit dependent is likely income based. You think of
someone who can't afford to take a car, but that's
not necessarily true. It could be people who can't drive
a car for medical reasons. It could be people who
(14:02):
can't drive a car because they're elderly and aren't comfortable
driving anymore, they don't feel safe doing it. It could
be people who choose not to drive a car for
various lifestyle reasons. They want to live a car free lifestyle.
But the reality is, in most places in the country,
if you want to be an active economic participant, you
have to be able to drive. So there are all
(14:24):
types of people who get affected when transit doesn't provide
the kind of service they need.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
And that's going to be even more devastating for these
communities where people rely heavily on public transportation. There's a
lot at sake for not just these agencies who might
lose a lot of money, but for writers who are
depending on public transit and a robust system to get around.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
This episode is produced by David Fox and Rachel Lewis Krisky.
It was edited by Air and Edwards, Patty Hirsch, and
Tim Annette. He was fact checked by andrean A. Tapia
and Rachel Lewis Chrisky, and mixed and sound designed by
Alex Sagura. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior
editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver.
(15:15):
Our executive producer is Nicole beemster Boor. Sage Bauman is
Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make
sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you
listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Just over five years ago, the onset of the COVID
nineteen pandemic brought the world to a halt. Schools were closed,
offices were empty, and without commuters, the number of people
taking public transit plummeted it. New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority
has been knocked down before, but its current leader says
nothing matches the current pandemic by orders of magnitude. We're
(00:32):
back up to more than a million writers on the
subway and a daily basis, but that's still down some
eighty percent year on year.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
House the fair box is like, you know, a huge
part of the revenue for these systems. So they needed
to get a bailout from the federal government.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Street Taylor covers transportation and public finance for Bloomberg, and
she says over the last half decade, the federal government
supplied roughly seventy billion dollars in aid to transit agency
across the US. A that's helped keep them afloat, but
ridership in the US across the board hasn't gotten back
to pre pandemic norms. It's been a struggle, and that
(01:10):
federal aid money is running out, so free Along with
Bloomberg Data reporter Aaron Gordon, they have been tracking what
could come next for those agencies, and they say the
prospect of riders not returning has some transit advocates sounding
the alarm about a potential death spiral.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
A death spiral is when a transit agency has to
cut service to save money, which makes it less useful
to people who then find other ways to get around
or don't take trips entirely because they can't, which then
leads to less fair revenue for the transit agency, and
then they have to cut more service because revenue's down,
(01:47):
and that's the death spiral.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I'm David Gera and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News today. On the show, as federal funding dries up,
we dig into how mass transit actions across the US
or trying to avoid a so called death spiral. What
that vicious cycle of low ridership, lower revenue, and cuts
to services could mean for America's major cities. The world
(02:18):
shut down during the early days of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
and mass transit in the US was no exception.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
So public transit agencies weren't exempt from the rule that
everything was just going to start clearing out. People weren't
traveling as much, so Ridership just kind of took a hit.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Street Tailor teamed up with Aaron Gordon, who was also
spent years covering transit. He says the funding the federal
government supplied during the pandemic helped agencies bridge the gap.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
It was a very rare instance in US history where
the federal government provided money to transit, not just to
do big, expensive, long term projects, but to run so
servius on a day to day basis. Typically, the federal
government had never done this before, and it was absolutely essential.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So here we are five years hence, is all of
that money gone? Is the seventy billion gone completely? Or
are we at a point where these transit agencies are
beginning to reckon with the fact that it is going
to disappear soon.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
It depends a little bit on which agency you're talking about,
whether they spent all their money or not. A select
few agencies kind of squirreled some away expecting that they
would need it, and by the mid twenty twenties, but
for the most part, it's all pretty much gone and
agencies are trying to figure out what they're going to
do now.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
A lot of companies have brought workers back to the office.
I'll say, personally, riding the train day in and day out,
I have my frustrations with delays and them being crowded.
When it comes to ridership, are we back to that
level that we saw pre COVID or are we close
to it?
Speaker 3 (03:48):
People are taking the train again, and ridership has ticked
up since the pandemic, but what hasn't recovered is people
going in as frequently as they used to.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
In the US, most trans agencies are hovering somewhere around
seventy five percent of pre COVID ridership, which if you're
a commuter on a train, you know, especially like Tuesday
to Thursday, which are you know, typically the highest ridership days,
the train probably feels more or less pre COVID, you know,
like maybe it's not quite as crowded as it was.
