(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 470: Yonah Freemark Part 1

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined once again by transportation and housing expert Yonah Freemark. In part 1 we talk about the equitable distribution of transportation grants, potential for flex funding for transit, and our annual transit openings discussion.

You can find Transit Explorer through the Transport Politic.

You can listen to this show at Streetsblog USA or find it at our hosting archive.

Below is an AI generated unedited full transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood (2m 22s):
Yonah Freemark, welcome back once more to the Talking Headways podcast.

Yonah Freemark (2m 26s):
Thanks for having me again. Jeff,

Jeff Wood (2m 28s):
I don’t know if you’re getting bored with me by now, but this is your 12th appearance on the show starting back I guess in 2013 or 2014 or so. So it’s been a been a bit, we’ve been talking about transit expansion and projects.

Yonah Freemark (2m 40s):
The tide is not pulled back. I suppose if anything it’s accelerated. There are more projects than ever. Yeah,

Jeff Wood (2m 46s):
More projects than ever. I’ll ask you about that in a little bit. It’s 2024 we just got here. I’m curious about how you’re feeling about this year so far.

Yonah Freemark (2m 55s):
I’m feeling a bit of trepidation. I think we should be worried about where many transit agencies stand with their funding and I’m also worried about the election. Yeah. And when you put those together, you get a little worried.

Jeff Wood (3m 8s):
I feel like we were just worrying about the election and now we’re worrying about the election again. I have to start thinking about my election day plans. I think maybe we’ll do another YouTube show, but yeah, I’m just, I, I don’t know. I’m cautiously optimistic, but at the same time I don’t really like the idea of having an election this year ’cause it’s gonna mess everything up. Right. It just, it gets in the way of stuff. It takes the air out of the room. It’s really a bummer. It feels like sometimes,

Yonah Freemark (3m 33s):
I think especially when we’re, it feels like we’re doing a repeat and somehow the tape has been rewound four years ago and we’re doing it again. Yeah. And it’s a little frustrating. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (3m 43s):
I think for a lot of folks. But we get what we get. I guess that’s how it goes. Not much we can do other than see what happens. Well I guess Yonah in the last year or two since we chatted, you’ve had a lot of research and a lot of stuff come up. So I’m interested to hear more about that. You had a lot of research published and a few reports for the Urban Institute, one of which you put together with a few co-authors focused on equity and infrastructure funding, which I’m excited to talk about. I’m wondering how federal funding is continuing to perpetuate inequality from what you found in the report that you did there.

Yonah Freemark (4m 16s):
Yeah, so we spent the last year trying to document where money has been being distributed from federal infrastructure sources. So we were looking both at transportation but also energy infrastructure, water infrastructure and things of that sort. And Yonah. When we started this project, I think we were already a little concerned that all the money that was going from the federal government into infrastructure wasn’t necessarily supporting the administration’s equity goals in terms of trying to encourage investment in communities of color, trying to encourage investment in historically under-invested places.

Yonah Freemark (4m 56s):
And I think the findings that we had from our research were really mixed. So from the positive perspective, we did find that the department of Transportation is doing a good job with the money that it distributes through competitive grants. So there’s some grants like the RES program where the department has choice over how it’s gonna spend its money. And we actually found that it was doing a good job picking projects in counties that were more likely to have people of color, more likely to have low income residents. And even when we looked at the specific neighborhoods, we found that that was the case. So that’s in my mind a good sign about the ability of the government to encourage equity.

Yonah Freemark (5m 35s):
But we also found some negative things. So one example of that is that we found that communities with higher levels of staff capacity we’re more likely to get money. Now this is intuitive but also problematic to some degree. It means that local governments that have been able to staff up have been able to get more money outta the federal government. But it also means that we’re creating a vicious cycle for the poorest communities out there because the poorest communities don’t have the ability to do things like apply for a federal grant and apply for a federal grant successfully. And so we found that the federal government is not necessarily fixing that problem with its current grant program.

Yonah Freemark (6m 15s):
So hopefully there’s some learnings from that finding. And Yonah we shared those findings with folks in the Department of Transportation and other agencies and and hopefully they are taking those findings to heart to some degree.

Jeff Wood (6m 29s):
Yeah. And I think what we found too is that one of the things I think is really important and is good is that there’s outside organizations that are working on trying to build capacity for getting smaller cities and towns and places understaffed grants. But it should be not necessarily the job of the outside groups to be focused on that. Right. So we had Robert Blaine from NLC come on the show and he talked about their building capacity work that they’re doing and basically they found that they had a 40% success rate If. you went through this program with the National League of Cities versus like a 5% rate overall, which is amazing. But it also is from that outside group, right? And so you need to have a way to figure out where the places that are missing in the cracks and get them the funding that they might need.

