(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 523: Yonah Freemark Part 1
March 5, 2025
This week we’re joined once again by Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute to discuss his annual transit project updates at Transit Explorer. In Part 1, we talk about housing strategies for properties near transit, exciting transit openings in 2025, and which cities could use a subway project. We also talk about government deference to local officials and how we can better use public assets to create more housing.
To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA.
It’s also a part of our larger archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
[00:01:39] Jeff Wood: Yonah Freemark, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast. Thank you again for having me. Yeah. Thanks for being here. 12 times is a charm. I just did the calculation. It’s two and a half percent of all my podcasts feature Yonah Freemark. [00:01:57] Oh that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good percentage. So we appreciate you coming back every year. It’s great to see you. I do have to ask you, how are you doing in this moment? [00:02:06] Yonah Freemark: I’m trying to figure out how we can, continue to make the argument for better cities and better transit. To be honest, I think the change in administration has certainly put a darkness over this space that I think we operate in, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there to still work for change that can be really positive. [00:02:27] And some of that work is probably going to have to shift to the state and local level, but I think that’s okay. We can do that work. [00:02:32] Jeff Wood: Yeah, usually when administration change, you expect some kind of upheaval because obviously the administration’s have totally different ideas about what matters in terms of like transportation funding and HUD stuff and whatever else. [00:02:43] But I don’t think anybody expected this to be this crazy. Some people saw it coming with all that 2025 stuff, but I don’t know if we thought it would be like this. So it’s. Frustrating. And I’m sure we’ll reference it several times during this episode. I do want to congratulate you though. [00:02:59] You mentioned on your blue sky that you said you had a thousand citations on Google scholar. Now. [00:03:04] Yonah Freemark: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for noticing. It’s funny because most of my work that I think is visible to the public is very much more around the policy audience, trying to identify best practices, trying to look. [00:03:15] To, what communities are doing well. And that kind of thing is not really a scholarly thing. It’s not the kind of thing that would get referenced, but I do have this secret life of having been a PhD student and I do write research articles sometimes for journals and it’s exciting to have that work be talked about as well. [00:03:33] This might be a hard question. Do you have a favorite? Yeah, actually, my dissertation, which I completed in 2020, now seems so far back. We’ve gone through a whole presidential administration and a giant health crisis since I completed that project. But in that work, I was really interested in understanding the governance of Transit projects and land use around them in France in the United States. [00:03:59] So I did a comparative research examination and I actually published this last year, a paper that I published in a journal called Urban Affairs Review. And it’s a really interesting case study into the reality that local governments play this really important role, even if state and metropolitan governments are the ones that officially make decisions about transit projects. [00:04:22] Jeff Wood: I’m interested in your thoughts on the French side of things too. We’ve had Eric Geidlin on, who was a German Marshall Fund fellow, and he, looked at German and French high speed rail lines and the land use stuff that goes around that. And some of the stuff that he shared with us is really interesting, specifically around how the French state operates and whatnot. [00:04:38] So I’m curious like about your kind of back and forth on the two, what we might learn maybe from that side of the ocean. [00:04:43] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. So one thing that I found fascinating in my research. So basically to do this work, I interviewed hundreds of locally elected officials, like city councilors, mayors, regional actors, even some state legislators in both countries. [00:04:57] And one thing that was fascinating is. The parallels between the U. S. and France. So they have very different legal regimes. The U. S. and France don’t share a history of their constitutions. They act differently. Nevertheless, in both countries, there is this very strong attachment to the idea that local governments are best representative of the viewpoints of people, I think, on the ground. [00:05:22] What you’ll find is that people working in France and regional governments or in the US and state governments often defer to elected officials who represent municipalities for decisions that are important to their constituents. I interviewed some folks in the state of California legislature, for example, who essentially told me that even though they had the right to supervise. [00:05:44] For example, policymaking related to the Gold Line extension out into the eastern side of Los Angeles County. They didn’t want to engage in that oversight. They wanted the local governments there to make the decisions. And in France, I heard very similar things. I spoke to the vice president of the region of Ile de France, which is the Paris region. [00:06:06] And what he essentially told me at the time was, if local governments really want something out of a project, it’s not my role, even though I have all the cash, it’s not my role to tell them to do or not do something. It’s up to them to tell me what they want. And I thought that was a really interesting parallel between the two countries. [00:06:24] What does [00:06:24] Jeff Wood: that mean for transportation projects? Does it mean that local agencies try to ask for too much when it comes to some of these projects? And maybe some of that deference causes some consternation. [00:06:33] Yonah Freemark: I think that’s absolutely right. I think the deference given to local officials makes sense from a political and democratic perspective, but it has the consequence of systematically resulting in projects that might be less. [00:06:46] Efficient and more expensive than if the projects had been planned by a central authority without the input of those local officials, I document in my paper essentially how, in Minneapolis, the root of a line was changed to support a local official who made her case to others in the region, even though that change cost. [00:07:07] The Metropolitan council, which is the financer of the project and Hennepin County, significantly more money. And we saw something very similar in the Paris region, where essentially a group of local governments said, we want this Metro line to interconnect, which essentially meant the trains could run around the region. [00:07:25] There wasn’t necessarily much evidence that would provide a significant