And then, once we get into who owns it, and the fact that it is public,
we have to get into political issues.
Public transportation is big business
and there are political interests involved in it.
But let me start first with the job.
Urban public transportation is very simple.
The job is to meet the demand of the people who want to travel.
And so the role of the public transit manager is to provide trips.
Or, as we say in the public transportation jargon,
we have to "meet service".
So the public transit manager every day gets up
and gets a sheet on his or her desk,
that says, "Have I met service"?
Do I have enough vehicles and enough person power--
bus operators, conductors, maintainers,
to meet that service?
And if I don't, why don't I?
The service that you have is a function of urban demand.
How many people want the service?
What kinds of trips are they taking? Are they business trips, working trips?
So where do they start and where do they end?
Where should I have my routes? How often should I put out
the number of buses or rail cars, or light rail cars that I need?
So once you have a sense of demand,
you then know the equipment that you need.
When you know how often you have to provide that equipment,
you know the number of drivers you have,
and once you have all the equipment, you know everything else.
Once you understand demand, which is the big outside figure,
once you know where people are coming from,
and where they are going to and when they are coming
and when they want to go, and what you need for that,
you pretty much know
that you are going to have to establish funding to pay for that,
and so you have to work on a couple of budgets--
an operating budget and a capital budget.
You need to understand that if you are going to provide service
you need to have the funds in order to provide that service.
And finally you are going to have to have a system of management,
to manage the system.
And I will talk about that in a few minutes too,
but you are going to have to have an overall chief
somebody that says, "this is the way we are going to operate service today"
and you are going to have to have an organization
that is designed to provide that service.
You are going to have to have bus operators,
you are going to have to have bus maintainers,
you are going to have to have people to clean the station,
you are going to have to have people to buy the equipment, to plan the routes,
to organize the system.
So you find that transit organizations
become very complex organizations
because there are a lot of things to do
in order to, very simply, have your bus at your bus-stop
when you want it in the morning.
In the United States we have different kinds of ownership models
but the primary ownership model in the United States
is a Public Authority,
and a Public Authority is a unit of state government ususally.
It operates like a corporation
It has got a board of directors or a board of managers
that is usually appointed by a public official
or a set of public officials.
In some cases they might be elected by the population.
And their job is to set the oversight
and operating conditions of the organization
and to basically hire the general manager,
the person that is going to manage all the operations.
And then the general manager's job
is to provide the service
and reporting to the board are what we call operating units.
For example, in New York City, we have the Metropolitan Transportation Authority,
which is like a holding company in a sense.
It sets the rules, it negotiates the budget,
it sets the hours of operation, the fare policy and everything else.
But the New York City Transit
provides the buses and rail cars,
and the whole personnel system
to maintain that to provide the service.
One of the reasons that you have an oversight body
is that the public demands accountability for its public transportation systems.
It wants to make sure that whoever is operating the public transit
does it with the public in mind
and is not, in a sense, taking advantage of the public
but is meeting the public demand for service
at times and places that they want, contracting out for services,
something that is done in Europe
and something that we are beginning to look at in the United States.
It has come later.
But you recognize that when you are contracting out for service,
the person who is providing the service
is looking for a profit, if it is a private sector.
In this they need a profit. In the public sector there is no profit.
But there are pluses and minuses on both sides.
Public transportation has always been considered a public good,
but the amount that the public pays for that public good
is depending on politics of the region.
In the European Union the general feeling is that the public should pay
the full and true operating costs of the service,
not the capital cost, not the cost to build the system
but the true operating cost.
In the United States the fares are set at politically acceptable levels,
levels that the politicians,
the people that control the system whether it is a governor or a mayor,
or some local unit of government,
feels that it is a reasonable fare for someone to pay
so that they can get to work
they can get to the hospital, if they are seniors,
they can carry out activities without any kind of hinderance.
And as a result the fares in the United States
only reach about thirty to fifty percent of the operating costs,
so operating costs in the United States
have to be subsidized.
Public transportation is inherently a political entity.
It is up to the local managers of the public transit system
to convince the funding agencies,
the people who are going to provide the subsidies
that these are necessary for the levels of service
that everything is priced right, the oversight is in place
you are buying things, you are bidding packages,
everything is within reason will work well,
and you can only meet the demand
if you get the subsidy to complete the subsidy
plus the fares and meet the total operating needs.