Jeff Wood (7m 11s):
Whether it’s Yonah something from an environmental justice standpoint or whether it’s something Yonah. Recently FEMA just announced that they were gonna do some distributions based on a mapping program that they have, that they’ve created equity atlas of sorts so that they can actually distribute the funding so that these communities that are getting walloped by climate change aren’t gonna get walloped again over and over and over again. So I think those types of things, the private companies on the outside are not really private companies, but Yonah like groups like the National League of Cities, they’re doing a great job and I really appreciate it. But I wish, like you said that internally it was more of a thing to reach out to some of these places with less capacity.

Yonah Freemark (7m 44s):
And I think the bigger problem is that Yonah, you can have National League of Cities do a great job with a cohort of several dozen cities, which is wonderful for those several dozen cities. Right? But we have literally tens of thousands of local governments throughout the United States and you have to wonder who’s falling through the cracks. Yeah. Who really deserves additional help and isn’t getting it right now. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (8m 6s):
And I’ve heard stories of people who say, well Yonah, we just don’t have the staff capacity to go after that funding, which means that they’re not gonna have funding for future things Yonah. They’re not gonna be able to stockpile and build on success over time. And that’s what you’re talking about the spiral.

Yonah Freemark (8m 18s):
Absolutely.

Jeff Wood (8m 19s):
You also had a piece with our friend Linda, we RET talking about the fiscal cliff for transit agencies and you make a a call for flexing federal funding from highways to transit, which we always love that idea. Have you seen any DOTs start to think about that at all?

Yonah Freemark (8m 34s):
So what I have seen, especially over the last few months has been a rising tide of interests from staff members in both the federal government and its state governments getting in touch and asking about this possibility of flexing. I haven’t seen this get to the stage of DOTs actually being willing to make that decision to move money into transit. But I think the fact that folks are really intrigued by the possibility and are talking about it is the first step. So I don’t know, I guess I’m hopeful but I’m not banking on it. Do

Jeff Wood (9m 10s):
You think it’ll be kind of a bifurcated process where it’s political from these state DOTs, the ones that are kind of more in liberal states are the ones that are gonna be more likely to flex funding versus the ones that are more conservative states which have many of their DOT heads fighting back against small changes that DOT wants to make now just because it’s coming from the Biden administration,

Yonah Freemark (9m 28s):
Yonah, historically we have absolutely seen Yonah Democratic states being more willing to flex their highway dollars for Transit than more Republican states. That’s just the reality of transit funding in the United States. For example, there was recently a report from the NRDC essentially cataloging the quality of state Transportation plans throughout the country from a variety of different perspectives focused on the environment. And what I did recently was actually compare the rankings that NRDC put out with the vote share that Biden had received in 2000. And interestingly, there’s a very close correlation between those things.

Yonah Freemark (10m 9s):
And I don’t think the NRDC meant for that to be the case Yonah. It wasn’t like they were going out to Yonah support democratic run states or democratic voting states specifically. But I think the reality is that because of the way people live in the United States, Democrats are more likely to support transit funding and Republicans are more likely to support highway funding.

Jeff Wood (10m 30s):
Yeah. It’s just the way that it’s sorted itself out I guess over time. Absolutely. We just replayed an episode with Clayton all about his book about highways and politics and I think that kind of connects to that as well. You also mentioned other mechanisms creating more efficiency through capital spending like bus lanes, rainy day funds. There’s just, it feels like there’s a lot of money out there. We’re just not using it the most efficient way to create these things that we need and these ways to make Yonah the systems more efficient, which might actually save us money.

Yonah Freemark (10m 57s):
Yonah, it’s really interesting. I’m not sure folks fully realize that there are win-win possibilities with improving the quality of transit service. So we actually have a report coming out very soon, maybe before the podcast airs related to the potential investments in Washington DC in their bus lanes. And what we did was we measured how much service could be provided if bus lanes were implemented and examined access to opportunity, how access to opportunity would change based on those improvements. And what we found was that bus lanes, if implemented and enforced, can substantially improve access for customers, especially for low income customers, while also actually reducing operations costs for the transit agency.

Yonah Freemark (11m 45s):
And so not only can you improve travel times, make buses more quick, Yonah speed people through the city, but you can also actually reduce the cost that the transit system is paying for that. And I think that we should be pursuing this everywhere. I mean, transit agencies should be promoting this as a way for them to save money over the long term. But frankly the rollout of bus lanes in the US has been a lot slower than I think we would’ve hoped 10 years ago.