benefit to riders, but the people in the communities really fought for it. And, maybe they were right to fight for it, but the result was the region had to spend hundreds of more millions of euros to pay for the project. [00:07:42] I think this might be one contributor to higher costs of construction over time is just the engagement of different local officials. But I think one thing that’s worth emphasizing here is that, this is not a problem that can be solved by institutional change. In many of the examples I document. [00:07:58] All of the official power is in those higher level governments to make the decisions. But what’s happening here is that the local governments are using essentially what I’m calling de facto power to get what they want out of these projects. [00:08:11] Jeff Wood: Oh my gosh. I’m sure we could talk for hours about that. We’ve got so much more to cover, but I just find that fascinating because we’ve been talking for so many years between the two of us about, the cost of projects and how long projects are taking and what we need to do to. [00:08:24] Build more projects here in the United States. And so it feels like that’s, part of that puzzle that we’ve been talking about for so long. [00:08:30] Yonah Freemark: Yep. [00:08:31] Jeff Wood: You’ve also been working on so many other things. I see your name in papers and stuff all the time. You’re releasing a report a week. It seems I wonder what some of the general themes are that you’re feeling through your research and what’s going on right now in housing and transportation, because it seems like you’ve got your finger on the pulse of a lot of stuff. [00:08:46] Yonah Freemark: I think so. I work at this organization called Urban Institute. We do work across a variety of different policy areas to understand essentially whether public policies are supporting better outcomes for people on the ground. That’s the goal of our work. And the change in the administration has It’s rev me up to some degree in wanting to get more work out there to do more analysis in understanding what’s working and what isn’t. [00:09:11] Because I think what I can do as an individual is provide data to help inform the conversation. That’s the best I can do. And I think over the last few months, it is true. I’ve tried to ramp up the work I’ve been doing. I’ve been particularly focused in number one, trying to respond to federal cuts. [00:09:28] Or federal changes in policy, trying to understand, how are those policies going to affect people on the ground? One thing that I did with my colleague, Lindy way, Renner is look at the department of transportation’s proposal to give money out based on marriage and birth rates. We showed very clearly that would be a regressive policy that would benefit essentially. [00:09:47] Wealthy communities throughout the country. That would be the ultimate outcome of that policy. But I think it’s important to be able to say that so that we at least know what we’re getting into when we start changing the rules about how we’re spending. So that’s one thing I’m working on. And then the other thing I’m working on is really trying to continue to build up the evidence base for how to get higher levels of density in areas near transit. [00:10:09] I think there’s a lot of opportunity for transit systems, for local governments and for States to work together to get transit oriented development. And that is true. Whether or not the federal government is an ally in that process, states and local governments can make this stuff happen. So the question is, how do we get the zoning right? [00:10:26] How do we get the financing right? And I think that’s been an area of a lot of interest from a urban institute perspective. That’s really interesting. [00:10:33] Jeff Wood: When I was at Reconnecting America, we took a look at where a lot of the density was. We made the TOD database and we had all those station areas that we’d mapped onto existing census data and things like that. [00:10:44] And it was interesting to see where a lot of the development was happening. And also some of the ways that the way we were building maybe one light at a time in a place like Charlotte or Minneapolis was actually hindering the progress of cities because they had a lot of pressure on them to do a lot more than maybe they were supposed to. [00:10:59] Recently, we had a discussion here in San Francisco about maybe muni should not be building just affordable housing on its properties, but actually building housing so that it can get revenue to come back to the system. And so that’s a very back and forth conversation between people who are looking for affordable housing, social housing versus folks who are rallying behind the transit agencies who are seeing these drastic cuts and might have this fiscal cliff coming up and other revenue sources that might. [00:11:22] Become available. And so I’m interested in your thoughts about what building more density and what more housing might mean for these fights that happen between different factions and cities. [00:11:31] Yonah Freemark: It’s hard to generalize because every city is obviously encountering its own specific political and community dynamics. [00:11:38] Certainly that said, I think one way of thinking about transit oriented development and just urban development in general is that ironically, the biggest fights about urban development are often over the smallest. Changes. I think we’ve seen just dramatic screaming matches on the grounds of city council about, allowing accessory dwelling units, reducing parking minimums, et cetera, that are important and will increase the number of housing units in communities. [00:12:06] But ultimately, if you want to build a lot more housing, I think there are opportunities to focus on huge sites. And most cities have huge sites that they have available. And the question then is, can cities leverage those big sites to get as many housing units as they can in areas near transit? And I live in Washington, D. [00:12:25] C. The area that is of most interest right now is where the RFK stadium is right now. The mayor is talking about building a new football stadium, which, we can discuss about whether or not that’s a good idea. But the area around there is Essentially empty right now, and there’s an opportunity to build literally thousands of housing units and the fact of the matter is that building all those thousands of housing units will likely attract less opposition than doing something like changing the specific rules of a historic district in a neighborhood. [00:13:00] And the reason for that is that people who are. Directly affected by the historic district are going to get out and say something for the city council, but a big vacant site doesn’t have very many opponents. And so what I think we need to do more of is identify where those big vacant or really underused sites are and just maximize the development that happens in those places. [00:13:22] Jeff Wood: That’s so interesting. I keep on coming back to this and my listeners are probably sick of it by now, but I keep on coming back to this paper that was written by Anthony Orlando and Chris Redford. