(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 555: Three Principals for Federal Transportation Policy

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This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Corrigan Salerno of Transportation For America. We discuss three transportation principles for a better federal transportation bill, how to create better reporting data for MPOs, and better bus manufacturing.

Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA, or find it in our hosting archive vault.

Below is a full unedited computer generated transcript:

When I was working at Federal Highway, that meant that I was working on things like driving simulators and how people react with avs that are simulated on the roads and meaning fake avs, people disguised as avs. And in that entire course of research, a lot of the time, we were kind of testing things that I felt were not exactly the most pressing issues for safety.

And I kind. I got interested in like, okay, what was the policy that led us to research this rather than that and what are the real more pressing issues on the road? And that kind of led me down this rabbit hole of the transportation advocacy world from this really weird starting point in, uh, already there.

And from there I kind of jumped off, uh, from that, uh, research role into this political advocacy and research role at Transportation for America.

I have a lot of funny stories from that job, but yeah, we’d say cars are autonomous when we’re driving around a racetrack, when in reality we’re just kind of driving it with our, uh, with our hands low on the steering wheel. And then just seeing how people. React to that in different conditions with different things like, oh, you have an iPad in your car that has signals displayed before they are actually displayed on the actual traffic arm.

So yeah, lot, lots of interesting studies on that side,

Uh, I grew up in Orange County, California, so. Very familiar with driving through traffic to get to any destination where cars are really the main option for you in that area, at least when I was growing up. So seeing alternatives to that when I first went to college in Washington, dc that really opened my eyes.

I think, to this idea that cities and regions can be more connected and a lot more fun and accessible for everybody. Whether or not you have a car really kind of opened my eyes up relatively early on.

Because if you’re not steeped in that world, it might be a little bit mysterious.

Can’t forget us. And then, uh, yeah, so the bill expires on September 30th, 2026. And right now folks. Are working in Congress to rewrite the bill or write its successor, and they’re weighing in across different committees in Congress, either on the house side with the transportation Infrastructure committee, banking, commerce, and environmental public works in the Senate.

But yeah, there’s a high chance that we’re gonna see a little bit different conclusion than just a straight up new authorization.

So you all have put together like a platform for this reauthorization. There are three principles and a fourth goal, modernizing. I wanna get details and I wanna know why you all initially developed this and how it came together as the ideas that you wanted to put into this bill specifically.

When we say blow up the Highway trust fund, we mean literally reconsidering every element of how we do federal transportation policy and with our full. Platform, it’s 20 pages long. On our website, we have a litany of different recommendations. Yes. Across our three principles of Fix It First, safety over Speed, and invest in the Rest, which is our relatively new one.

So we think that at its current iteration of this federal transportation program. One, we’ve got this highway trust fund that is not really delivering on any of these goals where we’re now having still staggering amounts of people dying on our roadways, and the system is really not scaling in terms of reducing those fatalities versus how much money we’re throwing into the system.

Congestion isn’t getting better. The state of good repair on our roadways is definitely not improving as well. Despite all of that, we have this trust fund that we’re borrowing against that’s already spending down and just not spending towards good outcomes. So to get around those issues, we propose entirely doing away with that system and thinking towards a replacement.

We’re considering things like moving to an annual appropriations basis. Just to give an additional level of congressional oversight, but there’s other options that we should really be thinking towards in terms of actually paying for our transportation system. You know, the gas tax hasn’t been raised since like 1993.

There’s discussions about aerial drones and manned or unmanned and even surface drones, right? So these vehicles that can deliver. Packages and things like that. So the transportation system doesn’t exist in that world that the gas tax was created in, which is to fund these highways and roads that cars drive on, right?

It’s a totally different thing that we need to look towards the future for.

It’s definitely time to reconsider what those dollars are doing.

Uh when there was a memo from Stephanie Pollock that went out. And so I’m wondering like how that gets received and also what you all mean by fix it first, specifically.

And I think when you consider fix it first, that’s one. The basics of you shouldn’t be spending more money than what you actually have when you consider all of the debts that you have on your infrastructure system. So right now we’ve got something like over $800 billion according to the conditions and performance report from Federal Highway in just purely a maintenance backlog for our highways, and we’re still spending significant portions of that same amount of money on expansion, hundreds of billions of dollars on expansion with these IHA dollars when.

