President Donald Trump’s war against Iran is triggering an unstable oil supply for the foreseeable future, a destabilizing event that will likely linger for years.
This third major U.S. war in the Persian Gulf in my lifetime underlines again the need for reducing the use of fossil fuels, and like it or not that means creating alternatives to urban driving in the Twin Cities. In my experience, this is a bitter pill to swallow for people whose vision of the future is predicated on the unending expansion of highways into the exurbs.
But such is the state of affairs. The Strait of Hormuz has eclipsed much of the world’s geographic map, and so we need an alternative vision for the Twin Cities. We must focus on walkable density, reducing vehicle miles traveled, and public transit; together they create mobility fundamental to high-tech, 21st century life.
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And yet, as reported by Erik Noonan last week, the supplemental budget proposal released last month by Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz slashes state transit funding. Given the geopolitics, cuts to support for Metro Transit could not come at a worse time, and state lawmakers should reject this idea. On the contrary, the global crises suggest putting more funding toward transit into the state budget, money that would directly help people in the Twin Cities who are facing high gas prices.
For the second year in a row, Walz suggests using the new transit sales tax as an ATM for budget cuts elsewhere, slashing state general fund dollars for urban transit operations by over $40 million in the next biennium (2028-2029). This comes on top of last year’s transit cuts by the Legislature after a last-minute negotiation fell through.
A transit retreat from 2023
These cuts undermine the generational investment of the 2023 legislative session that saw, after years of stagnation, the first meaningful change in transit funding in my lifetime. At that time, a .75-cent metro sales tax was levied for transit funding after decades of short-term fixes for a long-term shortfall.
The promise of that sales tax legislation was that our transit system would finally be able to invest in improved service and geographic expansion, starting to balance decades of inaction where, for almost a century, regional transportation spending had been heavily weighted in favor of private automobiles. To take but one example, the new overpass interchange on Highway 36 in Lake Elmo, saving a small amount of time for only 5,000 cars a day, will cost the Minnesota Department of Transportation over $50 million. These kinds of projects pile up every year, while state funding for transit stagnates.
The promise of the 2023 sales tax for transit was that it would add new money into the transit system, allowing it to catch up with other cities like Seattle or Denver, and putting the Twin Cities back in the conversation with national leaders. Instead, the new funding stream is proving to be an excuse for cost shifts, allowing the state and counties to walk away from their commitments. I wrote about this last year, when the governor again used this gimmick to cut transit funding. At the time, I argued that “using the groundbreaking transit sales tax as an ATM for cost shifts” was a bad sign.
For Hennepin and Ramsey counties, the new sales tax facilitated walking away from commitments to fund light-rail operations, representing over $20 million in annual savings for Hennepin County alone. Walz’s gimmick shifts statewide commitments to transit out of the general fund, essentially neutering the changes from 2023.
U.S. cities fall further behind
Every year I teach a class at the University of Minnesota called Fundamentals of Transit. I ask students to pick cities anywhere in the world, reporting to the class a bit about their history, ridership statistics, governance and funding, and other quirks. The resulting talks are usually fascinating; even after years, they repeatedly illustrate how U.S. cities are far behind their global peers.
Just some illustrations from this semester: Auckland, New Zealand, has half the population of the Twin Cities, but six rail lines and twice the transit ridership. Manila, the capital of the Phillipines, has half of the Twin Cities GDP but is building a subway. Frequencies on main transit lines of cities like Dublin, Ireland; Santiago, Chile; and Chongqing, China, are routinely under 10 minutes, something that does not exist anywhere in the Twin Cities metro. I was astonished to learn from a student last week that Dnipro, Ukraine, is expanding its heavy-rail transit system in spite of the fact that the front lines of a years-long war with Russia lie only a few miles away.
Meanwhile, the Twin Cities still struggle with transit service. Even the Southwest Light-Rail Extension, over budget and behind schedule, barely begins to offset the massive amount of money spent on highway expansion over the generations. We need to accelerate the important arterial bus rapid transit program while investing in other basics of the system, like shelters, security and affordable fare programs.
Related: Does the Twin Cities need the ‘opt-out’ transit agencies anymore?
All of that requires state funding, and the Legislature should reject Walz’s supplemental budget salvo. Instead, leaders should take 2026 as an opportunity to increase, not shrink, the state’s commitment to transit funding. The oil shock spurred by Trump’s attack on Iran is only beginning. Meanwhile, warm weather blanketing the western half of the United States this March shattered long-standing April temperature records.
Faced with ratcheting gas prices, state money spent on transit goes directly to help working-class people struggling with inflation. Not having to buy, insure, fuel and maintain a first, second or third car is a huge financial windfall for people of any background.
Transit funding offers a lifeline, and liberation, from the gas pump. State lawmakers should see transit funding as the solution to the acute, interlinked crises of oil prices and climate change. Now’s not the time to make more cuts.
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