(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 569: The Annual Prediction Show with Yonah Freemark

This week we’re joined once again by Yonah Freemark. In Part 2, we talk about our predictions from last year and what we got right and wrong on high speed rail and transportation funding, then we make new ones for the coming year that include Seattle and Mexico.

Listen in to the episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our episode archive.

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

Last year we were talking about research getting gutted by TRB. Mm. And sadly, that hasn’t ended. A number of the university transportation centers were killed, including one that I was on the advisory board of the Center for Equitable Transit Oriented Communities today. Trump cut the endangerment finding.

You know, obviously that’s gonna be litigated, but it’s another thing just kind of hacking away. But the time of this episode comes out, even more crazy stuff could have happened. I don’t know. So I don’t wanna take that lightly. But we’re, we’re very human, both Fiona and I, and we can’t be serious all the time or else, you know, life wouldn’t be really worth living.

So. I do wanna, you know, take that into mind as we have these kind of fun discussions about what we discussed last year and then what we’re gonna predict for next year.

My first prediction was that the MTA would crush the feds in their congestion pricing lawsuit. I said, this will win all day every day in court. And the road rules secretary can pound sand. Uh, and you said I would be wrong. Oh no, but I think I’m correct. I think I’m you.

’cause they, I think

Um, we’re gonna have some other folks come on soon to talk about it too, from the MTA hopefully. But yeah, it’s just such a big, it’s such a big win and so I’m glad that that’s going on. So your first one, your prediction was that another city in the United States is going to have a mayor announce a congestion pricing plan.

It looks like New Zealand passed a thing in late 2025 to do a scheme. Okay. Uh, and then Jacob Wasserman in the LA Times said that LA should price the airport should price the airport. Oh,

Yes. And then the Massachusetts Legislature’s Transportation Committee, they brought it up in 2025. And leaders in Boston. Were talking about it just this last week. I believe so it’s talked about, but it hasn’t been announced.

And you know, she was a transit advocate. Yeah, that was her thing. So I’m looking forward to, maybe Seattle is the horse to bet on and Roger Rudick at Streets blog Guest f floated it a couple weeks ago as well. So, uh, you know, it’s in the conversation. It’s in the conversation. Okay. So. Jonah number two, this is your second prediction.

New York legislators are going to come up with a new tax source to support the MTAs capital plan. And I’m saying this in part because I think the congestion pricing, as I said before, is going to fail in the courts.

I wish it would be an increase in the state gas tax. I don’t think that happened. They did

Right.

How are they gonna pay for that? I can tell you how they’re gonna do it with a gas tax increase. So they need to do it.

That’s the plan anyways. So I think, I think I got that right. Is that, is that a close one?

So that’s my question is like, which one is the first one to go in terms of like, building the section that’s actually gonna connect mm-hmm. The Central Valley with a major destination like San Francisco or Los Angeles.

It’s like. Something has gone wrong there insofar as there is no real plan to connect that line to actual, you know, the main population centers of LA and I don’t know. W why that is not being, I mean, I guess the answer is because it’s so expensive. It’s so expensive to figure out how, how to make that connection seems it’s like a major gap.

No.

From, uh, San Francisco to la I just don’t know, like I, I guess I get why people would use it now. You know, you drive out there to the desert Park, your car. And then you take the high speed rail so you don’t have to drive the rest of the way. Like I, you know’s, I guess it’s

The loop in Houston. I was like really confused by that and it was because of cost. So that’s kind of a negative of some of these private plans, is that like they don’t wanna shoulder the cost of that major, you know, investment to actually get to the population center, which would actually drive. Their ridership.

And so I think that’s a big problem.

And I was like, it’s not, not good for a number of reasons, but the main reason is that how are you gonna get it from city to city? You’re not gonna get into the center of the city without spending a lot of money. And they were like, ah, whatever, whatever. And I was like, well, it’s dead now. So,

Is there a single, uh, what happened to all those? They all those didn’t listen to me. These companies got created around the Hyperloop. Yeah. Yet again, Elon Musk, like, you know, poisoning the conversation

The reason why he drew it out on that napkin was to kill HighSpeed Rail in California.

