Planning past the end of pandemic-era federal funding

Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act authorisation runs out in September 2026. What small agencies can do now that does not depend on knowing what replaces it.

Authorisation under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expires in September 2026, and what follows it is not yet settled. Transit leaders are being asked to grow ridership without new revenue, while labour, fuel and operating costs continue to rise.

We are not going to pretend software solves that. What software can do is make you legible — to your board, to your state DOT, and to whoever writes the next formula — and legibility is worth real money when allocations are being argued over.

Things worth doing that do not depend on the outcome

Be able to answer questions in a week, not a quarter

When a funding conversation opens, the agencies that do well are the ones that can produce ridership by route, cost per service hour, on-time performance and missed trips without a three-week scramble. Not because the numbers are flattering — often they are not — but because a specific number invites a specific conversation, and a shrug invites a cut.

Make the service visible

A service that does not appear in trip planners is invisible to everyone who does not already ride it, including the people deciding what to fund. A current GTFS feed is among the cheapest ridership interventions available to a small agency.

Know what your deferred maintenance actually is

Deferred maintenance held in somebody's memory cannot go into a capital request. Written down, with dates and history attached, it becomes an argument.

A mechanic in a hi-vis vest crouched beneath a railcar with a drop light, inspecting a brake assembly in the dark of an inspection pit. — **Plate 04**An inspection nobody sees, on a date somebody has to remember.

Reduce what breaks when one person leaves

Succession is a budget risk, not just an HR one. An agency whose operations live in one person's spreadsheets has an unpriced liability on its books.

Four numbers worth having ready

When the conversation opens, it tends to open quickly and it rarely opens at a convenient moment. These are the figures that come up, and having them to hand is the difference between shaping the discussion and reacting to it.

Figure	Why it gets asked	Where agencies usually lose it
Cost per revenue hour	It is the standard comparison between agencies and modes	Deadhead folded into revenue hours, which flatters the number and destroys its credibility
Trips per revenue hour	The productivity question, especially for demand-response	Boardings counted inconsistently between drivers
Missed and cancelled trips, with reasons	It turns a service problem into a staffing or capital request	Reasons never recorded, so the whole year reads as unexplained
Deferred maintenance, dated	It is the only form a capital request can take	Held in a mechanic's memory rather than written against the vehicle

Notice that in three of those four rows the number itself is not the problem. The problem is that the distinction needed to make it credible was never captured at the time.

What not to do

Do not cut the service that is cheapest to cut. Cut the service that is least depended upon, which is usually a different one, and you will only know which by looking.
Do not defer the maintenance you cannot see. A deferred inspection is a cost moved into a worse year, not a saving.
Do not quietly stop publishing your feed to save staff time. Invisible service loses riders, and lost riders are the argument against you next round.
Do not wait for certainty before planning. The uncertainty is the condition, not a delay before the condition.

A note on the cooperative option

For very small operators, purchasing alone is often the worst available option. State DOTs, regional planning bodies and cooperative purchasing arrangements exist partly so that a four-vehicle agency does not have to negotiate enterprise software by itself. If your state has a mobility consortium, the pooled route is usually both cheaper and better supported than going it alone.

This is genuinely against our short-term commercial interest to say, and we are saying it anyway: if a shared statewide instance serves you better than buying from us directly, take the shared instance.

Source: Rail transit leaders on planning around budget constraints — Progressive Railroading, Outlook 2026

Questions

Will federal funding actually stop?

Authorisation expiring is not the same as funding stopping. What is genuinely uncertain is the level and the formula, and that uncertainty is itself the planning problem — you cannot budget confidently against an unknown.

What is the cheapest useful thing we can do this quarter?

Make sure your GTFS feed is current and your service period does not expire in the next six months. It costs staff hours rather than money, and it is the difference between being findable and being invisible.