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with this one, but basically they’re talking about the development regimes in California and Texas and the differences between the two. [00:13:35] And basically they said, California is just ahead of Texas. Texas will catch up and be out of land in a little bit when it comes to these large tracts of land where they can redevelop sprawl. And I have to think about the ways that we are coming back to trying to build in cities because we’ve run out of these large tracts of land and it’s harder because the regulatory regimes are harder than building on sprawl. [00:13:55] And so what you’re talking about specifically finding these large parcels of land might be one of those remedies where you find these large pieces of land in the city. That’s the way you can counteract a lot of these big sprawl developments that are building. 000 housing units that are leading to Texas being better off in terms of housing prices because they can just generate more units. [00:14:14] It seems like that might be a way forward. If we’re going to go, we might as well just find these sites in cities and try to maximize them. [00:14:20] Yonah Freemark: I think that’s right. And I think cities that want to. Encourage more housing construction, have the ability to be creative. So just to give an example, Washington DC is interesting because unlike almost every other us city, except for maybe New York, it is very little surface parking or anything like that in part, probably because of the height limit. [00:14:40] And so there aren’t that many obvious, like big parcels that you can just build big projects on that said, what Washington DC does have. is many relatively low density, publicly owned buildings that are in disrepair. So fire stations, schools, senior centers, libraries, et cetera. We have seen in the past few decades, DC built a number of beautiful libraries. [00:15:04] What DC should be doing is building towers with a library at the base. And we haven’t seen enough cities make that mentality, the standard operating. Procedure for how they think about their public assets. I think we’re starting to see some changes in places like Atlanta, where they’re saying like, Hey, we can redevelop this fire station into a mixed use project, especially with some social housing elements. [00:15:28] And that’s going to be a way forward. But I want to see every city saying for every public parcel we have out there. Let’s not sell it, but let’s leverage the land to create lots of new housing units and get a new version of whatever our public asset is. I think that’s a huge opportunity. We should be talking more about. [00:15:45] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. The dagged editor idea of public wealth. So trying to figure out what your assets are. Managing a list of them and then trying to develop on them, or at least make them, money making for the city you mentioned Atlanta, Atlanta has done this. They’ve got 10, 000 housing units in the pipeline because they figure out a way to, catalog all those properties and then start to think about what could be the best places for housing units and created a public private partnership. [00:16:08] in some ways to do that. And that’s probably the way forward. The only frustrating thing here in places like San Francisco is that now, like I mentioned, the muni yards and stuff like that, we’re having this discussion about whether it should be social housing, affordable housing only, or whether we should put some for profit stuff and then also the height limits and things like that. [00:16:25] So it would be great if it was social housing, but what if it’s like the first two floors are social housing and then the rest of it is. This, really tall tower that has a lot of housing units in it. And then the frustration comes from the neighborhoods around that about shadows and things like that. [00:16:35] But we have to build housing at some point. We can’t just sit here on our laurels and watch the housing prices go up forever and ever, while we lose really important electoral college points. So we have to do something. And I think this might be the way forward. [00:16:48] Yonah Freemark: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I think there are a lot of folks out there who are. [00:16:52] Incorrect. And assuming that just because it’s publicly owned land, you can create affordable housing. Unfortunately, it’s expensive housing costs so much. It’s like 800, 000 a unit. Yeah, it’s crazy. We would need a radical change in our construction technology and our labor force for housing costs to go down enough to just get. [00:17:12] An affordable housing unit without any subsidies. We need to be honest. [00:17:16] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And right now, a lot of the places that are seeing this kind of lowering in housing prices because of the construction or places that have that empty land that are available to do that. Austin, we see that what’s happening there and it’s impressive, but it’s also, I know what the layout of the land is and there’s a lot of land that they could build. [00:17:30] Multifamily housing units on, which is great. And I’m glad that they’re doing that. But at the same time, we also want to have it near transit. So we’re reducing the impacts on all these other things, the secondary things that folks think about when they try to develop land. So there’s a whole can of worms in there, but I think what we’re talking about specifically is one of the ways forward. [00:17:46] Okay let’s get to the transit Explorer part of this, because I’m always excited to see what you have in stock. It gets better and better every year. You add more and more stuff every year. You and Steve Vance do a wonderful job of pulling things together. I want to know specifically, what are your favorite things that are happening in the coming year in 2025? [00:18:03] Yonah Freemark: Can I first bring up two projects that have been able to leverage our data for their own purposes? We update our transit Explorer database with transit lines and projects all around the world. It is not entirely complete, but it is, it has as much as we can. It’s pretty good. Thousands [00:18:23] Jeff Wood: of projects. [00:18:23] Do you think they are the best in the world that has all this? Yeah. [00:18:26] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. I don’t think anybody has. the quality and extent of data as we have, which is part of the reason why other groups have been able to use the data to really augment their work. So just to give you two examples of that, ITDP, which is a great organization that does a lot of research on transportation and development policy, most of which is actually outside of the United States, most in South America and other places. [00:18:49] Yeah, they have this wonderful thing called the Atlas of Sustainable City Transportation, and they’ve been able to use our data basically loaded into their tool as one of their key indicators. So for every metro region that they look at, they are examining the share of people who are located near the high capacity transit, and they are able to update it. [00:19:09] And we actually work with them to add a number of bus rapid transit lines. In a lot of cities around the world that I wasn’t able to do myself. So that was really