(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 584: The Transit Abundance Playbook

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Will Poff-Webster of the Institute for Progress to talk about their new collection of ideas to bring transit project costs down entitled the Transit Abundance Playbook. We discuss how to translate ideas into legislation, how these ideas fit into the current transportation bill, the importance of building public sector capacity, and how to cut costs in order to build more transit projects.

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And I grew up in a neighborhood that sort of our founding myth was that we had fought the highway and won. There was an attempt to use eminent domain to take land to build a highway right through the neighborhood into downtown, and neighbors in an earlier generation fought back and won that instead the state built a subway line and a, a dedicated bike path and a park system through my neighborhood into downtown.

And so that was amazing. Jamaica Plain now has 10% bike mode share, which is the highest in Boston, and a lot of people taking public transit. So I got very excited about that stuff, and I worked in state and local government, and then I moved to the federal level and worked for Senator Brian Schatz in the US Senate, and part of my responsibilities working in the Senate was to work on public transit and how do we make it better and how do we build more of it, and it was really hard to do.

And so that’s what I’m here to talk about.

And so my mom talks about taking me on the train just back and forth on the Boston subway system because I was so into it, I would make her ride it back and forth. Or we have a ferry system in Boston, sort of little-known, so I would take that. So I was very excited about it, even as a little kid, and I think the sort of hinge moment for me was when I started going to middle school.

In, like, seventh grade, I went to a big public seven to 12th grade school in Boston, and I could just get around on my own. You know, I could take the bus by myself. I could take the subway by myself. And talking to friends later in life, I just had a level of freedom that they did not have because I didn’t have to wait to get a driver’s license to be able to do things.

And so that was great, and I think it contributes to a great urban environment, and, you know, in some ways, just growing up with it, it’s sort of the water you breathe and you don’t see it. But then, you know, my, my wife is from an ex-urban area, and so she forgot how to ride a bike because as a little kid, she learned on her own long driveway, and then she was never able to do it again because if you live in a neighborhood without any bike lanes, you just can’t do it.

And so, you know, and those sort of experiences have taught me how unusual my experience was and how it’s… it would be great to be able to provide that for everyone.

Honestly, when I was a staffer in government, at every level of government, I did not find think tanks that helpful. I usually found that the white papers they were putting out were too general for me to do anything with. They would be like, “It would be great if someone did this.” And I’m thinking, “But I want the bill text for how to do that,” right?

And so part of the reason that I joined IFP was really wanting to be at a place that is focused on that kind of last mile delivery of policy that, you know, for instance, there’s a lot of research on why transit costs are high and why transit doesn’t work as well in the US as we want it to, but there’s nowhere near as much work on so what are the specific things, what are the specific provisions that need to change in the surface reauthorization bill or in Washington State procurement law so that we actually get there.

And so IFP is one of the not very many, although not the only, organization that is kind of focused on that translational work. And that’s why it felt like the right place for me to go after a bunch of exciting things that happened in government. But, you know, it felt like it was time to do a, a tour outside of government and get to work a little more deeply on these kinds of infrastructure policy issues.

So I’m excited to be there and, um, I lead the infrastructure team at IFP, which does transportation, housing, and energy policy. So we do work on, you know, how do you make it easier to build clean energy in America, easier to build housing in America, and easier to build public transit as well. And, uh, recently I’ve mostly been focused on the transportation side, which has been very exciting.

Although if you’re interested, I- there’s also a big federal housing bill happening, including some transit-oriented development stuff. So I kind of think of housing and transit policy as linked, and there’s so much overlap. I know that’s some of your work as well. And so we sort of think of them as a single policy issue, although we sometimes work about them as different ones because it, uh, frustratingly can be, you know, different government agencies, different staffers that do each of the two.

I have some stories about talking to people at the US Department of Transportation about how do we get more housing near transit, and they just threw up their hands and said, “Well, we don’t do the housing stuff.” So also part of our job at IFP is to do linkages between these different topics and connect them for people.

So it’s, it’s cool, it’s exciting, but it’s also, um, there’s a reason that it’s hard to do this last mile policy development work because you need to know a lot about the policy issue, and you also need to know a lot about how legislation gets drafted and works. And so, you know, I have some of that expertise, but I also, in order for us to do this work, we often work with real experts in the field who have delved very deeply into some particular topic and know a lot about that, and we’re figuring out how do we turn their work into something that policymakers can take action on?