Jeff Wood (12m 12s):
It’s interesting, we had Tom Brennan on from Nelson Nygard to talk about this when we were at impact, but also at the start of the year there were a flurry of items from Winnipeg and it is not, what I had on my bingo card for the start of January was a bunch of articles from Winnipeg about plans for improving their, their transit service. But Yonah, one of the things that they want do is, is create these bus lane networks inside of the center city so that when buses are getting into the core where it’s more congested, they have more space and then they can actually use that to have better operations throughout the whole system. And so I feel like there needs to be some sort of coordinate coordinated, e coordinated effort to focus on some of these smaller things. And this is actually one of my predictions for later my crazy Prediction for later, we’ll talk about it later.

Jeff Wood (12m 52s):
But I feel like there, there, there needs to be kind of a, a focus on allowing these agencies to think outside the box from their usual, like one project, one win to like multiple little projects to one big win. I feel like there’s something to be said there about thinking about the bigger picture of service levels overall about how they operate through the city. And I think that’s something that we don’t talk about enough and we’ve talked about on the show here. But I feel like outside of here in our small world that we live in, it’s not really discussed as much maybe as it should be. I know that swiftly and those folks talk about it. I know that the folks at Nelson Nygard are talking about it. I know that like the agencies and Yonah people are thinking about it to a certain extent, but it’s not like it’s on a policy level, something that we think about from a city perspective, from a state perspective, even at a federal level.

Yonah Freemark (13m 37s):
Absolutely. Yonah, there’s been a view among transit agencies focused on things like the minimum operable segment that has translated into the way we do almost everything related to transportation. It’s like, well the project we’re gonna do is this small thing that maybe will be part of a bigger plan at some point when we think about it, but for the meantime we’re just doing this small project and we just gotta get that done. And there’s perhaps a lack of holistic thinking in how you bring everything together to have a more effective system overall.

Jeff Wood (14m 9s):
Do you think that’s a problem with how we’re doing planning from a top down perspective? I’m thinking about like how money comes from the feds, it gets to the MPO or the state and then it comes down to the local agency. There are these long range transportation plans, they have to put together five year plans, Yonah 30 year plans, and then all of those have like individual projects that have to be on a list, right? It feels like that’s kind of part of the problem is that we’re not thinking, we’re thinking about projects individually from that perspective of how we get money versus how we can provide efficient transportation.

Yonah Freemark (14m 38s):
It’s an interesting question because the whole MPO structure of these short and long-term plans in theory is supposed to do the opposite, right? I mean in theory it’s supposed to create a vision for the future that you are deciding what projects you want to fund based on that, right? You you have a view that your goals are to do X or Y and so then you’re gonna pick projects that meet that goal. But I think that the reality of the system is that it’s actually more like we’re gonna cobble together a bunch of projects based on what we can fund and then we’re gonna pretend like they’re part of a regional plan.

Jeff Wood (15m 13s):
Yeah. It might be something that Yonah, the reason why maybe it’s not is because it is part of that regional plan, but also because from a street perspective, If, you think about like pothole filling or If, you think about like fixing all of your traffic lights or whatever else. That’s like usually a city project and it’s not consider, it’s just you have a pot of money that’s there for that. But transit agencies don’t have necessarily a pot of money for street fixes, right? It’s not like something that is usually in their wheelhouse. And so maybe that’s a coordination issue. Maybe that’s something along those lines. But maybe it is something that is along those lines of, of what departments of transportation’s at cities already do and they should be coordinating in some way and many of them do, but there’s a lot that don’t.

Yonah Freemark (15m 49s):
Well the fundamental question is when your city is conducting a repaving process, is it taking advantage of that repaving process to reallocate street space? Yeah. In a different way And is it systematic or is it sort of street by street? And I think the reality is that we have decided for some reason that things like installing a bus lane, installing a bike lane require years of community engagement when it’s frankly some paint on the street. Yeah. And Yonah, I think cities should consider these projects in a different way perhaps. And it’d be great to see a city just sort of announce that those types of investments don’t require that similar level of change.

Yonah Freemark (16m 32s):
But it probably requires some sort of legal change that is beyond perhaps my pay grade.

Jeff Wood (16m 37s):
There’s probably some state laws or something that need to change or something. And here in California I’m sure there’s se QA stuff that needs to happen. It’s crazy. It’s we we’re oversubscribed on our opposition opportunities. Also, one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is, may be outside of your wheelhouse a little bit, but the inflation reduction act and the amount of money that’s there for clean energy and those types of things, what strikes me is that Transit agencies could take advantage of this funding in ways that are not necessarily related to operations unless it’s for like funding electric buses and bus upgrades that way. But Yonah, there are physical plants and their their buildings and all the stuff that transit agencies own. It feels like there’s some sort of connection there too where there’s all this money out there. Maybe they could get it for Yonah spending reduction for less just by going and thinking outside the box this way.

