According to analysis from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Smart Growth America, and U.S. PIRG, after a year of stimulus spending, public transportation projects are generating nearly two times as many jobs per stimulus dollar spent as highway projects:

The most recent data from states shows that every billion dollars spent on public transportation produced 19,299 job-months, compared to 10,493 job-months for every billion spent on highway infrastructure. Public transportation projects create more jobs than road projects because they spend less money on land and more on labor, and because projects are often more complex, whether laying track or manufacturing vehicles.

That all seems sensible, at first blush.  And, for a variety of reasons, we’re big supporters of public transportation. But we can’t help but wonder if these same numbers couldn’t also be used to argue that public transportation projects are less efficient with labor. This is aligned closely to a question we’ve been asking ourselves for some time. In some form, in focusing on job creation, don’t we risk losing a focus on productivity? It feels like the heart of productivity is doing more work with fewer people, which may not be a wonderful idea if your primary goal is to use more people.

We don’t mean to sound skeptical of job creation goals—we really understand that the stimulus act was intended, in large part, to keep unemployment from growing to catastrophic numbers. But is it necessarily true that the most labor intensive projects are necessarily the best? And shouldn’t they be weighed against other longer-term performance benefits gained from various projects?

To be fair to the authors of this report, we’re not sure that states or the feds are (yet?) tracking other performance measures sufficiently to allow more robust analysis of broad benefits. We certainly hope we’ll see them as more and more stimulus projects are completed.

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