That’s not, there’s no cap and trade money coming from like, uh, China or from the Cascadia or anything like that. Maybe in the future, who knows? I wrote down here, as you predicted, the administration was able to claw back money and California didn’t fight it because there were so many fights that were had.

So,

At the moment things can change. Okay. So, uh, Jonah’s number three. I keep thinking of the Canada High-Speed Rail project ’cause I just spoke with somebody who was involved in that project. I asked you if you had some insider trading last year and, and you said you, you denied it. Uh, it’s a moderate level prediction that might’ve seemed crazy like a month ago, but because of the Trump backlash, it might be coming back.

I think that the liberals are going to win the election, which they did, and I think they’re going to double down on getting the project moving forward. And I think one of the things we’ll see is an announcement that the project will move forward more quickly than the five years before construction, which is what they initially announced.

There

They selected a general route, they’re pushing it forward, they’re doing public consultations, they want 72 trains a day. Yep. And so, you know, they’re going forward with it.

Okay. So you got a, I’m giving you a point for that.

They should. Yeah. So I don’t think, I don’t think that’s happened.

I can’t remember where it was. I was trying to look for it last night, but I couldn’t find it. But I think I’ve seen that where they’re like, we’re gonna stop you from flexing money to, to transit. Yeah. So they probably have tried to, you know, curtail that even though like that was, uh, ice tea in the 1990s.

That was the first time you could actually flex money for different things. They had the CMAC money and a bunch of other stuff where you could take highway money and move it to transit. But the first time really anybody did it with some vigor was when Josh Shapiro did it. So.

But, uh, yeah, under the Trump administration is sort of throwing that away.

Would be decided by Congress in a new infrastructure law, which has not been sort of passed yet. Uh, I mean,

As I said before, they have been. Not funding new transit projects through the discretionary transit grant program. So I don’t know. I mean, maybe it hasn’t been Congress standing in the way, but they certainly haven’t stopped the Trump administration from trying to kill some of this stuff.

I didn’t write down the source. Yeah, actually it was ENE News. It was politico’s, ENE news, and then Russell McMurray after TRB. The commissioner of the Georgia Department of Transportation, president of Aashto said we need to sort of get back to basics, and so the states are pushing to preserve the federal government’s top line funding for Rhodes Bridges Transit railroads in the next transportation bill.

But they’re urging Washington policymakers to shift the funds into long established formulas rather than discretionary grants specifically said in ENE news. So they’re gonna try. You said, but they’re gonna wait, probably like you said, until the bill, but they’re on record is saying that’s what they want to happen.

They said this all, I think that they’ve been told to say this a million times, but what basics means to them is more road funding. Right. Right. Just building more roads and stuff. And it’s not anything to do with building more transit and railroads and those other things. It’s actually just let’s build more roads.

At some point, with all the positivity that we’ve set out today, coming from the electrification of, of transportation, it’s gonna go that direction. And so you can’t rely on the gas tax forever.

There is appetite to impose a fee on electric vehicles, but that will raise very little money.

Did you see this? It was in Streets Bog, yeah. A couple of days ago. Kia reported on it, and I think the folks at Brookings have been pushing this, uh, it sounds like something a d was talking about. Yeah. To mayor. But basically there’s a bill out there that says like, and I think this was Curbed directly from a Brookings report.

18% of the roads, or 16% of the money goes to, uh, NPOs when they have like 75% of the roads or something like that. And so state dots basically been hoarding money. And so there’s a bipartisan bill that would basically give more formula grants to regions instead of just to the state dots. They give it to the NPOs directly.

And so that’s interesting and that’s a positive. That’s totally against this other thing, like back to basics. But it’s a basic, in a different way, I guess, which is, you know, support the places where the roads are, not just where the highway departments want ’em to go or want ’em to spend money on.

Yeah.