exciting. And then just this last month, the national zoning Atlas, which is a great project that is trying to document zoning policies all around the country, incorporated our data into their online map. [00:19:30] And so you can now check out where transit stations are all around the country and compare the zoning to those transit stations. So I’m really excited about finding new ways. To use this data to help inform our policy conversations in transportation and also related topics. [00:19:45] Jeff Wood: Yeah, we just had Sarah Bronin on the show a couple of months ago, and that was very exciting to talk with her about her book, but also some of the stuff that’s coming up, the pipe and the zoning Atlas, it’s interesting because when I was at RA, we were paid twice to create a database of stations. [00:19:58] And one of the reasons one of the organizations came to us was because they wanted to know maybe where they could get work in the future. It was a. construction company. And so I think there’s a lot of ways that you could probably organize that. So that folks are be interested in helping you guys complete it. [00:20:11] Cause I know it’s something that you love to do and it’s fun, but it also costs money to do. But also it could be something that helps a lot of people figure out where they want to put transit lines or build something that might be coming up the pipe, apply for some of the contracts or something along those lines. [00:20:23] So that was something that came up when we were working on something similar. Obviously nothing as far as you all are doing, but it was interesting to see how people were interested in using that data. Absolutely. [00:20:32] Yonah Freemark: Okay. So projects that I’m really excited about in 2025 in Los Angeles, I’m super excited about the opening of their subway extension. [00:20:45] So they’re going to extend the purple line down. Wilshire, those who have visited Los Angeles, no Wilshire is like this quarter of high density surrounded by pretty low density, but it’s absolutely an area that deserves better. Transit access. And so they’re going to open the first phase of this purple line extension. [00:21:02] And I’m super excited about that because I love visiting LA and that’s an area that is hard to get to because you’re stuck in really slow buses, frankly, if you want to get out to the West side. [00:21:12] Jeff Wood: Yeah, sometimes the bus lanes are broken up a little bit because of opposition, right? I think West Hollywood or somebody didn’t want the bus lanes, and so you can go to a place with bus lanes and maybe some places that don’t, and so it’s a little bit disconnected. [00:21:23] You know what that, that line brings? It brings good feelings. And the reason why I say that is because when we started blogging so many years ago, one of the things that I was really excited about was the subway to the sea. And this is what that is. This is the subway to the sea. And I put this little badge on my website on the overhead wire blogspot. [00:21:37] com. It’s still there. That it was like a little subway underneath and it had palm trees on top and stuff. And I just remember that. And it was like advocating for that. And now it’s something that’s actually real. And when you do sometimes these crayon maps or these like little things that are really cool, eventually, maybe they might actually come true. [00:21:54] Yonah Freemark: It’s true. I will say that it is daunting the length of time it takes to get these projects. Cause the purple line extension was funded by, measure R which passed in 2008. Yeah. And man, that was, almost 20 years ago and this project is not going to be done completely until 2027. [00:22:12] So it’s going to literally have taken 19 years from funding to completion, which, oh man, I do wonder, can we do better than that? I don’t know. [00:22:21] Jeff Wood: I think we can, I think we can. I think it’s possible. We just need to be a little bit more focused and we have to want it, right? You have to want to do it. [00:22:28] I feel like we haven’t really wanted to do it. The state DOTs don’t want to do it. The federal government doesn’t seem to want to do it, but we have to find somebody that wants to do it and LA, they’re doing it, but they’re doing it slowly, but [00:22:39] Yonah Freemark: I, I think back at like the original construction, the New York subway, I think it went from approval to completion in just a few years, five years or something like that for the first phase. And I do wonder, is it that we have just much higher standards for safety and planning processes? Is that what it is? Is that what, is that why it takes so long? What is happening [00:23:03] Jeff Wood: here? No, because we talked about this last year. [00:23:05] I was listening to last year’s episode. I know we talked about this a little bit, but like China, look at how much. Look at how many kilometers, miles of subway they’ve built. Actually, after we talked last year, I went to China with my wife to visit her parents with my daughter. And we went to Zhuhai, which is just north of Macau. [00:23:21] And I spent the weekend in Shenzhen, and I spent a weekend in Hong Kong. And it’s insane how much they’ve been able to build in Both places in Macau, they’ve got a little light rail line that we rode, which is nice, but that’s not a big deal compared to the other two. But Shenzhen, they’ve just been building lines and lines, and I’m looking at your transit explorer to see when they’re building more lines and there’s radio lines and they cross over here and they cross over there. [00:23:43] And when I was there, I could see a hole in the ground for where they were extending a line, right? There was just a massive amounts of construction and they have highways too. It’s not it’s not like they don’t, but it was just amazing how much stuff they were getting done. And I know the regime is a little bit different in terms of planning and property rights and those types of things, but it’s possible. [00:24:00] That shows me that it’s possible and what’s going on around the world. And even the Crossrail, even Crossrail with the success that they’ve had. I know it took a long time too, if a more similar regime, they still got something done. They still built this huge infrastructure project that is benefiting people in London right now and Paris and the Grand Paris express and all that stuff. [00:24:18] It’s possible. We just are not, we’re not dreaming big enough or we’re not doing something big enough. We’re not thinking about it as a matter of national importance that we need to do this thing. And so I think that’s the reason. Yes, we’re safety is better. Yes. Construction standards are different. [00:24:33] Yes. The NEPA process is different than it was back then, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but these other countries are doing it. And so I feel like that’s an indicator species that shows us that it can be done if we wanted to. [00:24:47] Yonah Freemark: Nonetheless, I will say, you [00:24:49] Jeff Wood: seem very skeptical, I, [00:24:52] Yonah Freemark: I just, what is exciting to me is that, we do have cities like Los Angeles, like Seattle that are really trying to improve their transit systems and the obstacles are very high in the