A Secret Weapon in the Fight Against Trump: Better Public Transit

As climate activists mourn the November election and steel themselves for a second Trump presidency, a small, countervailing trend seems to be emerging at the local level: Leftists championing public transit are running for office and winning. Last month, Mike Siegel won a City Council seat in Austin, Texas, on a platform heavily focused on climate issues, including transit, promising to support and protect a popular plan currently underway to add a new light rail system, and expand commuter rail and bus service throughout the city. He also supported improvements and extensions to a major transit hub. Even in suburban Atlanta—not a place associated with rail or bus-riding culture, where a public transit referendum unfortunately lost in November—Gabriel Sanchez  won his election for state representative in a landslide after making transit central to his campaign.

Meanwhile, in New York City, congestion pricing began on Sunday. After years of advocacy, litigation, and gubernatorial shenanigans, New York is set to charge motorists for entering the city, using the tax to improve public transportation. Building better public transit is a key plank in socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s campaign too. Mamdani, promising “fast, fare-free buses,” raised a quarter of a million dollars in the first three weeks of his campaign, making him the fastest mayoral candidate in 2024’s growing mayoral field to reach that milestone.

Public transit, done right, could be politically powerful: Not only does it solve multiple policy problems at once—making cities more affordable and easier to navigate, while curbing pollution and addressing the climate crisis—but it offers a way to improve people’s lives materially, in easy-to-perceive ways, on a daily basis. That’s crucial for building further political support, both for climate policy and for public investments of all kinds. There’s every reason to believe voters will appreciate these policies: A recent study of eight major global cities found that 80 percent of people would rather use a well-connected transit system than drive. Even in Washington, D.C., the only American city in the survey, and the one with the most motorists, more than half said they’d prefer quality transit to their car. And it’s obvious that many people prefer to live near good public transit; in most cities and suburbs, access to good transit makes a neighborhood more desirable, as measured by rents, incomes, and small businesses.

Conservatives, meanwhile, seem to know just how politically powerful the promise of good public transit can be. That’s why they devote so much energy to portraying the New York City subway—the best one in the United States—as a Dante-esque inferno of horrors. The problems of public transportation have become a right-wing obsession, similar to the demonization of public schools (another popular and successful form of socialism, however flawed). Some recent awful crimes—one subway rider killed another by setting her on fire as she slept last month, while another, on New Year’s Eve, was shoved onto the tracks, suffering serious injuries—have been amplified nonstop by conservative media like the New York Post.

Right-wing politicians are eager to fuel this narrative of the dangerous subway too. Take the story of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless person who threatened subway riders in New York City, and Daniel Penny, the young Marine who unintentionally killed Neely while holding him in a chokehold in May 2023. A jury ultimately acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide—a reasonable finding in a profoundly tragic situation. For the right, though, Penny isn’t merely a bystander in an unenviable situation who accidentally made a horrific scene even worse. To them, Penny is a hero whose story showcases the daily dangers and terrors of public transit: That’s why he’s not just a man returning to private life, but JD Vance’s special guest at the Army-Navy football game last month.

Right-wing media has also relentlessly amplified every possible objection to congestion pricing, including the nonsensical statement by a Transport Union local president to the Post that the subway is “too unsafe” to implement congestion pricing. While more than half of New York residents commute to work by public transit, Fox’s local outlet has been vigilantly rounding up angry motorists from New York’s most conservative and least convenient environs, like Long Island and Staten Island.  

Congestion pricing, done right, will win over many who are now complaining, experience from other cities shows. And as for the other conservative narrative around public transit: Riding the subway is much safer than driving. In fact, measured by deaths per miles traveled, the New York City subway is 10 times safer than driving. And while even a handful of homicides is more than the public should have to deal with, that’s hardly a subway-specific problem. Likewise, while it may be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and sometimes terrifying to share a subway car with people who are mentally ill and don’t have anywhere else to go, that’s a reason to improve housing and social services, not a problem inherent to public transit. Conservatives don’t have any answers to these problems. They are just trying to use these sad and alarming stories to undermine a popular public good, hoping that we will give up on the ideal of clean, safe, and inviting public transit for all.

If the left leans into making public transportation great, this right-wing strategy, as savvy as it is, won’t work. Public transit, in fact, offers a general model for political resistance in the second Trump era: Pay attention to the public goods the American right wants to attack and take away—and, instead, make those services better, safer, and less vulnerable to far-right narrative and smear. Conservatives know that public transit is popular—that’s why they’re excited at the opportunity to discredit it. We can learn from this and put public transit and urban civilization at the center of our politics, cleaning up the environment by taking cars off the road, and bringing ease, comfort, and twenty-first-century efficiency to working people everywhere. The right can’t compete with that.