Yonah Freemark (17m 23s):
Yonah, you’re actually right on my mind. That’s what I’ve been thinking about today. I, I have been asking folks at the Department of the Treasury to see if they’d be willing to share some data about what governmental agencies have been applying for use of direct pay or elective pay depending on how you call it, right? Which is this mechanism where Yonah governments can get tax credits to pay for projects. And I completely agree with you that transit agencies are sitting on a gold mine in many cases because they have these enormous bus depots. In some cases they have rail depots those could turn into frankly energy production facilities.

Yonah Freemark (18m 6s):
Imagine you convert the roof of a bus depot into a solar facility. I think there’s a huge opportunity there and it could be financed with IRA funds. Are any transit agencies doing that? Jeff, have you heard any, any transit agencies doing that?

Jeff Wood (18m 20s):
Well, so we just talked with Elaine Clegg at Boise and they’re doing a lot of interesting stuff. Obviously they have electric buses, but Yonah, she’s trying to think of ways to Yonah connect those two ends together because there’s a lot of funding out there. And so I think transit agencies are thinking about this. I think one thing they should also think about is like when they’re done with their batteries on the bottoms of their buses and they don’t operate for the bus very well anymore, but they still have a Yonah 60% charge or whatever it is, that’s still a large amount of power they can collect, they should figure out ways to repurpose those, right? Or recycle them or something along those lines. Like you could take all of the batteries out of buses that your electric bus has used up from its useful life in a bus and you could use it for Yonah basically storing energy for something else.

Jeff Wood (19m 2s):
Yes. And so there’s all these like kind of recycling things that I think agencies can think about that some are probably thinking about. But the really interesting connections between all of those DOTs that maybe weren’t connected before.

Yonah Freemark (19m 13s):
That’s a fantastic idea. I mean imagine If you had solar panels on top of your depot and then you had sort of old big batteries that buses use that aren’t necessarily useful for a bus anymore, but you’re storing up that solar produced energy during the night and then you could actually use to power your buses overnight. That’d be amazing.

Jeff Wood (19m 33s):
Yeah, so much stuff you could do. I feel like there’s more, and here’s the one crazy thing that I’ve been thinking about too. Like imagine if we actually funded transit service through like carbon taxes or, or cap and trade or whatever it is. Yonah, the Transit agencies should have a beeline to basically access those funds because they’re actually reducing emissions when they are reducing emissions. I know that there’s some bus lines that are only carrying a couple of passengers, but If you’re getting over seven packs per bus on a corridor per mile or whatever it is. You’re reducing emissions and so you should be able to access funds from those created mechanisms. Now whether we can create those mechanisms or not, some states have them, some states don’t. I feel like there’s all this money out there somewhere that can be used for Absolutely for building up operations in cities.

Jeff Wood (20m 18s):
Okay. Let’s switch gears a little bit. What about housing research? Tell me a little bit about what you’re thinking about on housing.

Yonah Freemark (20m 23s):
Yeah, so we’ve been continuing to expand our sort of portfolio on land use research at Urban Institute. I think it’s of interest to a lot of policy makers throughout the country to understand what land use changes are potentially most valuable, most effective in terms of generating additional housing, reducing housing costs. And one of the things we’ve been working on over the past year has been building on some research that we have been doing in Seattle region, the Puget Sound. We know based on some research we finished in January of 2023, that there is this opportunity to completely rezone the Puget Sound and accommodate hundreds of thousands of new residents and potentially significantly reduce housing costs in that area.

Yonah Freemark (21m 11s):
But we also know from a series of different research studies that we’ve done that even additional new housing brought on through the market through zoning change is unlikely to be adequate to support the needs of people with very low incomes. It’s just reality. Yonah, we can do all we can to encourage private investment in new housing and there will be some filtering of that housing so that wealthier people go into the new housing and frankly lower income people go into the older housing. But we know also that that will still not be enough to ensure that people at the very low range of incomes are able to actually afford housing. So what we’re trying to encourage in the Seattle region and in other parts of the country is thinking systematically of land use change and investment in affordable housing as linked to one another, especially in association with transit.