We’re already so deep in the hole for maintenance. That’s just a basic fact of being responsible with your money that we need to actually change our policy and practice there, but then also with Fix It first. We’ve got a lot of infrastructure that was built, broken in the first place, thinking about all of the programs that came outta the infrastructure law, like the Reconnecting Communities pilot, that really took a step towards the right direction.

How do we scale things like that as the default for all of our infrastructure dollars, like our formula dollars particularly, and making sure that those outcomes are scalable and not limited to these types of programs that really kind of revealed themselves as relatively vulnerable and really actually get it into standard practice via the law.

So I think that’s really important. I also like the idea you all had. For these appropriate funding mechanisms for what you’re trying to do. So if you are trying to repair a road, maybe the feds should back you up to 80%. And if you’re building a new one, you only get backed up to 50%. So the priorities are in the budget rather than the priorities are on paper.

And so, as we’ve heard a number of times over the last few years, people’s priorities are in their budgets, and that’s actually how things are revealed versus what they say.

So just thinking towards new bills and the Senate and the House that would raise, uh, federal funding flexibility from 50% to 75%. That’s kind of the new direction that we’re going with this next reauthorization.

How can we get people to like kind of refocus on that? Since all of the stuff that’s going on in DC right now, the capital, I should say, not in the city, but about getting rid of the endangerment finding and EPA, wiping out the basis for us fighting climate change in their wording.

But I think we’re all, in many ways throwing what we can against the wall and kind of seeing what sticks. And sometimes I think the right audience that needs to be convinced right now might not actually be Congress, but just actual everyday people more so. And actually communicating. The values and the actual value add of these kind of technologies.

And then also, uh, the policy that we’re trying to enact, like making transit more accessible for people is just one cheaper for them, but also is just a huge boon for their quality of life. And that in and of itself, I think is more of a winning argument than just simply trying to convince people on the merits of, oh, climate is real.

And, uh, it is an issue. The people have really kind of perpetually tuned that issue out.

Like those types of things seem common sense, but you know, it’s hard to have that discussion when some folks don’t want to hear it, even if there are lots of other folks who understand the weight of what’s actually at stake. The next principle I wanna talk about is invest in the rest, which focuses on transit, passenger rail, electric vehicles.

And so I’m wondering what the important points are for transit coming up in this next reauthorization.

And for a lot of these more fair dependent services, we’re looking at gaps in terms of the revenue from riders and fares. We’re looking at the, uh, stronger communities through Better Transit Act, which would provide an actual federal stream for operations funding. But even beyond that, we’re looking at kind of the more basic things.

Or kind of common sense with our existing transit dollars and our reauthorization platform. So thinking about how there’s so many different little streams of transit funding through things like the Department of Veterans Affairs, department of Labor, HHS, and all of these things that come together but don’t scale up together at all.

We’re thinking of ways of actually merge those funding streams in reauthorization so that it actually goes to one transit agency that can. As a whole, deliver much better service, thanks to all these different streams coming to it.

There’s so much money in all these little pots. But if you combine the pots, they actually turn out to be something bigger and they exist still. But it’s hard to just kind of focus on transportation from just a reauthorization standpoint. If they have existing systems in these other bills, uh, you know, even if something like was in a health bill or something was in the farm bill or something like that, there’s just like so much money out there that goes to these things.

But then, like you said, they’re like kind of bifurcated and, and split. So if you combine them, that would be beneficial, especially to these rural agencies who depend on it so much for operations.

So right now there was a big push in the last administration too to kind of address this issue of bus customization, and we’re hoping to see a lot of that continue to follow through in this next bill.

Meanwhile, FTA would be willing to cover the entire cost of that, or the majority of that cost of extra customization. So putting caps on that, or at least creating some forms of standards about what we want out of a bus. ’cause when it comes to riders, I think most people are fine with the bus being there, uh, and more buses, better than buses with, uh, a specific charger or a specific aesthetic appearance.

