“Based on the numbers, there will need to be an alternative or states will have to become comfortable with having to rely on general fund dollars for transportation,” said Garett Shrode, policy analyst with the nonprofit Eno Center for Transportation.
Garett Shrode with the Eno Center for Transportation said that approach has its pitfalls because “80% of electric vehicle charging happens at the home and not at public chargers.”
“If you look at the numbers over the last two decades, we’ve been losing revenue to fuel-efficiency gains in internal combustion engines,” [Garett] Shrode says.”
“The Eno Center for Transportation in a new research report said that current national policy priorities that favor electrification tilt toward a future where some new vehicles would pay no federal motor fuel taxes, while vehicles with internal combustion engines would generate less fuel tax revenue as fuel economy improves.”
To understand why NJ Transit is facing a fiscal crisis, you have to go back to the agency’s founding, said Philip Mark Plotch, a Fair Lawn resident and a senior researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation, a Washington-based nonprofit that shapes public debate on transportation issues…. Garett Shrode, a policy analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation, said NJ Transit and similar legacy transit systems, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, still rely heavily on fares to balance their operating budgets — which is what doomed them when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“Cutting service is a feedback loop that makes everyone worse off,” Shrode says. “Even when you cut a significant amount of service, you aren’t going to fill that gap, because the costs to maintain the system are pretty fixed. Whether you’re running 10 trains an hour or 30 trains an hour, you’re still paying a station manager for a full day. …”
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