(04:19):
You know, hard to get this, it's still hard to
get to see there's still tons of people on the train.
It feels like things are more or less back to
normal overall all washes out, So like most transidencies are
about seventy five percent of ridership, which is basically where
some of the most of the estimates were, you know,
in like twenty twenty two of where this would all
shake out. This is a problem for transit agencies because
(04:40):
if they rely on fair revenue to help balance the
budget every year, that's a really significant hit.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
If we took a.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Tour through major cities in the United States, or most
of them or all of them fair dependent, is that
the kind of economic model that they use.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
It varies by transit agency. Some are more fair dependent
than others. A lot of the transit agencies, for like
mid size American cities that you wouldn't really think of
as being very transit dependent, but have transit systems that
are very important to the cities. I'm thinking like Boston, Philadelphia,
San Francisco, Atlanta, cities where car dependency is still very
(05:20):
much the norm, but there's also a large population that
uses the transit system to commute every day. Those systems
tend to be extremely fair reliant. New York City gets
a ton of revenue, like billions and billions of dollars
a year from the subway fares, but they also get
a lot of tax revenue too. So it ends up
being about fifty to fifty more or less. So it
(05:42):
depends on the system just how much they rely on
fair revenues. But I would say even for the systems
where it's maybe a smaller chunk of their overall annual revenues,
a twenty five percent reduction in that chunk is still
significant for them.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So if folks aren't riding the train the way they
used to, what are they doing differently? I imagine some
are just staying at home working from home. But are
there's some folks like I know you're a bike rider.
They're folks like you're riding bikes in now or taking
their cars through. How is that shift manifested itself?
Speaker 1 (06:08):
I don't know. If we've seen a huge shift in
transportation action. Call this mode shift the mode you're using
to get where you're going. What we have found is
much more significantly. If people moved away from the city
during the pandemic thinking remote work would be the future,
and they got called back to the office and they
live further away from their office than they used to,
(06:29):
that probably means they're driving now. But broadly, the mode
choice pre and post pandemic is looking very similar.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
A lot of these transit agencies don't think that ridership
will ever look the same as it used to before
the pandemic came. So is ridership inching back to what
we might consider normal, sure, But for these transit agencies
who are so used to certain levels of ridership for
(06:57):
decades before the pandemic came, they aren't seeing what they
need to see at the fairbox.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
How would you characterize the financial situation of major transportation
agencies across the countries? Is there nuance here or are
some doing better than others? Where it's there kind of
a blanket sense you can give us of how they're
doing financially.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I would say generally there are two categories. As with
most things US transit related, there's New York and then
there's everywhere else. You have to remember that basically one
third of all public transit trips in the US occur
in the New York metro area. So even though it
feels disrespectful of the rest of the country to talk
(07:41):
New York and everywhere else, it really is that way
with transit. So the MTA is actually in pretty good
financial shape all told. Because of some new taxes on
the state level, and also congestion pricing, which has allowed
them to fully fund their long term capital plans. D
Transit is in pretty dire financial shape, and then the
(08:03):
rest of the country is, I would say, in a
similar boat to New Jersey Transit. Their ridership recovery has
been quite poor. They tend to rely on commuters for
most of their rides, whereas the MTA has a lot
of discretionary trips. You know, people take the subway for
all kinds of reasons in New York, whereas in most
other cities, the transportation systems were designed to get workers
(08:25):
to work, and they assumed if you're taking discretionary trips,
you'd probably be driving your own personal car. So they've
had a lot harder time getting people to take their
systems as commuters aren't returning to the office, you know,
maybe more than like three or four days a week.
And also in those other states, it's harder for the
transa agencies often to get financial support from the state
(08:46):
for various different reasons. But buying large transit just isn't
prioritized in the US.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
A lot of these systems have been flashing warning signs
for years now, so the fact that some systems that
are mentioned in the story still haven't gotten it together
or gotten what they've needed or sorted it out. It's
super down to the wire now, so.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Ridership is down, and if it's not coming back, what
options do these transit agencies have left? That's next? Could
you just quickly take us kind of inside a boardroom
at one of these agencies having to make this kind
(09:34):
of decision. I imagine that the calculus is incredibly difficult
and tricky whether or not to cut service, and that
fear that it might kickstart that vicious cycle or that
death spiral.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
There are only so many levers you can pull if
you're running one of these transit agencies. You can raise fares,
but that again is going to discourage some number of riders.