And kind of making sure that those are the main priorities with the federal dollars is one of the goals that we’re trying to push for in this reauthorization.

It would be good to pool that expertise. We had Colin parent on a couple weeks ago to talk about California and ways that Caltrans could actually do some of that for the state, even just. Because there’s a need to kind of pool resources when they’re talking about some of these projects. I also really appreciate some of the stuff that like Cal ITP is doing, which is basically creating a standard for like payment systems where you can get on the purchasing for that system if you live in another state or if you operate in another state.

And so you have this economy of scale where if you’re a small agency that has like. Your, your CEO is the bus driver you still can operate with, uh, apple Pay or something along those lines. So it’s really interesting to think about those systems where it scales to the whole country so that, you know, these smaller agencies can get in on the benefits as well.

Japan has taxes on engine size. What’s stopping us from being a little bit more ambitious in like the types of ways that we gather funding from these new types of vehicles along with the old ones?

We’ve seen out of the house these, uh, EV registration fees, which are like double what gas cars pay. Really, our principles and proposal here around electric vehicles is really driven by the idea that we should have something more fair, at the very least, and. Ways that that could be done would require us maybe thinking a little bit outside of the box, like what is stopping us from an actual technological standpoint, from charging vehicles for the electricity drawn based on what the car reports may be, for instance.

There’s also this discussion about cars, generally about safety. The electric vehicles are so much heavier. We also have this problem where we have safety issues for people outside of vehicles as well. And so that’s another issue that I think might be a big focus of this next bill, is like general safety.

And it might actually get the attention of the Republican side as well because it is such a big issue and there are so many traffic deaths and we are kind of not the norm when it comes to these statistics around the world.

So the idea that like EVs and their weight is this immense issue, I think really turns into more of a talking point just against EVs for the sake of them being against EVs. ’cause we have plenty of people being hit by large and heavy normal combustion engine vehicles every day. And that still gets a lot less attention from certain voices, I’d say.

But also just actually making sure that people have more options to just simply drive less.

And so they were like, oh yeah, the 85% rule, that’s a good idea. Let’s do that. And it turns out that’s actually not a great safety rule or regulation. And so figuring out whether we should do research on a lot of these rules and why they exist, to see if they actually make sense or not. It shouldn’t be just some random like car dealer in the 1930s that decided that we should measure vehicle death by passenger miles to figure out the ways that we should go forward.

I wish I was in a bike at that point, at that point. If it’s empty, it’s even more frustrating, right? And so they’re taking up 250 square feet of space, and now they’re taking up 250 square feet of space without a person in them. And so I think that that’s one of the things that maybe should be addressed.

Yeah, it’s great to think about the possibilities of greater safety, but our streets and cities specifically are very overtaken by cars already. And so trying to get the transit to work in these spaces is already hard. And so. We’re creating an opportunity for these vehicles to duplicate a route that already has a bus.

And so why are we letting these vehicles be empty? To take people places where the bus already goes?

But yeah, the program itself has really been very good at filtering money to projects at the very least. Um,

On a specific stretch of land in a specific duration of time, usually only peak hours. That right now is the main deciding factor about where all of our public dollars are going. So we’ve been looking at national transit database information about existing capital expenditure and seeing how scaling that up would deliver additional rolling stock and how much that might cost to actually deliver that.

But that’s been a lot of our work recently.

When I used to do a lot of mapping and, and cartography and stuff before, it was a lot of like database work and parcel data sets that we’re trying to pull together, like. The certain parcels have this characteristic and they are near transit in this way, and they’re a half mile from this, and we crack them open and figure out what the percentage of population is in this section and those type of things so you can make ’em more readable and manageable for folks trying to like take all this really complex stuff and sit in the corner and process it and then make it into something that was really easy to understand.

What the actual, uh, category of spending that might be, and then combining that with some other models that kind of account for the greenhouse gas impact of individual project types based on how much is invested in it. We checked that out for the impact of the existing first two, three years of infrastructure law spending.

And of the federal rail dollars for instance, we had barely spent even like 5% of it at the time of analysis, despite being like 40, 50% of the way through the actual authorization.