Yonah Freemark (22m 2s):
I think as folks at Center for Neighbor of Technology have told us for many decades at this point we have to think about housing, transportation costs is linked to one another. So Yonah, even if somebody’s housing costs are somewhat higher, if they’re able to save money on transportation, getting them in a place near transit can really be valuable. If, you combine that thinking with investments in affordable housing in those places near transit, you can really do a lot to improve quality of life and reduce household expenditures for the people who are able to live there. So my hope is that we can continue pushing this message of changes to zoning to allow denser housing by market rate actors while also investment in publicly supported housing.

Yonah Freemark (22m 44s):
And that can be done in a number of ways. I think folks all around the country are, are considering a number of different ideas, whether that’s increased tax credits or social housing in some places.

Jeff Wood (22m 54s):
Did you see that Newsweek item a couple of weeks ago talking about how smaller cities are actually more expensive than maybe larger cities? ’cause people have opportunities to figure out how to reduce their costs, whether that’s living with roommates in bigger cities or finding like farmer’s markets or whatever it is. But their housing plus transportation costs are inching lower in a place like New York City versus other Yonah car oriented cities around the country where transportation costs are expanding. I found that really interesting that that showed up in a national publication from a journalist that I I’d never heard of. And so they’re talking about these things and I talked about this with Beth Osborne recently too. But I think it’s, it’s really interesting to see these ideas that you’re talking about pop up Yonah after CNT have done this so many years ago, but they are kind of trickling into the consciousness of the, of the discussion.

Yonah Freemark (23m 36s):
The Normies are starting to understand the connection green housing and transportation.

Jeff Wood (23m 42s):
Oh Normies. Well let’s chat about something that the non normies really care about, which is your expansion post that happens every year. And all the folks that are listening to the show are really excited about it because I got so many emails and messages asking me, when is Yonah coming on to talk about this? And I always have fun with that because I think it’s so exciting that so many people are excited about what we’re excited about. But you’re entering your 16th year of putting together project lists. I’m wondering also, let’s take a little like kind of memory lane pushback and I’m wondering what’s changed since 2009?

Yonah Freemark (24m 15s):
Well since 2009 Yonah, I think the first thing that has changed is the availability of information that we can collect from around the world to understand what’s happening in terms of investment in transportation for example, has just radically changed. I mean it just was not possible in 2009 to have any idea of what was happening in countries like China or India or Southeast Asia countries in Southeast Asia. There are a number of reasons for that. One is literally there were no websites, the news organizations there were not online, but also translation was terrible during that period.

Yonah Freemark (24m 59s):
And so from an American’s perspective who wants to understand something about Asia for example, the idea of doing so in 2009 was like entering and Yonah into a a rabbit’s warren of reading. Sort of remember there used to be all those forums that you would read and try to get a track of, get track of what was going on. So that’s been really wonderful from my perspective. Yonah, I I’m sure there are many Wikipedia addicts out there who can’t help themselves just learning more and more. And I think it’s just wonderful to see how it’s one of the great things I think in our lifetime, right? Just to see how much more easy it is to acquire information. So that’s

Jeff Wood (25m 35s):
Now for you though, is that a blessing or a curse? So for me having to collect all this information, ’cause I’ve seen how you’ve gone from US projects to now like the list. I mean I can’t lie, I was looking down the list and I kind of glossed over. I was like, this is, this is a lot of information. Oh yeah, I can’t take this in in the next week or so to figure out what we need to talk about. But it’s a lot and you’re collecting all this and I’m just amazed

Yonah Freemark (25m 59s):
I, a few things I Yonah certainly I probably waste too much time on a project that is not funded Yonah, I, I simply Yonah use it as a bit of a hobby. I would say that Yonah, I started out this project in the United States exclusively and have systematically tried to expand it over time until tried to cover systems all around the world, which has been wonderful. I, I do think that one thing that has been great about Yonah, the Transport Politic in general and transit Explorer as a website, part of that is that folks contribute to it by just emailing me or filling out the form online and telling me what’s wrong or telling me about changes.

Yonah Freemark (26m 42s):
For the most part, I have have no idea who these people are, but the fact that people are excited enough to want to keep track of change, to want to submit new information in some cases to provide geographic information to add to the website, I think it really speaks to the fact that people are aware of public transportation investment as a worldwide phenomenon and something that’s worth considering from a worldwide perspective. And I think one thing that’s particularly good about it from the US perspective is that it’s, it enables us to put the experience that you and I have frankly on a day-to-day basis into perspective is the quality and the condition of the transit system that we see on a day-to-day basis acceptable.