Um, I did wanna have you on to talk about a series of articles called The Transit Abundance Playbook that you all curated from, uh, folks listeners of the podcast will be really familiar with, like, uh, Alon Levy, Hayden Clarken, Stephanie Pollack, who’s a friend of ours from a long time ago doing TOD work specifically.

What was the impetus for soliciting these items? You mentioned a little bit, but I wanna kind of get into more detail about that.

But it’s been way over budget and kind of a boondoggle, and people in Hawaii are very frustrated that it’s taken so long and cost so much to build. And the part of it in the most important dense parts of the city are not done and are nowhere near being done. And so, um, my former boss got very interested in what is the cause of this problem, how do we fix it?

And so as a staffer, I went and looked, and there’s all this amazing research on why US costs are high, and actually it’s pretty recent research. It’s the Transit Cost Project, it’s the Eno Center. Circulate San Diego has done some great work. You talked to Colin Parent over there in one of my favorite episodes of your podcast, talking about the powerless broker.

Um, so there’s great work on that. But when I was thinking about, as a staffer in the Senate, how do I turn that work on the problems into specific legislation for the solution, I was coming up short on that. And so that’s my story of how this project started, is, is trying to do that work of translating.

You know, we know that America, we don’t plan enough up front, and so we end up racing to do the planning last minute. We over-design our transit projects. We do gold-plated stations and super customized buses, when what we really need are simple things that don’t cost as much that get people where we need to go.

We do low-cost procurement at the start, and then it ends up getting way more expensive later. Um, transit agencies aren’t empowered to make decisions in permitting, so they get held up by local government. The whole permitting process takes a really long time, and there’s not enough capacity inside agencies to do this, so they contract out with consultants who are not thinking about how to deliver cost effectively.

They’re thinking about, “How do I increase my billable hours?” So there’s all these problems, but we felt like more work was needed to translate them into specific solutions, and there’s this upcoming opportunity in the Federal Surface Reauthorization Bill that happens every five to seven years. It’s coming up in Washington, so there’s a chance to do something about this on the federal level, and obviously a lot of state houses and local governments thinking about this as well.

So while I was thinking about this in government, other people already at IFP were thinking about this, and they started a, a call for proposals that we did with Matt Yglesias this at Slow Boring, and so we put that out and we got tons of great ideas from people who work at transit agencies, from researchers, from practitioners, from academics, from people who are just really frustrated by the high cost of transit.

And we picked the 15 best of those ideas, and those are now public on our website at ifp.org/cheaper-transit. So it’s a pretty quick, easy URL, and, um, you can go read them if you’re interested.

We have an introductory piece that’s kind of the high-level case. You could start with that one, and that’ll be an easier thing, and then go into whichever other ones you’re interested in.

Are parts of this in that bill that’s moving forward at this very moment? ‘Cause I know that if you wait until now to start putting stuff in, it won’t get there until six years later, until the next bill, right?

The couple ones we’re most excited about are, there is delegation of authorities over permitting to transit agencies. There is some initial work on reducing the over-customization of buses so that we’ll be able to purchase buses for cheaper, and there’s also work so that transit agencies can buy land for a transit project before they go through all their federal environmental reviews.

So they can buy land when they actually start the project rather than having to wait until way later. There’s a lot more to do, and luckily the Senate has not gotten very far yet on their surface transportation bill, so there’s more opportunities in the Senate. There’s also more opportunities at the state level.

A lot of these things, you know, we have at least one federal recommendation in each of these transit playbook pieces, but in a lot of them you can see places where a transit agency or a state legislator or a mayor could change things to make it easier to build public transit. And you can also see even a few places where a private body like the Fire Protection Association or the American Bar Association could make a change that would make it easier to build transit, too.

Um, US subway and other transit construction costs about three times what global averages are. But even that masks a deeper problem, which is that because our costs are so high, we tend to build less tunneled projects. We build more light rail. And so when you take account that we do less tunneling, we look even worse.

And the worst US projects can be 10 times or more. The New York City Second Avenue subway project is somewhere between 10 and 20 times More costly than the Madrid Metro per mile. So we have other countries, you know, we’re not talking about China or a very low-cost country. We’re talking about other developed countries in Southern Europe or in Asia that are building for fractions of what it costs in the US.