Some things really just take time. The good stuff tends to take time. It really revealed itself in that, and the bad stuff was very quick to be obligated, I think, in this analysis. And we found that the good stuff that we really tend to love is the exact kind of projects that have really been targeted by the Trump administration now in terms of what grants are being frozen and what grants are, um, not really having any of their funding outlaid at this stage now.

So that whenever just general members of the public want to see, okay, what is my tax dollar actually going to in terms of public spending and like, how much is going to this? How much is going to that? Just simply having a, uh, list of our projects in a region. Divided in an actual spreadsheet with some level of default categorization and actual real descriptions of what’s being done on the project.

So you know, okay, is this a shoulder widening or is this an actual new lane based on the physical characteristics of this infrastructure that you’re describing here? Like that would be incredibly useful to have. More real project data on the step, or at least some resources linking from there. If that became a federal requirement, it would definitely make our lives easier.

Having the actual physical infrastructure work reported on the step would be super helpful to one, determine how many lane miles is the state adding per year based on the step, how many miles of bike lanes are we adding? Is there any new dedicated transit right of way that’s, um, being slept on maybe in certain states, like, uh, thanks to Complete Streets policies.

Those sort of things would make it really helpful to kind of put a spotlight on. What’s going on in states in reality versus what I think really tends to get spotlighted more like in terms of flashier announcements for one type of big specific project, rather than kind of the default policy outcomes that just kind of find themselves on the step.

The other thing was like the Golden Gate Bridge, like is a feed of. Engineering Marvel and people are proud of the Golden Gate Bridge and Stuart Schwartz and some other folks chimed in and was like, Metro. And I was like, but that was like back in the sixties and seventies. Like that was a long time ago.

Like anything recent where people are proud of this thing we did. And I’m wondering like is there anything cause I can think of like. If I was in London, I would be really proud of the Elizabeth Line. Or if I was in Paris, I would be really proud of the expansion of the Grand Powder Express or the electrification of India’s rail lines.

They did the whole thing in like a 10 year period or something like that. Or even like the 48,000 miles of China’s high-speed rail. Like you can point to that and be like that’s impressive. And so from your perspective, is there anything that you think you could collect that information from those databases and be like, well actually we should be proud of this.

We should be proud that we put this many bike lanes over the last 10 years? Am I not. Seem like a lot when you look through everything and the way, the way we talk about it, but according to this data, we should be really happy with that.

Whether or not that same data would have like the quality of that bike lane incorporated. Maybe that could be something we would ask of folks to report, like whether or not it’s protected or separated or just buffered, et cetera. Yeah, that would be, I think from that data, a big win that would be kind of hidden, but like even, I mean, I feel like we can at least be a little happy for LA Metro, right?

In the last,

Yeah, light, light rail. Some light rail systems. I wonder if you could use like, you know, with all these large language models, I’m gonna say LLMs, ’cause I, I think AI is. Just a silly term overall. Totally. Because it’s basically, and we were talking with folks on the show about this, it’s basically just a fancy word for using more computing power.

It’s like a Pentium chip versus a punch card.

Tease out on all these streets. If you could like ride a program, there might actually be a way to like, see we have this percentage of protected bikeways, or we have this percentage of sheros and we have this percentage of this. There’s probably a way to do it, although it might take a little bit of sitting down and riding the program, but after you did it, there might be a way to pull it out.

I mean, that’s a huge boon for the public. If we actually could use that towards analysis like you’re saying.

Um, now we’re talking about dementia. Do you think there’s gonna be ever be like a measurement of that for like the highway system where they start to talk about the brake dust and they start to talk about the exhausts and they start to talk about that impact on communities where it’s actually like in the bill and they’re trying to create a goal to reduce it.

So in this reauthorization maybe not, but,

And we talked about his book, transport Justice, and two of the things I took outta that were like the philosophy discussion, like D Dorkins, desert Island thesis or, or Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance, like these philosophers thinking about what justice actually is or what equity actually is. The idea I took from that is like, how would you design a transportation system where if you had to design a system on this island, but you didn’t know on the other side whether you’re gonna be a rich person or a poor person, how would you design the system?

