If your commute is a nightmare, blame Congress

America’s mass transit agencies are teetering on the brink of collapse.

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The money they got from Congress to help them through COVID-I9 is running out, but ridership remains below what it was before the pandemic. Lower fare revenue plus higher wage costs equals a bigger deficit. Unless state governments fill that gap, agencies will need to dramatically curtail service. Yet service levels are one of the primary determinants of ridership. Hence the increasing risk of a “death spiral,” where revenue shortfalls lead to service cutbacks, which lead to lower revenue, which lead to service cuts, and so on. State legislatures should try to avoid this doom cycle, even though finding the money may be difficult. But there is a deeper issue here, beyond the question of less funding versus more, or higher versus lower levels of service: the declining labor productivity of transit agencies. The tasks performed by transit workers have remained basically the same for decades even as wages have risen to keep up with economy-wide trends.