US buses, which is a, a pretty simple thing, you might think, you know, a bus is a bus is a bus, but US buses can cost $500,000 to a million dollars, depending on whether it’s a diesel or electric bus, and those prices in other countries are 200 to 350 to, you know, 600, $700,000. That high amount is just for the electric.

So you’re looking at buses that are at least 30%, sometimes half as expensive as the US. And so when you think about that, that means that a US transit agency is going to be able to afford to run buses half as often as a transit agency in another country, which means people are just not gonna be able to catch the buses often.

It’s not gonna be as frequent, and it’s a problem of our own making, unfortunately. So that means it’s a, it’s a policy choice and one that we can fix, and it requires getting very deep in the weeds, so that’s why we resulted in these 15 different pieces.

There’s a lot of different details that have gone into projects, and then also just, like, not being able to keep money if you save it, right? So, like, if the FTA decides that you, you d- y- you did a good job and you went under budget, you get to give that money back, and it’s like, well, you know, that’s not an incentive to save money.

Might as well spend it somehow, right? So there’s, like, lots of things that have happened over time that I think we should be able to change in this way. Um, you mentioned the bus procurement thing. I think that’s really fascinating and, and one of the pieces in here, especially the costs that other countries can get buses for because of a lot of this specialization.

And I’m wondering if, like, the specialization is partially because… Well, maybe you could explain to me a little bit what the issue is, because it feels like, uh, part of the problem might be some of the fare box stuff with the different companies that are very proprietary, which y- obviously we’re having a problem here in the Bay Area with Cubic.

But there’s, there’s just a lot of mess that’s going on with that specifically that leads downhill into other issues.

And I should also say they’re not the only ones. Brookings Institute has done good work on this. Eno is working on it. But the, the overall problem that they describe is that the federal government reimburses eighty to eighty-five cents for every dollar that’s spent on a transit agency’s bus. And so what that means is that transit agency is only spending a small fraction of the overall cost of a bus, and that means it’s basically free money.

So what the transit agency often will do is they will say, “We want these super specific components for the bus.” The contractors will advertise, “We can make a special bespoke floor for your bus. It’ll look like no other floor on any other bus.” So instead of simple buses that are used across maybe any place that has a similar climate, you get a different bus for every single transit agency in America, uh, with very few exceptions, and tons of customization on these buses.

So Rohan and Alex have a pretty simple answer, which is that the federal government should establish a benchmark price, which is how much a bus typically costs, and that’s the amount they should reimburse. So if you, as a transit agency, buy a bus that costs less than that, then you’re getting fully reimbursed by the federal government.

But if you’re buying a really expensive bus, that’s coming out of your own budget. And the hope is that that will result in a more economies of scale-based bus market, where a bus manufacturer can sell the same bus to many different agencies rather than having to customize so much for particular agencies.

Now, that’s not the only problem in high bus costs in America. There’s also Build America, Buy America restrictions that require companies to set up US manufacturing plants when, you know, maybe it’s easier to buy a bus from Canada. There’s some interesting ideas out there as well on things like that.

Like, for instance, allowing transit agencies to buy a certain number of buses from an international company before that company has to set up a US affiliate. So there’s a lot to do here. But at its core, if we just start reimbursing for what we want, that’s a way that we can start bringing costs down to international averages.

And so we split it into different categories. We have categories around improving planning, improving cost-effective design, like buses, procurement policy, coordination between local governments, utilities, and government agencies, permitting for projects, and state capacity, increasing the capacity of transit agencies to build their own projects.

And so I, I’m wondering, like, how that plays into some of these discussions as well. Like, this is good policy for folks who want transit, but, like, what does that mean in terms of the culture war aspect of it, where there’s a lot of folks who just don’t want transit at all? So if you have all these great ideas, and you’re like, “Hey, w- what if we did this?”

They’re like, “No, we don’t want this. We just don’t want that thing, even if you make it better.”

In my observation, a lot of the advocacy for transit is about getting more money for transit, and that’s really important. We have to fund these projects. We need to fund agencies to deliver these projects. But we are trying to tell our allies in the transit community it’s just as important to fight for cost-effective, rapid delivery of projects because we could spend billions of dollars to build just a few subway stations, or we could spend billions of dollars to build dozens of subway stations if we build at the cost of Madrid.