You can cut service, you can try and defer hiring,
or you know, put long term projects on hold. You
can try and do as little maintenance as possible, but
(10:05):
all of those have long term costs and ramifications as
well that could be even more severe than anything you're
doing in the short run. You know, we saw the
cost of deferred maintenance in New York City back in
twenty seventeen twenty eighteen when the subway seemed like was
collapsing every day, and you know, not literally, but every
day you would go down into the station, you weren't
(10:27):
sure if you were going to see, you know, the
platform five six people deep because the trains just couldn't
run because maintenance had been deferred during the Great Recession.
That was a huge reason for it. So I think
the people who run these systems are extremely cognizant of this.
They're not naive. They know that almost anything they do
to try and cut costs and balance the books is
(10:48):
going to have some type of long term costs or
ramifications that they'll have to deal with. Eventually.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
When you cut service, like those drastic cuts service, people
find other ways to get around and they'll get set
in their routines and then they might never come back.
If they hit the roads and you know, they can
get in their cars and they figure that out, then
that could also add to congestion and more traffic and
(11:14):
it's just not good for anyone really.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
But by law, most of these transit agencies have to
present balanced budgets every year. That's kind of the governing
ethos of these public authorities. They're not government agencies that can,
in theory run deficits. They have to present a balanced
budget every year, so one way or another, something has
to give.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
And I wonder sort of how you see this playing out.
Can go back five years we had the government, federal
government stepping in during the pandemic. Is there a world
in which the federal government steps in again to help
out these systems.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
No one we have spoken to for our stories has
any expectation that this administration is going to step in
and help public transit. If anything, the fear runs the
opposite direction, which is previously committed money for projects is
going to be clawed back or never delivered. Certainly, the
administration's posture towards congestion pricing in New York is lending
(12:13):
credence to those fears. Right, the administration is aggressively trying
to cancel that program, revoke authorization for it, which would
have tremendous ramifications on New York City's transportation lands.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
This is this is a program that was designed to
raise revenues to improve the larger system here in the
New York area by raising money from people who drove
their cars into certain parts of the city.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
That's right, and in a lot of ways. That was
a program designed so that New York City would not
rely as much on the federal government for money to
rebuild the system.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
Essentially, if Trump gets his way and congestion pricing is mixed,
then MTA needs to come up with a plan B
for you know, I guess, how to fund their capital
project for the next however many years, and then they
have to wonder, you know, how many people will actually
(13:04):
want to ride the MTA if we're dealing with CenTra
old equipment and it's always breaking down.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
Transagencies are used to dealing with administration changes, but what
they're not as used to dealing with is an historic
drop in ridership at the same time. And so how
they're going to navigate those two things is, I think
something that has very little historical precedence.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
If you look at the demographics, who is hurt the
most when we see a system get into a death spiral?
We see cuts across the system. Can you characterize who's
most likely to be adversely affected by that?
Speaker 1 (13:42):
It's going to be the people who are transit dependent,
the people who need those systems because they don't have
another way to get around. And I think in this country.
The first thing that comes to mind when most people
here transit dependent is likely income based. You think of
someone who can't afford to take a car, but that's
not necessarily true. It could be people who can't drive
a car for medical reasons. It could be people who
(14:02):
can't drive a car because they're elderly and aren't comfortable
driving anymore, they don't feel safe doing it. It could
be people who choose not to drive a car for
various lifestyle reasons. They want to live a car free lifestyle.
But the reality is, in most places in the country,
if you want to be an active economic participant, you
have to be able to drive. So there are all
(14:24):
types of people who get affected when transit doesn't provide
the kind of service they need.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
And that's going to be even more devastating for these
communities where people rely heavily on public transportation. There's a
lot at sake for not just these agencies who might
lose a lot of money, but for writers who are
depending on public transit and a robust system to get around.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gera.
This episode is produced by David Fox and Rachel Lewis Krisky.
It was edited by Air and Edwards, Patty Hirsch, and
Tim Annette. He was fact checked by andrean A. Tapia
and Rachel Lewis Chrisky, and mixed and sound designed by
Alex Sagura. Our senior producer is Naomi Shaven. Our senior
editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our deputy executive producer is Julia Weaver.
(15:15):
Our executive producer is Nicole beemster Boor. Sage Bauman is
Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make
sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you
listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks
for listening. We'll be back on Monday.
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Sarah Holder
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