At Streetsblog Capitol Hill, Elana Schor’s “Crunching June Stimulus Numbers: Roads Create Pricier Jobs Than Transit” confirms, so far, the predictions in SGA’s Spending the Stimulus: per dollar of investment, state road projects create fewer jobs than do state transit projects. The differences that she found are smaller than other studies have found, mostly, we suspect, because all the road project types are lumped together. Repair has long been found to produce more jobs than new roads.
Equally crucial in a recession: the June stimulus numbers show that states are spending transit funding more quickly than road funding, relatively speaking.
States have three times more money to spend on roads than on transit. If the speed of spending for road and transit projects were equal, we’d expect road spending to be three times transit spending. But in June, highway spending was only twice transit spending. Each dollar of available transit funding was spent about 1.5 times faster than highway funding.
Investments in public transportation: creating more jobs, faster.