And because there’s also that other side of the aisle that doesn’t always want transit, there’s no- never gonna be as much money for it as we want, and so let’s spend the money we can get as well as we can. I will say, as someone who used to be a congressional staffer, I think there are arguments to make to Republicans and fiscal conservatives about transit.

It’s true they’re not naturally in favor, although there are some exceptions. Like, I was able to get Republicans from Indiana and Utah to co-sponsor public transit bills because there is public transit in those states, and they do care about serving their constituents. So every so often, we’re able to do it.

But there is an argument that, you know, we should be just spending government dollars more effectively. These are taxpayer dollars, and why not actually, you know, in one year be able to fund a bunch of projects across different states instead of only funding two projects because it costs so, so much. So we have gotten some excitement there.

I also think that transit is more broadly applicable than a lot of people think. Most rural communities have some bus network and some bus system, and so part of the reason we’re focused on both the urbanist stuff from where I grew up, where there’s a subway system, and also buses and rural transit is trying to make those connections across the aisle and, and across different kinds of communities in the US.

So you know, the, the message here is if you care about the effective expenditure of public dollars, then you should care about improving transit project delivery. And if you care about transit project delivery, you should care about spending dollars effectively.

Although I, I’ve been critical of APTA for listening to them too much in the past, um, and I think that’s why organizations like NACTO actually were founded because of that kind of bias towards those systems. But I do think that if that gets them to listen, then that’s a, that’s definitely a good thing.

has a great sense of the problems here, but obviously could not speak about them publicly.

Keep going.

And so I always take that a little personally, even though I, I know I shouldn’t. But it’s one of those things where it’s hard to push back on folks who’s like, “Well, why not, why isn’t it built yet? Why isn’t it done?” And I’m like, “Well, it’s coming. They’re building track now, right? They just did a procurement for, uh, track laying, and so we’ll get there eventually, but it’s slower.”

And also, given my wife is Chinese and we’ve been back the last two years, seeing 48,000 miles of high-speed rail versus what’s happening in California is, is, can be a bit frustrating, too.

I think a lot of people in the US have the perspective, you know, it’s just hard to do big things. We just gotta get the money for it and need to do it for decades. And of course, that’s partly true. These projects do take a while. They are large physical infrastructure. But it is not this hard everywhere.

There are places that do it better than we do. Italy, for instance, has a great model. One of our pieces is about how in Italy, instead of a poor transit agency having to go and beg a local government for a permit to tear up the road to build something that is then gonna benefit everyone for the long-term future, in Italy, they have a conference of services process where everyone who wants something out of a transit project and everyone who needs to do something for the transit project to happen all gets in a room and has a defined process, and there’s one decision-maker who gets to decide, “You get this, you get that.

The transit project is going to pay for you to rebuild your park next to the station, but they’re not gonna pay for a new police kiosk, you know, uh, two miles away,” and make sure the project can actually move forward in a reasonable time period and doesn’t get stuck the way, unfortunately, lots of projects in California, but not just California.

You know, it’s happened in Seattle. It’s happened in Boston. It’s happened in Washington, DC. I think one other thing is there are a lot of invisible failures. So I live in Washington, DC, now. We built the Silver Line, which is a very exciting new transit line to the airport, but we built it right in the middle of a highway.

And the reason we did that is we were so worried about having to deal with all the normal problems of utility relocation and land acquisition and local permitting that we ended up having most of the land right around the station be asphalt that cars drive on so that it’s really hard for people to get to the station.

And if you want transit-oriented development, it’s gotta be right next to a highway where you’re breathing in all the fumes. So it’s not the best place to build transit, but we do it there because we haven’t fixed all these other permitting and governance problems that will make it easier to build transit where we really need it.

I like a lot of the recommendations where specifically, like Eric’s and, and Stephanie’s are talking about trying to figure out how to do this planning early on so that you can actually get good projects. I wonder if you all also had a conversation at a higher level about regional planning as well, because I feel like that plays into some of this as well, where highways have this easy ability to just say, “Okay, well, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna put it here, and you’re gonna like it,” versus transit, where we have to have these whole votes, elections.

Uh, Hayden talks about this obviously. We have to have an election about it, and then we talk about it for five more years, and then we might get the State of Texas and the folks there might get against it, and so you have to fight for your funding every single year instead of actually planning a project.

So I’m wondering what, like, the higher level discussions are before you get into that lower level planning discussion, the details that are in here.