Yonah Freemark (27m 28s):
And I think by documenting what’s occurring everywhere else, you can at least put the US within a global framework. And I think people appreciate that. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (27m 38s):
And Yonah, what I get joy out of seeing when you post something, when you post the article for the 2024 projects list and you get all these submissions underneath, it feels like going back to like original Twitter, right? Where basically people aren’t adversarial. They’re like, oh hey there’s this project here and there’s this project here and I really like, it gave me joy because it reminded me of the fun times that we had trying to pull all these things together in Web 1.0 or whatever it was when we were blogging about this stuff and people Yonah coming onto your comment section, not to like Yonah give you a hard time, but being like, oh yeah, I, I agree with that, but also there’s this other stuff going on and sharing information and kind of making it a community. So I really appreciate that. That makes me happy.

Jeff Wood (28m 19s):
What doesn’t make me happy though is that we can see what’s going on in other countries and we can get really depressed by it, right? So like looking at the China list, I’m like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. Like so much is happening. They’re doing so many expansion projects of subways and we are just getting left behind in terms of Yonah, the comparison of we can maybe build a couple miles of the second avenue subway and they can build 200 miles of subway network in the country. And I think that that has brought kind of some clarity about how far behind we are not just to China but France and places around the globe that are just going faster and doing more.

Yonah Freemark (28m 53s):
Yeah, it’s actually really interesting. Yonah, the world is filled with many different people and many different political systems, some of which are not at all acceptable from a civil rights perspective. Yonah, I mean it’s difficult to, I, I think that when we are conducting an international comparison of things like public investment and you see all the investment in places like China, Turkey, Iran, to name a, a few countries that have problematic records when it comes to democracy and rights. I think it should raise alarm bells to make too close of a comparison with the United States. But at the same time we can also look at other countries where the Democratic record is a lot stronger right now.

Yonah Freemark (29m 39s):
Yonah, I mean Chile, much of Europe, they have much stronger democracies equivalent to those in the United States where there also is more transit investment happening. So it’s interesting because Yonah, from my perspective, it is true that China and India increasingly are investing massively in metro systems and those are really remarkable to watch. But from my perspective, it’s most interesting to compare the United States with those other democratic countries because ultimately Yonah, hopefully we can retain our system of rights and and democracy.

Jeff Wood (30m 14s):
Crossing my fingers 2024 election. Well there were some big openings this last year for projects here in the United States that we, we can celebrate the regional connector East side access Honolulu finally opened. We’ve been talking about that for years. That seemed to be a running joke on the show. Yes. That we had. So they opened that one too. How are you feeling about this last year’s openings?

Yonah Freemark (30m 36s):
I think I was most excited about the new projects in Honolulu for the reason that you described, which is that literally we’ve been waiting for this for 10 years. So Yonah finally something is happening there and it’s also nice to see the implementation of world class, automated metro being implemented in the United States. Yonah, this is the type of investment that we should be seeing in a lot more cities and that you do see in other parts of the world, Yonah, even in North America, in in Montreal and Vancouver at this point. So I’m hopeful that folks get out to see Honolulu’s project and that that project continues to be implemented successfully in the coming years.

Jeff Wood (31m 18s):
Yeah, I hope it gets expanded to where it was originally meant to go because that would be really beneficial for them to have access to all the destinations that will drive ridership. Right? And so building half a line isn’t really the end game there. It should be building a whole line, but it’s expensive for them. They keep on having to add money and it’s complicated.

Yonah Freemark (31m 35s):
Yeah, I mean what’s interesting about Honolulu is that it’s not a very big city compared to other US cities investing in major transit expansions. It’s one of the smallest, perhaps smaller than anything except for Salt Lake City. And that puts a lot of strain I think, on the local finances of the project to build this elevated line. But I still think that it’s one of the best corridors in the country when it comes to actually moving people around. It takes advantage of the fact that most population is really densely settled on this small area of land between the beach and the mountains. So Yonah, there’s a huge opportunity there if they can continue getting it right.

Jeff Wood (32m 13s):
Yeah, it has like Yonah, we used to talk about weighted densities a lot, but it has like one of the highest weighted densities of all United States cities. And so it’s not like they’re lacking the geography for it. It’s definitely a place where they should be putting it. So I hope to see it succeed then I’d like to see them be copied other places.

Yonah Freemark (32m 29s):
Absolutely.

Jeff Wood (32m 30s):
Openings this year are quite stark though, right? So I think I’m, I’m a little bit more excited about transit Christmas coming out, Yonah the new starts slash cig or whatever we’re gonna call it these days list, whenever that comes out in the next few months. Hopefully. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on that list and if it’s expanded or not. But this year it looks a little bit like there’s a dearth of of things opening.