current climate for a number of reasons. [00:25:09] So I guess my sense is that. There is a willingness to try to push for change if we can figure out how to identify what the changes specifically are that need to be made. One of the challenges that we, there’s been a lot of discussion about transit construction costs and how they’re very high unquestionably, it has not always been clear to me that much of what has been discussed is actionable. [00:25:34] Tomorrow, and so that’s something that I think we need to continue working on. [00:25:39] Jeff Wood: I like the idea that Scott Wiener had and some other folks have had here in San Francisco. It’s buy a tunnel boring machine and always be boring. Just always be doing it. Like just turn it sideways and put it another direction and just keep boring. [00:25:50] Like just. Do it over and over again. And I know we’ve had the argument. We’re going to have this discussion a little bit later too, about deep water tunnels in San Jose. But we’re one of our predictions from last year. I just think that we just got to keep on going with it. [00:26:02] Cause this one line, a decade thing, isn’t a one line to two decades thing, isn’t going to work, especially for light rail and things like that. And early, I already mentioned that as part of the TOD thing. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is those lines went to the favorite quarter of the region and they were easy to develop, but the places that actually have the most equitable TOD and transit ridership in those things are these networks that existed for a really long time. [00:26:22] The Philadelphia is a Chicago’s that have a larger network and the transit oriented development is a little bit more equitable and world more even because there’s so many more stations to develop at. There’s not a fight over the five stations that exist. About how to have TOD. And you don’t have to put every single problem in your region on those five stations either. [00:26:39] And so that’s another frustration of mine too, is that when we do these 20 year per one line systems, it Fs up everything from our social policy to our development policies and all that stuff, because we’re trying to shove as my track coach in college used to say a five pound sack into a one pound bag. [00:26:57] Yonah Freemark: That’s right. No, that’s absolutely right. And I think, comparing. As you said, what cities in China, but not just China. You look at a lot of projects happening in India as well, throughout the middle East, there’s a lot of projects happening. So yeah, there’s. There are a lot of other countries where projects are happening at a much faster clip than the United States where we seem to be Very much resistant to change. [00:27:19] Jeff Wood: Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be subways necessarily right either It could be just like transit investment overall I mean look at India what they’ve done with their electrification of their railway system [00:27:27] Yonah Freemark: Actually I’m I’m interested in what you think about this like I think Over the past few years, there’s been a increasing interest by a lot of cities to improve their bus services instead of build light rail in part because of the higher costs of rail projects and especially subways, certainly. [00:27:42] But at the same time, it almost seems a little wild that the U S arguably the biggest economy in the world can’t handle building a few subways once in a while. It’s pretty shocking, isn’t it? [00:27:53] Jeff Wood: It is, I think this goes to a whole nother thing. It’s like firing off stuff in my brain, Durham Raleigh Durham right now, Raleigh is trying to build a bus rapid transit line. [00:28:01] And I think they’ve tried to set it out to bid three times because they can’t get a bidder on it. And it’s your, your hometown and your area. And you probably know about this more than I do, but what’s up with that. We have tons of road builders. We have tons of projects, folks. They’re saying that it’s because of the hurricanes and all the people that are building projects are going back and rebuilding these roads that were knocked out, but I think it’s a larger problem. [00:28:21] There’s actually a paper that I think you, I don’t know if you posted this or David Zipper or somebody posted this and I reposted it. But there’s a paper that was from 2023 that got re released, this week. The one about costs for road projects and the limiting part of what makes costs go high is the capacity of the local governments to oversee the projects, but also the quality and the number of bids that they get. [00:28:42] And so the lower number of bids, the higher the costs go and the higher the prices go on these projects. And so there’s something about our cyclical nature, or at least the lack of maybe the long term funding mechanism, our highway bill only goes six years, maybe it needs to go, 20 years or 30 years, which might be a problem if We have one regime over another at the time that it’s passed, but maybe it’s like the longterm or short termness of it that keeps these companies from, really investing in the ability to build, but also our inability to invest in capacity, which we’re just gutting right now, the capacity that we barely had we’re just gutting right now at the federal level. [00:29:12] And so that’s part of the problem I feel like as well. [00:29:15] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. And I do wonder. If the alternative is certainly one alternative is building up the public sector unquestionably, it seems likely that we have to do that. I’m thinking right now about the high speed rail project that was announced in Canada, between Toronto and Quebec city, they actually are bringing in a sort of. [00:29:35] Consortium of private air Canada and some other air Canada, but also, yeah, also SNCF from France. And I wonder, is it possible to replace public sector capacity with private compilation of knowledge? I’m not confident that it is. [00:29:53] Jeff Wood: I don’t think so. I honestly don’t think so because look at what’s happening in California, the high speed rail line as well. [00:29:58] You have to build up that competence over time. And I think doing it locally, and I think, if California has feed rail, if we readjusted some of the, the labor union’s rule here in California and they are, basically top of the dogpile when it comes to trying to get projects approved. [00:30:11] So if you see the California CTC decide that it wants to keep funding highway projects, that’s probably part of the reason is ’cause of the labor unions. And their leaders have gotten in the ears of some of the folks at the CTC. And so I think you could reverse that though and figure out a way to train people to get them to be knowledgeable. [00:30:27] And, part of the thing about building the high speed rail in California now is you’re going to have a lot of people that have knowledge in this stuff. And so what you do is you go to the next project and you can say, okay. You have knowledge in this, let’s do it faster, or let’s figure out what you did wrong last time and do it better. [00:30:39] And so that knowledge base for subways and for high speed rail and for whatever other projects is not there. I think about all