They’re probably getting federal money. Most projects are funded by federal money. We want those federal dollars to come only with the right strings attached. So you want strings attached to make sure that the project is delivered in a cost-effective way, but you don’t want a million procedural requirements you have to comply with from FTA just to be able to build your project.

Stephanie Pollack’s piece is very eloquent on that, that FTA is often more focused on compliance than they are on actually doing project delivery. You want to do that planning early and upfront so that you anticipate the problems that are gonna come. Currently, our process doesn’t really let transit agencies do that.

They have to do this back of a napkin thing and then later do more of the process, and then you want the project to proceed quickly and expeditiously in a process that everyone has decided this is something we want to move ahead. So that’s where the local permitting is really important. Exemptions from permitting laws that are often designed for the kinds of projects that are not good for the environment, and we need to be careful and, you know, check are we hurting the environment.

But we all know that transit is good for the environment. It’s gonna reduce emissions over time. It’s gonna reduce air pollution over time. I’m not saying there are no trade-offs there, but when we collectively decide that we want to build something, we should figure out how to do it without it taking decades.

And each of these pieces in their own ways are, are different parts of trying to get there.

But, like, for example, we had Alexis Madrigal on to talk about his book, “The Pacific Circuit,” and he talked about West Oakland and the impacts of building not just the terminals there for shipping, but also the BART construction that went through a neighborhood that was once vibrant. And so there’s a whole bunch of things that came together to make that happen.

But also, uh, you know, there was definitely some impacts there. And so how can we be sensitive to those impacts if we’re gonna be building these projects, building them fast, but building them, you know, fairly?

If it’s a low-income neighborhood, those are the folks who most need transit access, right? We shouldn’t only be building transit through wealthier neighborhoods where no one will be displaced, but people are more likely to own a car. There’s a pendulum swing from that to stasis and being unable to build anything and unable to serve people, but listening to local communities and, and listening to the voices of people who are impacted.

And we need to get it right. We need a, a balance there where real impacts are taken into account and considered and mitigated, but also projects that benefit the public and, and benefit low-income Americans can proceed and aren’t stuck forever. You know, I, I sometimes think about how this works in the housing context, where there are these interesting studies that traditional community engagement processes, where you’re trying to build an affordable housing building, and people are gonna show up at the zoning board and yell about how they don’t want it to be built.

Um, those kind of processes don’t engage renters, young people. They are disproportionately dominated by elderly people who are lawyers and, you know, architects and very knowledgeable about these kinds of things, that are homeowners. Even in majority areas of color, it tends to be white people who are showing up to those meetings, too.

And, you know, I’ve personally observed the same thing happen in transportation policy. So, I do think we need a different way of doing this. These proposals are also not comprehensive, right? We are suggesting ways to nudge back toward the right decision. But I guess the way I would think about it is We should elect elected officials, we should tell them we care about transit, we should trust them to make the trade-offs, and if they make them the wrong way, we should punish them at the ballot box rather than having everything take 10 years of procedure in order to go ahead to make sure that no one is ever negatively impacted ever.

Um, we need a better balance there that, that makes sure that we’re taking account of negative effects, but not over-emphasizing that to the degree that we can’t get the positives that we know transit can bring.

Which of these papers might somebody who’s really not, like, deep in it get the best?

Because guess what? Trains are made of metal. There’s not a lot of fires in train stations. It’s not that safety isn’t important, it’s just that this kind of extra expense doesn’t seem to do anything. When other countries have studied are we gonna follow the American model or the European model for building subways, they go with the European one because they’re like, “We don’t want to spend all that extra money.”

That’s one of them. The bus one is pretty simple. We should pay the actual cost of a bus rather than paying 85% of whatever you end up deciding to spend on a bus. So, you know, there’s a… We should let transit agencies buy land when they actually want to build the project instead of waiting five years to complete a book report before they’re allowed to buy land.

Um- There’s a few of them that you can describe in a kind of simple way, even if there’s some details in the weeds there.

To give, uh, people an idea of how much paperwork goes into some of these projects now, which is ridiculous.

It’s literally bulletproof.

And, I mean, the conclusion that our authors come to is that that creates this avenue for the small percentage of people who do not want transit, who, you know, probably are drivers and, and don’t care about this. They just have so many ways to stop a project and delay it until it dies. And so instead, we should be listening to the majority that voted for these projects and wants them to go ahead.