Yonah Freemark (32m 50s):
Yeah. It’s not clear to me why there was a slowdown in projects other than perhaps the fact that the cost of projects has continued to accelerate as we know. And every time projects become more expensive, you have less resources to build more projects. Yonah, just honestly and Yonah, it’s been really great to see in Seattle for example, the expansion of the transit lines, which I think is actually the biggest openings in the United States planned for 2024. But you’re right that in most other parts of the country that Yonah 10 years ago we’re opening new light rail lines in places like Portland.

Yonah Freemark (33m 31s):
Salt Lake again seemed to sort of fallen off the map. These cities are no longer actively pursuing major light rail expansions. Yonah, maybe Portland will get a line over into Vancouver, Washington with the new bridge, but the pace seems to have slowed down a little bit.

Jeff Wood (33m 50s):
Yeah, salt Lake, I mean there the point redevelopment of that prison over by, I think it was Draper down on the south side of the city, they’re looking at $950 million investment there. There’s some other stuff that’s probably out there. It’s just like, it’s not as out front as it used to be. I mean I remember when Salt Lake, it was very inventive because they were like, we’ll build five lines and we’ll get 20% of that from the feds and we’ll package ’em as a deal and then we’ll build them and then we’ll be able to do more. And now I haven’t seen really that kind of stuff, although we’ll talk about something in a second. But I feel like there’s not like that bundling thing that was going on back in the day where you had a bunch of projects going on in these smaller places and the expansion that we saw. And I think partly to your point about getting more expensive, I mean we’re seeing what’s going on with the southwest corridor in Minneapolis.

Jeff Wood (34m 33s):
There’s fights over that. There’s even fights. I think that’s part of the fight even of over Yonah reorganizing the Met Council was some of this stuff that’s going on because of how much projects cost is like starting to make people rethink governance, which is pretty crazy to me. Thinking about that. I mean, just five years ago I don’t think that discussion maybe it would’ve happened. So that’s interesting too. Houston’s University Avenue BRT, second Avenue Subway extension. I’m thinking about these projects in the US context that are exciting to me anyways. But when you looked at all those lists of projects from other countries, I’m curious if there were any that like stood out to you or that were like, oh, you saw like maybe a map or something like, oh, that looks kind of cool. Was there anything that like stuck out to you in that search?

Yonah Freemark (35m 11s):
Well, I’ll name one in a sort of problematic country from political perspective and then I’ll name one in a less problematic country. Okay. So one that stands out to me is as really sort of oddball wild, are the two monorail extensions that are being built in Cairo.

Jeff Wood (35m 27s):
Okay.

Yonah Freemark (35m 27s):
So Cairo has a metro, okay. And it’s extremely well used. It is an extremely dense and very large city. I’m not sure folks realize how big Cairo is. And the government has decided to build a new capital, which is to the east of Cairo, but it’s still sort of within the metropolitan area. And so they’re building a monorail line that’s going out from Cairo essentially to that new administrative capital. And when you look at the satellite views of this area, I mean it’s just wild. These gigantic new parts of the city that are being built at pretty high densities with these enormous boulevards and monorail running through it.

Yonah Freemark (36m 10s):
It’s just kind of wild to see and almost incomprehensible from an American perspective. I mean, can you imagine an enormous new capital city being built in the US today? Absolutely not. No. It’s just not. It’s not within the realm of, and perhaps it shouldn’t be. I mean it, it’s kind of crazy. So that’s, that’s one crazy project. Okay. And then a project in Sydney. Yonah Sydney has a series of new automated metro lines that are underway that are sort of supplementing its regional rail system. Australia has this really interesting regional rail network that exists in a number of cities in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth.

Yonah Freemark (36m 50s):
That has been what they’ve relied on on since British colonialism Yonah in the 18 hundreds I guess. But they are supplementing these with automated metro lines that are serving a number of the communities around Sydney Center and some of that is gonna open this coming year. So I’m excited to see how that’s implemented.

Jeff Wood (37m 9s):
I also wanna ask you about this thing, this emerging project agreement that is something that the Build America Bureau has put together, I guess, for getting funding for multiple different projects in multiple different topic areas, if I can call them that like energy and transportation and all those policies. We’re coming up with all these different ways to use our funding. We’re coming up with better ways to coordinate. I’m wondering if you’d seen this before and also if there’s other things on your mind that you thought Yonah from a federal funding perspective are interesting.

