TRANSIT EQUITY LETTER TO CONGRESS

• Public transit provides a lifeline to communities in crisis. Much as water, electricity, sanitation, and food distribution services are essential to maintain during the pandemic, we must keep buses, subways, and other forms of transit running safely. Essential workers such as doctors, nurses, and sanitation workers must get to their life saving work.
• Transit systems nationwide are under severe financial stress because of the pandemic. They are incurring additional expenditures for frequent sanitization of handrails, benches, seats, and other surfaces that employees and passengers touch frequently.
• In many transit systems, service has been cut back, leading to overcrowding on buses and at bus stops. This is a dangerous situation during the pandemic. Transit systems must be able to run at whatever frequency is needed to allow all workers and passengers to maintain the medically recommended safe distance. Lack of funding shouldn’t be an excuse to endanger public health, and the federal government must step in to provide the entirety of the additional funding transit agencies need to maintain free service at the required frequency to avoid overcrowding and allow all system operators and users to maintain social distancing.
• We commend the inclusion of $25 billion in emergency funding for transit in the CARES Act, but that is insufficient to deal with the scale of the crisis. We strongly urge you to reach out to transit agencies across the country to determine their revenue shortfalls and additional funding needs for safe operation of essential transit service (including paratransit), and provide the needed funding on an emergency basis to keep transit systems running as an essential lifeline during the coronavirus emergency.