the TRB paper that are on bituminous asphalt. And what, you know what I’m talking about? Like you see it every time you go to TRB, it’s five different posters about how asphalt can be spread better. [00:30:56] It’s like there’s a whole regime and a whole like thing behind all this research and all the road building capacity and like knowledge and background. So I think we can build that up in transit. It’s just going to take time and you need to start now because the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the next best time is now. [00:31:13] Yonah Freemark: That’s absolutely right. And I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve totally distracted us from the projects to look for. It’s okay. It’s [00:31:20] Jeff Wood: just, we’re having a fun conversations. I appreciate it. I like that. [00:31:24] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. There are other projects that are exciting. In Seattle, East link, right? Yep. It’s super exciting. [00:31:31] I was just in Seattle in the fall. And for those who’ve not been there, their light rail system, which, Has had some issues recently with maintenance. Nonetheless is really effective. It’s super fast. It’s pretty frequent. And when they open up this East link, which is going to go across Lake Washington from downtown Seattle to Bellevue, it’s really going to create a regional system. [00:31:52] And I’m really excited about seeing the performance of that project. [00:31:56] Jeff Wood: That’s huge. Connecting all those job centers together, Redmond Bellevue and downtown Seattle with the university of Washington and everything else. They’re starting to get stuff together and the speed at which you can travel now between, for example, the university of Washington and downtown Seattle used to be on a bus, took quite a while, and now it takes what? [00:32:12] Six minutes or something like that. Five minutes. And so those are the types of gains I think that are really important. I saw yesterday or the other day, the Seattle transit blog was promoting the Ballard link be automated because they wanted more service. And I think that’s. Something that maybe they should think about, but it also means disconnecting it from the West Seattle line and things like that. [00:32:28] But there’s all kinds of, once you put it in, like they’re doing, you can make these small tweaks maybe to understand like what you can do better the next time. And so that’s part of the next iteration of how we can build better transit in the United States. That’s really exciting. Eastlink, Seattle and LA are just years ahead. [00:32:44] Yeah. They’re the ones that are [00:32:45] Yonah Freemark: building right now. They’re [00:32:46] Jeff Wood: the ones that are building. They’re the ones that just put together 50 billion, 120 billion worth of ballot measures. And they have the populations to do it. It’s a bummer that other cities aren’t doing that. And I wonder if that’s a function of like the West Coast is not so bogged down by legacy stuff and repairs and things like that. [00:33:02] So you know, I was in Philadelphia for impact and even just riding to the airport, you see the rust and the disrepair and it’s hard because that’s so much stuff that you basically just have to rebuild from scratch. And they’ve probably rebuilt what LA is building now over again, because they had to spend on repair rather than new systems. [00:33:18] Yonah Freemark: I think that’s absolutely right. And you will sometimes hear the elderly railheads, if I can call them that, complain about new projects because they say, we can’t invest in new project because think about what’s going to happen in 30 years. We have to improve that project. [00:33:32] Jeff Wood: But that’s the scarcity mindset we need to get away from. We have all these road projects that we need to do repair on. I know that T for America and others have been focused on thinking about what that might look like, fix it first. We don’t need any new highways, so we can just fix it first on the highways, but we do need some more transit infrastructure. [00:33:49] And, we’re talking about kind of high level stuff and subways and the big kind of projects, but we also need service and we need a lot more, service in cities. 15 minute headways is not good service. It’s so that a lot of these places that are smaller. Maybe they should just start with 10 minute, five minute service in some places. [00:34:03] And I used to be against this. I used to be a light rail head where I was like, build your street car, build your light rail, build whatever it is. But now as I’ve gotten older and I’ve seen what has happened, I’m like maybe we should start with our bus. And I hate to cede ground to the arguments of some Randall O’Toole, who, which was not a real argument anyway, because he was just trying to kill stuff. [00:34:18] But when I hear myself say that, I’m like, Oh. Did I turn into that guy? No, I did not. Because I, I believe in this stuff. [00:34:24] Yonah Freemark: There was this, there was a certain point where I think, just to annoy everybody, he proposed replacing the subway trains with buses. [00:34:32] Jeff Wood: In New York, yeah. He did do that. Was it him or Wendell Cox? [00:34:35] I don’t remember, but one of those two. [00:34:36] Yonah Freemark: Dude, just come on. What are we even talking about right now? But [00:34:39] Jeff Wood: that’s just that’s just kills their credibility for anything. And anytime you read any of those people now, they’re all crazy folks. Kotkin now. If you read some of the stuff at the daily beast, he’s gone full Maga and so it’s crazy what those folks back then, I guess some people saw them as somewhat reasonable, but now the mask is off and we know exactly what it’s all about. [00:34:56] Yonah Freemark: Yeah, but I did want to say, one other place that folks should be checking out is the twin cities, which they are actually building out a really interesting network of these lines that are sometimes called arterial rapid transit, sometimes called bus rapid transit, depending on who you’re asking. [00:35:13] And, frankly, for a region like Minneapolis, St. Paul, where, it’s not super dense, you’re not going to have light rail everywhere. There are a lot of corridors in that region where having a high quality bus service that comes frequently that has nice stations that has some bus lanes in the places where it makes sense can be transformative and make the system much more usable for people who need to use it on a daily basis. [00:35:37] I think. Other folks should be looking towards what Metro Transit is doing there with their upgrades. [00:35:42] Jeff Wood: Yeah. If you look at that old streetcar map of Minneapolis, you can see the density laid over the top of it. That’s where people in older cities should be looking, right? Where those old streetcars used to go is where their frequent bus service now, and it should be a five minute service because that’s where people live. [00:35:56] And so if we’re going to do infill and all that stuff, maybe that should be the answer. Absolutely. So I know we don’t talk about inner city stuff as much. I did mention India electrifying its railways, but I also am interested if you’ve been watching what’s going on in Mexico too, because