Yonah Freemark (37m 38s):
So my sense from talking with folks at the local level is that they almost feel barraged with the sheer number of different federal programs that they’re having to deal with. It’s not so obvious that Yonah, you have a project you want to do and you’re supposed to apply for some specific grant. So the idea of the federal government being able to come to cities and say, Hey, we recognize that you have a number of different ideas for how you want to change your community and you should apply, we’re gonna help you apply for a number of different grants simultaneously. It seems like a wonderful one. I mean that that’s in theory going to solve some bureaucratic nightmares that cities currently have to go through.

Yonah Freemark (38m 18s):
And Yonah, if it were extended to cities with lower levels of capacity, I think it could be particularly interesting because it would help communities that just don’t know how to apply successfully to do so. I’m particularly interested in whether we could extend this line of thinking beyond just transportation, but into housing. And the federal government has recently announced that its changes, its rules related to these large transportation loan programs that are called TIA and R. And in theory, what’s going to be made possible is that you’ll be able to get a loan for a affordable housing project located near transit at a significantly reduced cost compared to current loan costs.

Yonah Freemark (39m 9s):
And I think that could be wonderful if combined with, for example, a federal investment in a new Transit project, what if the federal government were to say, we will provide you not only funding for that Transit line, but we’ll provide you low cost loans to ensure that there’s affordable housing and new housing in general located near the stations on that new line. I think that could be the ideal combination.

Jeff Wood (39m 32s):
And what about the scoring system for some of these larger projects too? I mean, I feel like I saw something that said they wanted to change the scoring systems that said you had to have better zoning around your transit lines in order to get some of this funding because it’s getting so competitive, they’re gonna have to start Yonah figuring out ways to parse it out even more.

Yonah Freemark (39m 49s):
I certainly think there has been discussion of that. I’m not sure it will be realized, but one thing I think is worth emphasizing here is that Yonah, in order to get funding for a transit project right now, you as a transit agency have to demonstrate your financial stability, right? You essentially have to be able to say, I will be able to maintain this transit project over the 30 years that are coming after the transit project is built. I have the financial resources to be able to do so as a transit agency. Now, Yonah, the reality is that Transit agencies often run into financial issues as we’re seeing with the fiscal cliff, but in general, that serves as a sort of minimum requirement for any project that gets funding from the federal government.

Yonah Freemark (40m 35s):
The question that I have is why doesn’t the federal government have a similar minimum requirement for land use policy or housing production near transit? In my view, this shouldn’t be a scoring matter. This should be a minimum that’s required for any new project.

Jeff Wood (40m 49s):
Yeah, that minimum thing makes me think of, and going back to the Cairo thing here in California, they’re trying to build a city. The billionaires are trying to build a city between Sacramento and the Bay Area. And they released like this manifesto thing last week where they said, oh, we want minimums of basically 20 units an acre on the land that we’re building on. And Yonah from a TOD perspective, when we talked about Yonah, the most efficient densities for transit, I think the 15 to 20 was kind of like the minimum. I mean, seven was Push Grove and Zoo band’s number for providing community rail service or whatever. But that’s such a small number, it doesn’t really move the needle, but I feel like this 15 to 20 is even too low. And so thinking about putting minimums on things like that, how much affordable housing you have, how much zoning capacity you have, et cetera, would be a really great way to go forward.

Jeff Wood (41m 34s):
I like it. I like it. That’s my basic way of saying.

Yonah Freemark (41m 36s):
Yeah, no, I mean I, I agree with you. And actually I agree with you that that number is too low. I mean, there’s an article, I just read a paper by Robert Ro and and Eric Garra from 2011, where they try to quantify what the minimum densities are needed to support quality transit. And what they said was you needed at least 30 per acre and preferably 45 to support a good transit system. Yep. So Yonah, if we’re going at 20, I think it’s better than most suburban sprawl undoubtedly. But it’s not high enough for good transit. It’s

Jeff Wood (42m 7s):
Still kind of sprawly to me. It’s a lot, but it’s probably not enough, especially If, you wanna make big investments. Thanks for joining us. Stay tuned for part two with Yonah and my scoring of last year’s predictions and next year’s big ideas. And thanks for joining us. The Talking Headways podcast is a project of the Red Wire and published first at Streets Streetsblog usa. Thanks to our generous Patreon supporters for supporting this week’s podcast. And you can find out more at Patreon dot com slash The Overhead Wire. And sign up for our 17-year-old newsletter by visiting The Overhead Wire dot com to get the show each week, follow along at your podcaster of choice, including Spotify, SoundCloud, iHeartRadio, YouTube, tune in Apple podcast, and many, many more. And If, you can’t find it there.

Jeff Wood (42m 48s):
You can always find its original home at usa dot Streets bog.org. We’ll see you next time at Talking Headways.