We don't need another efficiency study for RIPTA

Yahoo

28-04-2025

Two Rhode Island Public Transit Authority buses wait in Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence. (Photo by Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)
I watched the April 8 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Rhode Island's critically essential but chronically underfunded public transit system, which faces a $32.6 million budget deficit. Committee members hammered the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority's (RIPTA) new CEO for the agency's decision to delay a mandated efficiency study due back in March. As lawmakers hinted that the delay in conducting the study justified not providing additional funding for RIPTA, a thought circled my mind: Where is the efficiency study for the new Washington Bridge?
Public transit in Rhode Island has always been held to an unfair standard compared to other public services, especially highways. Nobody proposed doing a cost/benefit analysis before funding the new Washington Bridge despite it costing $713 million. Legislators may argue that the potential for financial savings is a good reason for withholding funding from RIPTA until the efficiency study finishes, but I can make a pretty good guess as to what the results will be. RIPTA has been studied for efficiency seven other times.
The Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council did so in 2002. The Acadia Consulting Group did so in 2006. Consultants Abrams-Cherwony & Associates did so in 2007. The Special Legislative Commission to Study Transit Service in the State of Rhode Island did so in 2007. Then-Gov. Don Carcieri did so in 2008. The Senate Commission on Sustainable Transportation Funding did so in 2011. And finally, RIPTA gave a presentation to the Senate Oversight Committee in March 2023, which references findings by the American Bus Benchmarking Group of RIPTA 'outperforming similar agencies across the country in almost every key performance indicator. Despite a chronic lack of funding, RIPTA provides more trips, across a larger area, at a more effective cost per trip than other transit agencies that serve similar population areas anywhere in America.'
These reports didn't find inefficiencies within RIPTA that would magically fix its fiscal cliff – rather, many highlighted the need to expand transit and praised RIPTA's ability to run efficient, award-winning service despite chronic underfunding. Nearly all of these reports proposed many solutions to address the critical need for sustainable, long-term funding for RIPTA; yet two decades later, few of these solutions have ever materialized as RIPTA hobbles from one fiscal year to the next.
At this point, it's challenging to see how this eighth efficiency study is anything other than an attempt to avoid funding public transit and deprive Rhode Islanders of the economic growth, traffic reduction, and mobility justice that we deserve.
There is a reason we don't ask public libraries, state parks, or highway builders to do efficiency studies before giving them money: Financial efficiency is at odds with serving the public effectively. RIPTA's highest cost services are its rural routes, like the 10x that provides the only transit service to Foster and North Scituate. However, these 'inefficient' rural routes are lifelines for the riders who use them and are often the only difference between financial stability and unemployment. RIPTA is a public service, not a business, and it can't effectively serve the needs of all Rhode Islanders if it is forced to be efficient. There is a reason it's not called the 'Providence County Public Transit Authority.'
At this point, it's challenging to see how this eighth efficiency study is anything other than an attempt to avoid funding public transit and deprive Rhode Islanders of the economic growth, traffic reduction, and mobility justice that we deserve.
There is no more couch change to find. RIPTA was forced to do more with less when federal funding cuts plowed a $6M budget gap in 2014. Since 2010, RIPTA has slimmed and slimmed as its largest funding source has withered up, while RIDOT's budget grew one and a half times as fast. Any belt-tightening left was erased in the financially destructive COVID pandemic, as RIPTA remained one of the only transit agencies in the nation that didn't cut service.
We don't need one more study to know that RIPTA is one of the most efficient transit systems in the nation, that 30,000 Rhode Islanders depend on it daily, and that hundreds to thousands would lose their jobs if service is cut. We don't need one more study to know that the state's highway system can't handle even more cars on the road, and it will be impossible to meet our state's Act on Climate mandates if RIPTA collapses. What we do need is for our state leaders to fund transit as the essential public service it is, to recognize how detrimental letting RIPTA collapse will be for household income, student outcomes, congestion, and the local economy. We don't need an eighth efficiency study to understand that for tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders, the collapse of RIPTA is like the collapse of a second Washington Bridge.
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