there’s a discussion from the new president, Claudio Schoenbaum, about building rail lines between different parts of the country and even connecting with the United States. [00:36:16] There’s been a discussion with folks at the state legislature in Texas about connecting a place like San Antonio or Austin to Monterey. And so I find that interesting as well. And I don’t know if you’ve seen these discussions in maps. Yeah, [00:36:26] Yonah Freemark: no, it’s. I will say Mexico has been low key improving their transit system in a way that I think a lot of Americans would be jealous of if they knew what was happening there. [00:36:36] Guadalajara has a actually quite developed light rail system and a bus rapid transit system already. Mexico city has. Two regional rail lines that are electrified and actually really nice underway. They also have all these like aerial trams. And then you have the government of Mexico saying, we’re going to build this inner city rail network in a lot of ways in a much more difficult environment than we had in the U S where. [00:37:00] Amtrak was built up. Amtrak was able to essentially stick itself onto legacy freight lines for better or worse and get some services running. Mexico didn’t really have that. And they invested in the inner city line up the Yucatan peninsula, the trend Maya. And now they are, yeah, they’re, they have a whole network of lines planned connecting Mexico city with, Guadalajara, Monterey, et cetera, that could be transformative in terms of creating a great inner city rail network. [00:37:27] Maybe instead of putting tariffs on Mexico, we should create an inner city rail network with Mexico. That would be great. [00:37:33] Jeff Wood: Oh, don’t get me started with that stupidity. We can talk about other stupidity though, if you want. Um, I have two more questions for you. The first is because you’ve been looking at density and transit lines around the country, I’m curious what your thoughts are on where is a place that needs a Metro that maybe doesn’t have it or hasn’t been planning one that might exist. [00:37:55] Yonah Freemark: This is a hard question. I ask of you because I [00:37:57] Jeff Wood: was thinking about it last night and I couldn’t think of one that hasn’t maybe tried it or thought about it. Austin and Nashville have thought about a tunnel or whatever, but I’m wondering if there’s a place that needs one that maybe doesn’t have it. [00:38:08] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. [00:38:08] I will say, I think when we think about the communities in the United States that have the density of population to justify, really high quality transit service, there aren’t that many because we have not. Focused on, on transit investment. I do think we have seen some significant concentration of growth in places like Miami, where there is, a metro system that unfortunately doesn’t really serve the densest parts of the city, which I think is one thing that’s worth pointing out. [00:38:39] Miami beach has no access to the metro system of Miami. And the result is getting from Miami beach to the airport or other parts of Miami is actually difficult because there’s extreme traffic on the bridges between those places, but the people of Miami beach have repeatedly gotten in the way of making those projects happen. [00:38:56] I think Portland. Is a great example of where the light rail system might’ve made sense as a surface system, when it was conceived, but now it feels like it’s actually making the system difficult to manage. It reduces reliability and it’s just slow for people who don’t need to get downtown. [00:39:14] Yeah. And I think that’s an opportunity. [00:39:16] Jeff Wood: Yeah. The cross tunnel, that was the one that came to my mind because of what you were mentioning, what they built was bare bones and cheap at the time, but. Getting from one side of the region to the other is really difficult because you had to go through downtown. [00:39:26] So if you could have that subway and have a couple of stops downtown and then go to the other side, you might actually. Connect two sides of the region who were not necessarily easily connected through transit before. [00:39:36] Yonah Freemark: Yeah, I think that’s right. And, I think another place that has had on and off discussions about investing in a much more serious system is San Diego, which actually does have a pretty developed downtown. [00:39:48] It has some major job centers around the universities. It’s like rail system really slows down downtown. It’s the same [00:39:53] Jeff Wood: as Portland. Yeah. [00:39:54] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. Cause they were building the. First period of light rail systems. And, I think folks in San Diego have been talking about creating a sort of secondary. [00:40:04] Transit system that hasn’t really gone anywhere, frankly. There’s an opportunity there. I think so. [00:40:08] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. I’m just trying to think of places that have like really dense development that maybe, could use it or, maybe it could be the catalyst for something bigger. That might be something interesting to think about as well as, build a subway tunnel from one job center to another and see what happens in between. [00:40:21] Houston’s success with the light rail line that they built with, no federal money. It was just such a huge boon, and it probably would be even better if it was a subway, although you can’t build under that water table. But between the medical center, which is one of the largest employment centers in the city, and one of the biggest medical centers in the world, and the downtown, which has got a lot of employment population, they were able to get 40, 000 riders a day on that light rail line. [00:40:42] And so Things like that makes sense for a subway network that have the density that have the job employment centers and stuff that we can be connected. Maybe we should just start doing a city pairs or urban pairs looking at some of these outside employment centers and connecting the dots. [00:40:57] Yeah. Yeah. The last question I have for you before we get into our old prediction show antics is, there was a couple of memos that were from the secretary of transportation and they took back some climate policy memos. And you mentioned before also the paper that you and Linda Rennert wrote about the silly birth and I call it birth and death rates, but birth and marriage rates and some of the stuff there. [00:41:17] And I’m just curious, like your overall feelings about USDOT, those memos and some of the stuff that’s been going on in DC. [00:41:24] Yonah Freemark: I think that the people who are currently in the administration are doing what they accused the Biden administration of doing but amped up you may remember back in 2021, the Biden administration put together a memo recommending that state transportation departments fix it first, rather than build new highways that memo got Turned into a huge political crisis. [00:41:47] You had governors, Republican senators accusing the Biden administration of meddling. The Biden administration said we were just recommending what you do. And ultimately they actually took back the memo because it was such a politically sensitive