Researchers says stimulus funds spent on mass transit projects create more jobs than road projects

House Republican leader John Boehner calls the Democratic stimulus package “bloated government and wasteful spending” as “Americans are asking ‘where are the jobs?’”

On this anniversary of the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, one group reviewed the job creation numbers and concluded that a lot of those jobs were tied to mass transit projects.

If the stimulus bill was supposed to create jobs, John Krieger says the government got more bang for its buck on mass transit projects. Krieger, a transportation policy analyst with the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, says public transportation funding for transit and rail projects is creating about two times as many jobs as the highway funds.

In California, that means stimulus money created or retained about 9,000 jobs for highway repairs and construction, and more than 19,000 for mass transit projects.

John Krieger says transit is more labor intensive. While states spent much of the stimulus money on building infrastructure — such as light rail stations or rail cars — they also hired new transit drivers and conductors. The challenge for local transit agencies will be to keep paying those salaries after the federal stimulus money runs out.