Investment in mass transit grew during the 1990s.
Results in ridership increase were visibel by
the end of the decade.
1991: The Intermodal Surface Transportation and Efficiency Act (ISTEA) passed. This was a milestone achievement for mass transit advocates because the act shifted the balance slightly more towards mass transit systems.
The ISTEA was a result of a number of factors. By this year, the interstate highway system had reached its completion. As Dilger notes (53), despite the completion and hundreds of billions of dollars spent through the Interstate Highway Aid, the country’s highways, bridges, and tunnels were still in poor conditions and in need of more investment. The traffic volume, on the other hand, was still on a rise – congestion by no means was solved by laying more miles of highways or expanding the existing ones. Consequently, suburbs kept sprawling and the air quality kept getting poorer. In the meantime, mass transit advocates had gotten stronger foothold in the affairs of national transportation.
One of the most significant aspects of the ISTEA was that “more than a quarter of the $190 billion in transportation money distributed by the federal government in the 1990s was designated as ‘flexible’ funding. States and localities could choose to spend this portion of their federal transportation dollars on almost any transportation project, from roads to transit to bikeways” (Gillham 50). Subsequently, considerable progress has been witnessed in projects involving mass transit and bikeways. The “federal spending on bicycle and pedestrian projects was thirty times higher in 1999 than in 1990” (Gillham 51).
Although this was an encouraging development in the transportation policy, about 90 percent of the flexible federal money that could have been spent on any project, including experimental ones, was still spent on highway projects. Moreover, the percentage of increase in spending for highways still surpassed the amount for other systems.
1998: Congress reauthorized the ISTEA under the name of Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21). The new act preserved the guidelines of ISTEA and earmarked $41 billion for the mass transit out of $216 billion funding for the transportation overall until the fiscal year 2003 (Gillham 50).
By the end of the 1990s, investment that went to mass transit showed fruits in terms of rise in the mass transit ridership. The ridership had declined throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s. “From 1995 to 200, mass transit use increased 21 percent while automotive use increased 11 percent” (Dilger 70).