That doesn’t make any sense. We should be making it at least as easy to build transit.

I, I found that fascinating.

It’s not the government directly building the thing. It’s a government procuring a contractor who builds it. And Alon talks about how in the US, the main way we build transit is we give a big lump sum contract to a private company, and then that company builds the project. And guess what? The company comes back partway through and they say, “Oh, we had all these changes.

We need to charge more.” And the reason we- they do that is that a lot of states require that the transit agency pick whoever has the lowest bid. So, you know, if three contractors say, “We’ll build this project,” and one of them comes in at half the cost of the others, you gotta pick that, even if you know they’re not gonna be able to do it for that amount.

And then the contractor makes up the difference with these change orders later. So Alon has this great idea, which is that we should say upfront, you know, we expect this will be X number of cubic feet of concrete, X number of steel girders, and if the price of concrete goes up, the, the contract can go up by that amount.

If we decide we need to buy more concrete, it goes up by that amount. But it’s not this undefined change order process where the project has already started, the transit agency really wants it to get built, and so if they get sued by their contractor or the contractor asks for more money, the transit agency kind of doesn’t have any choice.

We have another procurement piece which is similar from Anthony Potts, and his argument is when the federal government gives money for transit projects or when state governments decide to build them, they should give transit projects exceptions from the state procurement rules that require lowest cost bidding.

They should let transit projects pick whoever they think is gonna build the best project in a reasonable time, rather than having to pick the lowest bidder. And that’s how transit construction happens in other countries, and they actually end up with a lower total cost. Even if the initial bid comes in higher, you have lower maintenance costs, you have less change orders, and so you end up with a better project at the end of the day.

And then, you know- Regular citizens assume it’s corruption. They think, “Oh, there must be kickbacks somewhere. Someone must be paying someone off.” But that’s not actually what’s going on. Actually, what’s going on is we put in place laws that require transit agencies to pick contractors that they know are not gonna be able to do the job.

It always seems silly to me that we pick an alignment and then we say, “Oh, well, we ought to go through the NEPA process to make sure it’s the right one.” Well, everybody picked it already. It’s frustrating that we have to go through that process again after we had an election, then take five years, and then people get frustrated with the process.

It sort of requires you to look before you leap for a project that might really have negatives for the environment. But it’s a procedural law. If it comes out at the end of the day that actually there are tons of environmental negatives, it’s just a book report and the judge has to say the project can move forward.

So it doesn’t actually make any judgment about whether a project is good or bad for the environment. But guess who is making that judgment? The voters are deciding, “I want this project to be built. It’s gonna improve the environment, it’s gonna improve the climate, it’s gonna take cars off the road.

That’s why I want it to be built.” And they’re making that decision, and then we’re second-guessing that decision with years and years of paperwork afterward.

Um, Andrew Miller talks about this, Philip Ploch. How important is state capacity? I think it’s something that, um, I just posted an item in my best of newsletter that’s coming out tomorrow about how the Reagan administration really messed up affordable housing o- over the long term, uh, and m- most- a lot of that is because of the loss of experts in the administration that could kind of bird dog those things.

And so I think we’ve lost a lot of expertise over time, and I know that there’s a kind of over-reliance on consultants that people talk about, but this expertise, this state capacity is a really important part of this.

So they’ll get an international consultant to come in and, you know, manage other consultants that then do studies, and none of these consultants are actually in charge of the project, but they know more than the agency does. And so they’re telling the agency, “We need to do another study. We need to make sure that this works.”

Oh, and guess what? There’s gonna be a lot of billable hours that come along with that. I’m not saying that consultants aren’t important. Paul Lewis himself, who wrote the piece criticizing the use of consultants, is a consultant for transit projects. But he recognizes the problem, and I think he has a great rule of thumb, which is about sixty percent of the staff working on a transit project should be staff who work at the transit agency themselves.

There should also be specialized consultants who come in with particular expertise, but that shouldn’t be most of the people working on it. And even more importantly, the top managers of the project, the people in charge of the project, they should all be in-house. We shouldn’t have consultants managing other consultants.

We should have the government actually responsible for this, and we need to pay government workers enough to incentivize people to take that jobs. We need to reform government HR so that people can be hired in a, in an efficacious way to take these jobs. We need to rebuild our transit agencies so that they have the internal capacity to deliver these projects.

