Gwinnett County Transit Costing Taxpayers $10 Million Per Year

I am sure you have heard about Gwinnett County’s buses.  You may have even ridden one.  But do you know how much the taxpayers pay to keep the service going?

Work through the County’s 2013 budget and on page 8 you will find the money used to operate the County buses in the Local Transit Operating Fund.  The total for this budget item is $7.76 million.  Of that $7.76 million it looks like fares and other revenue collected from riders comes to $4.25 million, leaving taxpayers to pick up the remaining $3.52 million.  Not great, but at least it looks like fares are covering more than half of the cost.

Unfortunately that is also only half of the story.

What is not shown in the County budget is that the actual total cost for the Gwinnett County bus service is $15.23 million.  $6.5 million of the difference comes mainly from the taxpayers via State and Federal grants and pass through money and an additional $935 million comes from GRTA State Passenger Fares. This means that tax revenue, in one form or another, pays for $10 million of the $15.23 million required to keep the buses running.

In 2012 a little over 2 million passengers used one of the 28 County buses. Working out the math based on the total revenue the County received It appears that while each rider paid an average of about $2.50 (which coincidently matches the regular fare listed on the Gwinnett County Transit website), the taxpayers coughed up an additional $5.

Most people in Gwinnett have never taken a bus, and of the 2 million yearly fares I couldn’t find out how many different riders this number represents.  But if we assume that 95 percent of those rides occur on business days we end up at about 7,700 rides per workday.  Let’s further say that 80% of these riders are regulars who are using the system to get to work.  This means that 6,000 of these fares are from daily commuters.  Since they both go to and from work this could mean that as few as 3,000 people take advantage of these buses regularly, and these people account for the vast majority of the yearly rides.  That means each of them effectively gets a tax funded subsidy of $3,261 per year.

So you have to ask a question - why would the County continue to operate a bus service that essentially loses $10 million each year?  Here is where it gets interesting.

You may recall something called the Clean Air Act of 1990 which required that cities meet certain air quality standards.  When the Gwinnett County Transit service was started in 2000 the County took about $75 million from the Federal Government to help them implement some of these initiatives.  The County bus system was a large part of meeting the clean air standard requirements - and if they dump the buses they will have to pay tens of millions of dollars back to the feds.

But in the past thirteen years cars have made tremendous improvements in efficiency and run much cleaner than they did when the bus service was started. What this means is that the pollution savings the County receives by running the bus service, especially compared with the number of vehicles on the road, is now insignificant.  People didn’t flock to public transit, and if the buses run almost empty we may get to a point (if we are not there already) where they actually cause more pollution than they save.

In theory mass transit is wonderful, but in practice it doesn’t seem to work, at least in Gwinnett County.  But as long as local governments succumb to the lure of Federal dollars they will continue to be trapped in programs that frequently turn out not to be in the best interest of their residents.

Footnote - I received the information for this story from helpful people at Gwinnett County and some remarkably honest e-mails from County Commissioners.  I get the impression that some of them feel frustration at being locked into the transit deal.  If I have made any errors with the information I was sent I hope that someone will provide me with any necessary corrections and I will make changes as soon as possible.

See also: County: Transit Fares Should Cover a Third of Operating Costs