matter to recommend. Maintaining your roads before you build new ones. [00:42:04] And I think what we’re seeing right now is the Trump administration attempting to direct national transportation policy. And that in the effort to get rid of congestion pricing in New York city, in the memos where, there is this preference for certain types of communities over others, the sort of. [00:42:25] Effort to undermine efforts to improve the climate. But this time, I think, unlike during the Biden administration, they seem to be actually planning to leverage the power in a way that is going to really undermine projects that I, for one, am excited about seeing. [00:42:41] Jeff Wood: Yeah, [00:42:41] Yonah Freemark: there isn’t much of a check on the Trump administration as we’re talking right now in late February. [00:42:47] I don’t know if that will change, but the result is I am concerned about the federal. Government, interfering with state or metropolitan planning organizations, transportation plans. Are they going to announce that they’re not allowed to focus their support, federal support on certain projects? [00:43:03] Are they going to say that you can’t justify a project because it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions? I’m very worried that’s the kind of outcome we’re about to start seeing. [00:43:13] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s trickling down to the States to you saw in Utah just the other day, the state legislature snuck in some language into one of their bills that said road planning can only be for non congestive planning or whatever. [00:43:25] It’s like a really weird wording. But basically what was saying is No bike lanes or bus lanes on the roads that might get in the way of cars. And the Democrats in the Utah legislature and the Senate, at least didn’t even know it was in there because they didn’t tell them until, and they found out halfway through the vote. [00:43:40] And so they had to change their votes from yes to no on that specific legislation. And so I feel like that’s the thing that we’re seeing. We saw a couple of years ago in the Texas Republican platform saying that we don’t want California style road planning, which basically means complete streets and all that stuff. [00:43:53] It’s silly because California has tons of roads and highways that expanding. But also, this state preemption thing, and I think it’s going up to the federal level as well, where we see in those memos specifically, so the other stuff was crazy. And I think that was somewhat of a distraction, right? [00:44:07] The birth rates and stuff. And they might take that out later when some of the folks in Congress complain that it’s not going to be, enough funding for their jurisdictions, but down below that, and it was in plain language and it was like, we need to put money towards things that are of the federal or national importance, which in my mind, that is a kind of a dog whistle for. [00:44:24] No transit, no bikes, no active transportation, right? Because to them, federal importance means large highway projects and large road projects. And so these little local things that you’ve been doing over there, messing around with the federal money, that’s not allowed anymore. But that wasn’t really paid attention to because it was in the plain language that’s understandable, but the other stuff was like wild and out of tact. [00:44:47] Yonah Freemark: What’s funny is I saw the exact same thing and thought the exact same thing. And my, my, my head immediately went to, they’re going to try to say that you can invest in transit, biker ped, because supposedly it’s not, it’s too local of a project. And as of our conversation, they have not done so, so far, however my. [00:45:08] Alarm bells started going off. And one thing I’ve been working on and we’ll see if I have to actually publish it, but I’ve been looking at the national household travel survey to essentially understand, what are people’s travel patterns and what, one thing that’s really interesting is that claiming that the roadway network is national in importance. [00:45:27] Whereas these other networks are not, it does not match the facts. The reality is. The vast majority, I’m talking above 90 percent of roadway trips are occurring within metropolitan areas. In most States, it’s like above 95 percent in the same metropolitan area. So essentially you can’t claim that investment in roadways is somehow national in meaning, whereas investments in transit or railways is not it’s just not the case. [00:45:55] And so that’s something I’m going to be keeping track of very closely. Yeah. [00:45:58] Jeff Wood: It’s a hypocrisy that’s been going on for a long time because they’ve been spending a lot of money on these highway expansions, for example, like I 10 in Houston, expanding it to 25 lanes or whatever it is now. That’s not of national importance to get people from Sugar Land or from Katy to downtown Houston, and so a lot of this stuff from the Metropolitan Planning Organization realm, anything that goes to the MPO is going to be local if you look at it from those small perspectives, and so that’s frustrating too. [00:46:22] If you’re going to think about it all nationally, it’s all going to be interstate highways between places, not inside of places. [00:46:27] Yonah Freemark: That’s right. Listen, if the interstate highway system had been built on that actual framework, like I believe Eisenhower originally envisioned, I’d be much happier about our highway system in the U S because it wouldn’t have involved demolishing huge shares of our inner cities. [00:46:41] Unfortunately, we built the interstate highway system primarily as a commuter system for people to commute to work in their own metropolitan areas. And that’s just the reality of what we’ve built. [00:46:52] Jeff Wood: Yeah, you mentioned earlier the interference that the feds might run. And I saw this recently to Ampo sent out an email specifically talking about this, where the step funding, which is the five year transportation plans, they’re looking for all of the line items and those two. [00:47:06] And so think about how many thousands of even millions of lines are in these step programs every five years for the metropolitan planning organizations and all the transportation policy that has to go in. And so I know that they’re trying to take an AI to go through all this stuff. Equity. [00:47:20] Doesn’t always mean what they think it means. And how much stuff is going to get stripped out of there if they try to go through that. And that’s the fear is that they’re just going to try to go line by line finding stuff when they’re not actually knowing what they’re looking for. [00:47:31] Yonah Freemark: Yeah. [00:47:31] And we’ve seen that just the utter neglect for. Taking the role of government seriously that the Doge people have already done. They’ve fired air traffic controllers. They’re, stopping funding for AIDS treatment in Africa. They’re allowing Ebola assistance to go unsupported, firing national park rangers who actually do a job. [00:47:51] It’s just utter neglect. For effective government. That’s their intention. They want to destroy the public sector, and that’s what we’re seeing. [00:47:58] Jeff Wood: Yeah, that’s what it is.