And usually people would design it so that everybody had access, right? And so I’m finding that an interesting kind of framing for discussing this, or at least Carol’s transportation sufficiency idea. And even recently he came up with a really interesting metric, or at least questions for measuring success of transportation.

We, we might not like some of the outcomes of some of the expansion of highways and things like that, but he said that you can actually figure out how to measure success. So I’m wondering, like, just thinking about the philosophy of our transportation bill. Thinking about what we should get outta the other side.

And it’s not just distributing the states, but maybe it should be more than that. Maybe it should be trying to figure out this access question that you all talk about in the document. Maybe it’s thinking less about level of service and the value of time measurements and thinking about the philosophy of it.

And I know that’s kind of hippie dippy San Francisco talk, uh, to a lot of people, but I do think that there’s some value in that.

And that’s why it would be such a game changer, I think, to have that be built into our actual performance measures. And driving factors for project selection in the United States because for so many users of our system, transit, walking and biking just simply is not an option in terms of what’s practical to get them to where they need to go.

And, uh, that lack of access just kind of drives or helps to drive some of the kind of worst outcomes in the American political and economic system where so many people have end up disenfranchised.

There’s a spectrum, and we talked with Ryan Russo about this, uh, head of NTO recently about slowing down a street. You can allow all this other stuff to happen, but from the federal perspective, do they get involved? Are they gonna get involved in this freight discussion? I mean, there’s all these discussions about warehousing where the warehouse.

Are located the Inland Empire. Obviously, you know, Southern California has been beset with warehousing and the truck traffic that goes with it. It’s not new freight is not new, but the way that we’re using it is kind of new. The way that some of these companies are setting up some of their warehouses in cities, you know, where the industrial land has been declining in value for a long time, but now it pops back up because Amazon wants a warehouse.

And so there’s demand there for just in time delivery. So I’d find that interesting and wanna kinda get your take on where that is at the federal level.

I think that argument kind of gets around the fact that, one, the environment for freight might be changing a lot in the next 10 years in terms of. We’re actually seeing legitimate automation use cases around highways, for instance, for freight, but then also are these freight vehicles getting a great deal on our existing transportation system without really paying into it?

And is there more efficient uses in terms of both one, a public dollar perspective, and then also carbon and electricity and energy used to transport all these things that maybe we need to be thinking more towards. Taking new revenue from freight and actually dedicating it to like more efficient modes like e cargo type solutions and other more freight rail oriented transportation.

If we can.

And so maybe on the outskirts of city, the feds would really wanna support transfer stations for the different truck types before they start going into the urban core, those types of things. And so there’s lots of ways to look at it, and I’m sure people have thought about it obviously, but you know, from an urban.

Transportation planning perspective, it’s not something I hear about a ton and every time I come across something about it, I find it very fascinating.

What should we be expecting? Are there ways for us to plug in to get involved until that bill passes? Maybe next year or the year after, or even the year after that?

When there are concerned people, I think that really helps to influence this conversation, but also staying organized and plugged in with organizations like us at Transportation for America. Our partners, like America Walks, the National Campaign for Transit Justice, all of these different organizations that help plug in and weigh in at the federal level.

It’s really important to ensure that one, people at the federal level and the staff especially know that there are issues in the transportation system that everyday people care about. And two, the solutions that we are thinking of are not the same. As what’s kind of being pedaled to them by some of the more traditional actors in federal advocacy thinking towards state dots.

So what Congress is concerned about right now is solving a lot of issues with streamlining and interpreting that as it being important to make it easier for state dots to use federal funding flexibly without attachment to performance goals. In reality, maybe that streamlining means making it easier for states to use National Highway Performance Program dollars to spend on any sort of transit project, because right now you can flex up to 100% of any Federal Highway Formula dollar.

Two transit, but you’re kind of brushing up against limits around the types of projects you can spend under each pod. So there’s a lot of different things that you can weigh in on. And of course, Jeff does a phenomenal job at elevating a lot of these issues. And same with all the other folks at Streets Plug that we love.

So stay plugged in there and yeah, make sure you’re bothering Congressional staff all the time.

But yeah, you can take a look at our [email protected] for those kind of updates.