Executive director of the transit agency talking about a report that was just released on how they’re behind. So this report is maybe laying the groundwork for a larger discussion, maybe. I mean, that’s the best thing I can come up with. But this is your fantastical one. So you didn’t have much hope for this one.

I,

Oh, yes.

Going across the phenomen, growing across the lake is gonna be easy. Bellevue, Redmond, the Bell red corridor. It’s gonna be huge. And, and Popin, right?

But I like that. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. They’ll build two, at least two bus rapid transit lines, and maybe they’re the ones that are already in the, you know, the McGinnis one that the Adams administration got in trouble for. Uh, that one could be put on the table back really quick. Right. Isn’t that a bus driver chance lane?

Yes. Or that was just like a Yes. Yeah,

I think, yeah. Frankly, the people in New York City mayor’s office really wanna get that stuff done, so Yeah. Let’s, let’s hope that they actually start building something by the end of the year. That’d be awesome.

And I’m gonna predict that they’re gonna make an announcement that they’re going to plan a high speed rail corridor from Mexico City to Guadalajara by the end of the year. So that’s my, that’s my prediction.

Right?

Uh, MTC. And, you know, we’re doing pretty well right now. I mean, Bart’s not, you know, it’s obviously not coming back as fast as like the New York City subway, but it’s more of a commuter network. Yeah. Um, but Muni has been doing pretty well. We’ve been, you know, had good service. I feel like, I feel like it’s, it’s packed on some of the lines, like some of the lines that I ride anyways.

They’re actually more fooled now because they’ve got good service than they had before the pandemic. And so the 22, the 24, the Van Ness line has the bus rapid transit sections on it. Like those are actually really doing well. So. I just think we’re doing pretty well, hopefully. And then also, I saw an article recently that said VTA was able to use AI and their traffic signals to speed up their service 20%.

So travel time increases. It’s, it’s really good. So that’s my prediction is that we’ll pass the ballot measure.

Yes. Because the electorate this year is gonna hate Trump.

So maybe that, that should be my prediction that that other, another major city will put forward a major referendum for transit funding this

Center for Center for Transportation Excellence at cft. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. They, they do all the ballot measures. They see whether they passed or not. Usually it’s like 85% positive rate or something like that. Yeah, they usually do. Okay. And so my third one, uh, I don’t know if I have a fantastical one this year.

I, I wasn’t feeling very, um, I wasn’t feeling very positive, I guess, when I was doing this recently. Uh, but my third one is an international prediction. Okay? I predict that China will slow down on its high speed rail and inner city rail and metro expansion due to the economy and, you know, economic headwinds that are going

That’s the opposite of fantastical. But I think, I think I agree with you. Also there’s some limits. I mean if you look at the networks they’ve built already,

’cause you can connect some of the smaller cities, but there’s no big connections to be made anymore, I don’t think.

Operate it.

Is this a public good or is it, you know, should we be,

Some people are having it there about whether, because I think they’re losing money on a lot of roots that they had built, even though there is a big benefit, you know, in terms of money, you can always calculate these cost benefit analysis in, in ridiculous ways. But I think we always, and maybe they’re doing it too, is like underestimate the actual benefits of these systems.

And others, these are sort of like these small scale metros that I think they just opened one in Xian, if I’m, I’m looking at my map right now to see if I can find it.

And it’s gonna be interesting to see if more projects like that are funded in China over the next year or so, as sort of like a, a next step for their metro investment.

Like I, I know that there’s a dead one in J High. Yeah, it used to be there. Um, but that’s not there anymore. The tracks are still there. The stations are still there, but they don’t run service on it anymore. They just stopped it. So, and then, you know, Macau is doing like the light metro thing where they’re like doing these elevated automated vehicles, kind of like what they do in, um, it’s almost like a people mover more than a metro actually,

Right, exactly. Yeah. And I think. In China, they know how to do those pretty cheaply. And so

City and state money to do the projects that they want to do. So Philadelphia, Chinatown, and Atlanta, the Stitch without federal dollars.

Well that is it for our predictions this year, Yona. Where can folks find out more about Transit Explorer and your work and everything that you’re doing?