That’s a theme that runs through so many of our pieces. Phil Plotch wrote about how transit agencies are not empowered to share information. The federal government used to fund these conferences where transit agencies would talk to each other about failures and successes. We need to be doing that more.

We have a couple other pieces. Jackson Moore Otto wrote about how transit agencies can build capacity by the federal government giving them more loan financing, so they can do more smaller projects, uh, one at a time and have kind of stable federal financing. We even have one of these pieces is about better use of technology in transit planning and having more access to data and past reports for transit plans of what prior projects have done, what the utilities are in that location.

And so we’re trying to create a situation in which the staff of the transit agencies themselves are well-resourced, have enough capacity, and have the information at their fingertips to make as many of the decisions as they can so that they don’t have to take on as much white-collar consulting.

Sometimes people think that the big problem in American transit is high union rates. And you know, it is true that there are some situations in which unions raise the cost of transit. You know, for instance, we could have more automated trains in the US. Canada has automated the Vancouver metro system for forty years, and it runs very easily.

It, it has great service. And you know, the people who would be running the trains are instead running buses, and so they don’t have as many bus operator shortages as we do. And that is a union problem in the US that we need to solve by taking care of workers rather than having veto-prone negotiation processes.

But the reality is that countries that have very much higher unionization rates than the United States actually have lower transit costs. And the reason is that the bigger cost in the US is white-collar labor, and it’s these consultants that, you know, if we had them in-house, uh, they would be lower cost.

You know, we should also pay the in-house workers more. But there’s a lot we need to do to be empowering transit agencies, both with, say, capacity, with the ability to make decisions, with the ability to deliver so that we can actually get these projects done.

Aidan Mackenzie talks about this, and I also think about like the Hong Kong model, the Rail Plus Property model, and a lot of those things, in addition to the idea that just, even just procuring land ahead of time helps you do those utility relocations and stuff early on. But we’re allergic to land and the connected transportation, and your, uh, analogy earlier about the folks at DOT saying that we don’t want to have anything to do with housing is, is apt to be, but because we do need to have things to do, because how, where are you going to get your transit ridership?

It’s not like you’re driving a car and you’re coming from a suburb. You’re actually connecting people and places, and the access portion of this is the most important part in getting people to destinations. So I’m curious about your thoughts on that, the land, and I know that there’s nothing in here specifically about Hong Kong’s Rail Plus Property model, and there’s probably a US way to do it.

But I think it’s really important that we should allow these agencies to actually, um, make money, uh, on the investment that they make, uh, because they make this investment, and we should get something back out of it as a community.

At that time, the way we funded transit was with the housing and commercial development that went alongside it. That’s how we funded the railroads across the country. So it’s a great model. It’s still practiced elsewhere in the world. It’s definitely something we need to be doing more in America, and, and just in general, you know, I do housing and transportation policy, and thinking about them as a connected conversation where it’s really, it’s a failure of governance where we build a transit line and then we mandate acre-sized single-family homes next to the transit line because almost no one’s going to be able to take advantage of that, and the people who are able to take advantage of it are going to be people who can afford million-dollar homes.

It’s not going to be people who can’t afford a car who need transit the most. So there’s a lot of changes that need to have there. Our piece on this is sort of a first stab at it. It’s about land, you know, not only for this, but also just you need to acquire land to be able to build the transit line itself.

This is a problem in America across all of what’s called linear infrastructure, whether it’s an electrical transmission line for clean energy or a subway line or a bus rapid transit line. We need to be able to, uh, buy land in a row so that we can build something that the whole public will enjoy, and we make it really hard to do that.

With all the paperwork and processes and procedures that need to happen before you’re allowed to do that, um, by the time you can, you really should have already started looking at this. Aidan’s piece is great because it doesn’t just look at land acquisition. It also looks at utility relocation and siting for, you know, construction activities, all of what transit people call early works.

Stephanie Pollack talks about this a bit as well. All the early works that need to happen early on in a project for it to go well later, right now we don’t let happen. Stephanie Pollack has this great example from the Green Line Extension in Boston, where they were trying to get a, a rail track turned into one that would be available for light rail, and they were getting really high bids from private contractors because there was another railroad right nearby, and they were worried about relocating that railroad and litigation risk, being sued by the private railroad.

