Cover photo from our friends at Transit Riders United

Every year in April and May, advocacy groups for every cause imaginable descend on Lansing from all over the state to make their case for increased funding in the state budget. In my experience as a volunteer citizen lobbyist, I often find that people who have never spoken directly to their elected officials have simplified and partisan views on lobbying: they categorize their rep as a “good guy” who will certainly support the “right things” or a “bad guy” who can never be convinced to do so. But every budget season, state legislators must divide the budget according to every conceivable need that their constituents may have, and it’s up to constituents and advocates to bring attention to needs that may or may not be adequately addressed in budgets past. It’s a game of ranking priorities.

In the state of Michigan, transit has historically not been high on the priority list. For example, compare the per capita transit funding Greater Philadelphia got from the state of Pennsylvania to the funding Greater Detroit received from Michigan in the chart below. 

There have been political risks to relying so much on the state lately for SEPTA, Philadelphia’s transit system, but the results speak for themselves, because Philadelphia has had a much more functional transit system than Detroit does. Note that the federal funding is likely higher for Philadelphia than Detroit because the federal government provides funding that is only available with adequate local and state-level matching, which we are often not eligible for in Michigan – leaving money on the table for transit! 

In the past several years, advocates like Transportation Riders United and the Michigan Public Transit Association have been lobbying for more public transportation funding, arguing that it’s key for mitigating the rising cost of living, meeting climate goals, and retaining and growing Detroit’s population. There have been several promising attempts at improving state transit funding, like the SOAR reform package in 2024 which would have nearly doubled Michigan’s transit funding, but did not pass. 

This year, instead of a budget season that took place mostly in the spring, the budget negotiations stretched all the way into October, with a budget finally passing in the wee hours of October 2nd. Deliberations stalled over a number of priorities but a big component of that funding was for Michigan’s roads. The conversation about road funding could and should be another entire blog post, but transit advocates took the opportunity to push for equitable funding for all of Michigan’s transportation systems in the Michigan Transportation Fund – not just roads but buses, trains, and ferries. Our laws allow for up to 10% of transportation funding to go to public transportation – already a fairly paltry sum – but historically we have only had 7-8% of that funding go to public transportation, resulting in our anemic and inadequate systems that serve some of the most vulnerable people in our state. 

So what does this budget mean for transit in Michigan? Let’s contextualize these numbers!

What does the 2025 state budget mean for transit?

In order to make sense of this year’s budget, we have to define a few key terms:

• Local Bus Operating (LBO) funding is relied on by all bus agencies in the state of Michigan to fund their daily service. Due to our complete lack of commuter rail, this essentially constitutes the entire state-level operating budget for transit in Michigan. This is what DDOT, SMART, and all other agencies in the state rely to pay for drivers, bus maintenance, administrative work, etc. For rural agencies, this is often the only funding they get, whereas in Detroit we get some municipal funding, too.
• Capital funding is for infrastructure and long-term investments projects that lay outside of operating expenses – think building bus shelters, purchasing new buses, laying down tracks, planning new route expansions, etc.

Here’s how those numbers break down between 2024 and 2025:

These are total numbers for 2024 and 2025, with LBO funding in dark blue and capital funding in lighter blue. The best news here is the LBO funding – an increase from $246 million to $306 million. In order to keep up with increased costs and match last year’s funding, MDOT predicted we would need $270 million, so this is big! How we got there is… complicated to say the least, a combination of the official state budget as well as multiple separate bills. For example, one bill will disperse $35 million to the LBO budget every year for a period of 5 years; that’s included in the $306 million. We also lost some temporary federal funding from the Biden administration that was available last year, which was made up for with some of the roads funding. This increase won’t result in a revolutionary change in Michigan’s transit, but it may allow for incremental improvements, like improved bus service frequencies, as proposed in the DDOT Reimagined plan.

The capital funding officially dropped a little bit from last year, going from $250 million to $247.7 million, but it’s important to note that previous increases in capital funding were mostly the result of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also sometimes called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill) grants from the federal government, which somewhat predictably are becoming less available overall. However, some new capital funding is allocated from the roads bill, and the budget also allocates a new $65 million a year to a newly-created Infrastructure Projects Authority for “transformational transit projects” – which could include new rail lines, Bus  Rapid Transit (BRT) projects, and other investments in high-capacity transportation. Essentially, it’s capital funding for shinier projects.

How did these budgets align with what advocates were asking for? Surprisingly well! A major campaign from Transportation Riders United pushed legislators to allocate the allowed 10% of funding from the roads budget to transit, as was mentioned above. It doesn’t account for all of the funding, but the roads deal totaled $1.8 billion, of which $160 million was dedicated to transit – very close to the 10% advocates asked for! In early negotiations, it looked like we were going to get an effective cut in transit funding when adjusting for inflation, so these improvements, especially in the LBO, constituted a win by advocates. 

Does that mean we’re getting close to Pennsylvania in the chart above? Absolutely not! While these numbers are better than expected, Michigan and Detroit specifically are very, very behind when it comes to transit funding. If you combine all sources of funding, Detroit is dead last on per capita transit funding compared to pretty much any major metro, including all of the other ones with reputations for poor transit – look at Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and even Tampa.

Not all of that is state-level funding of course – some states have municipal sales taxes that help fund their transit, for example – but state funding can and should be an integral part of the picture, especially in Detroit where many struggle with high property taxes.

What does the 2025 state budget mean for transit in Detroit?

Because the transit funding is divided by a complicated formula involving how many riders it serves, Detroit will get a larger slice of that LBO funding, which can fund improvements like the DDOT Reimagined plan I mentioned above. The $65 million in transformational projects is application-based, but we stand a good chance of getting some of that money for BRT projects in the Metro Detroit area. 

However, I wouldn’t get too excited about the prospects of funding BRT with that $65 million, because the other component to contextualizing this money is cost, and the costs can be substantial. For example, Indianapolis’s IndyGo Purple Line BRT project cost a total of $188 million to construct, and part of the appeal of BRT is that it’s cheap. So I wouldn’t expect the $65 million to fund even one project to its completion. However, if we were to use it well, we could fund a study to get a project shovel-ready, or use that funding to apply for matching funds from the federal government (such as they are). 

In sum, this budget is a reasonable improvement, but still won’t put us on par with other major cities when it comes to public transportation. It’s important for advocates and citizens to continue pushing for more funding in the upcoming year, including at the local level, and to support millages that create reliable, permanent revenue streams if we want to catch up with other major cities in the US. It’s also important to support the land use changes that make transit more usable, such as the “Let’s Build More Housing, Detroit” ordinance which will increase density, walkability, and available housing near transit corridors.