So the transit system just did their own work first to move that other line so that they could then get bids to do the main project for a much more reasonable cost with lower risk. But those kinds of things are very difficult to do today, and we should be encouraging transit agencies to do this work up front so that projects go more smoothly and you don’t read an article three years into the project that it’s been delayed another year because of some legal snafu.

But what they did found is they actually improved the capacity of the engineers, uh, the, the actual capacity of being able to build these lines because they had people in-house. And so they built a line, they built the housing around it, so they had people that were good at real estate, they had people that were good at building and engineering for the, the, each of these projects.

But over time, because they kept on doing it and they kept on extending the lines, they actually built up the capacity, the engineering capacity that would’ve disappeared over time unless, uh, they were actually continuing, uh, to build this and they got the funding from each of these projects. And so it’s a really fascinating connection between the land use issue as well as that capacity issue from an engineering standpoint.

So definitely check that out if you get a chance.

And so building that capacity is so important. There’s actually another piece that we’re working on, um, that my colleague Reed Schwartz just published. It’s about how New York State, I think, yeah, New York State has a little-known provision that, um, state assembly member Zohran Mamdani, before he got elected mayor, championed, that says that you can levy property taxes, like a land value tax basically, on land around newly constructed transit.

And so we’re thinking about whether that’s a good model for building the Interborough Expressway in New York between Brooklyn and Queens. So there are more ways to do this in America. I think we should be doing it all across the country. We should think about how to better tie together housing, other development, and transit, um, so it makes the transit more efficient and more funded.

But there’s definitely a lot more work to do here, and there are, there are all these little ways to do it, you know. Uh, overall, this project is focused on what are the kind of niche ways to make these changes happen? How do we translate this big problem that can sometimes feel too big into a, a series of smaller solutions that might actually work?

Aren’t they all part of the same government?” But that’s not how we do it in America, and I was very excited to learn that Italy has a way of actually solving that problem without having to have everything under one roof. You still have different agencies. So that was very surprising. I was also very surprised about just how deep the procurement problems are, that we just procure in totally the wrong way.

And, you know, it’s funny that procurement is so complicated, but there really is kind of a simple fix to that one. And I think just in general, um, you know, I was worried that this was gonna be one of those problems where it’s just so hard to solve. We don’t know how to solve it. But actually, once you dig into the weeds, there, there are identifiable causes and there are identifiable solutions.

So that was kind of the optimistic endpoint of this for me. Um, not that it’ll be easy. You know, we gotta do this all over America in many different places, and probably across a long period of time, but, you know, it was surprising to learn how bad the problem is, and it was also, on the plus side, surprising to learn that there really are things that we can do.

How do we build more of the things we say we want and the things we need in America, again, to, to create a more abundant society, especially for folks who are less well off, who, who need this the most. So anyway, those are, those are two ways to reach it. It’s on Slow Boring as well, um, Matt Yglesias’ Substack, where he sometimes covers transit issues.

So we’re gonna be… The next step for us is talking to people in Congress, talking to people in state houses about how they can make these changes happen. But we would love, we love feedback from, you know, if you see a problem in here that we didn’t address, it is true that it’s not comprehensive. Like, we have no piece in here on how stations are over-designed and customized, just the way buses are.

That’s another big problem. I’m sure there are other problems people can point out that we want to tackle as well, and if we got anything wrong, we want to know about that too, ’cause this is gonna be a living project that we propose to policymakers.

You know, for instance, I’m from the East Coast, as I said, but I, uh, got the chance to meet last week with an amazing group in the Seattle area that did a campaign called Build The Damn Trains, which could be the title of this whole thing, Build The Damn Trains. And they are facing a problem where the voters approved a really exciting and extensive expansion of Sound Transit light rail across the Seattle region, and guess what?

The costs have gotten so much higher that now Sound Transit is saying, “We got to cut all this and build way less than we promised. Way less people are going to get transit.” And so, you know, I’m excited to talk with them about how do we actually get to build the damn trains by using some of these ideas.

And, and you know, we’re also gonna need more money, right? It’s not gonna just be able to be done on the cost efficiency side. We’re gonna need to make the argument that transit needs more money, but it’s gonna be a lot easier to make that argument if we’re getting more transit for every dollar we spend as well.

So I hope there are folks like that all over America that want to take this on and dig into the weeds and figure out how to fix this.