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Welcome to CoMotion Deep Dive, a weekly examination of an issue or technology shaping the future of mobility. If this email was forwarded, you can sign up here.

It’s hard to imagine two groups as diametrically opposed as the League of Conservation Voters, the venerable environmental group, and Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group funded largely by Charles Koch and the late David Koch, the petrochemical magnates. And yet they’re both listed as sponsors of the YIMBYtown conference, where activists, academics and policymakers from around the U.S. gathered this week in New Haven, Conn. to attack America’s housing crisis.

YIMBY stands for “Yes In My Backyard,” the antithesis of NIMBY, “Not In My Backyard.” The YIMBY movement seeks to reduce regulatory barriers that either block or drive up the cost of housing, such as single-family zoning, minimum lot size requirements, parking mandates and height restrictions.

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Despite the presence of some conservative groups, the “vibes” at YIMBYtown are overwhelmingly liberal. I can say with a great deal of confidence that Donald Trump had a very poor showing among the conference’s roughly 900 attendees. Climate change, racial equity and supporting public transit were common themes among the dozens of panels held over the three-day event. In the very first address of the conference, Redfin economist Daryl Fairweather noted glumly that it is particularly hard for people to find affordable housing in cities and states with strong LGBTQ protections.

But also present at the conference were elected officials and advocates who are indifferent or hostile to many of those same progressive causes. One panel, “Everything is Bigger in Texas: Crafting Coalitions for Transformative Housing Reform,” included an official from the ultraconservative, oil-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation and one from the progressive social justice group, Texas Appleseed, to discuss how they collaborated on recent bills forcing Texas cities to allow more multifamily housing.

“It’s really incredible to see some of the most far left groups and some of the most far right groups that on any other issue are on 100% opposing sides,” said Nicole Nosek, founder of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, which played a key role in coordinating the cross-ideological campaign for housing legislation in the Lone Star State.

The bills approved by Texas’s GOP-controlled legislature mirrored laws approved the previous year by the Democratic City Council of Austin, the liberal capital that is usually at odds with the state’s conservative leaders.

To get a sense on how the movement has evolved, I sat down with Sonja Trauss, widely regarded as one of the YIMBY movement’s pioneers. In 2011 Trauss was a teacher in San Francisco, frustrated by the city government’s hesitance to allow new apartments despite skyrocketing rents. In an effort to counter the power of homeowner groups that blocked new development, Trauss founded the cheekily-named Bay Area Renters Federation (BARF), which eventually broke off into several different groups, including YIMBY Action and its legal arm, YIMBY Law, which Trauss now heads.

Given the movement’s ideological diversity, I asked Trauss if she ever worries that some of the strident progressive rhetoric at the conference would alienate more conservative members of the movement, or vice versa.

“I actually don’t worry about alienating members of the coalition because we have a great track record,” she said. “It’s been 10 years and although there’s been disagreement, compared to other movements, we really haven’t torn each other apart. And I think it’s because, by definition, YIMBYs are incrementalists.”

In recent years, YIMBY bills have been passed by Republican legislatures in Montana, Texas, North Dakota as well as Democratic ones in Maine, Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington state and Oregon. Just last week the California legislature adopted bipartisan legislation that will require local governments to allow midrise residential development within a half-mile of transit stations.

“Some movements are all people who share a goal and an ideology. And we’re not,” said Trauss. “We’re people who share a strategy. And that strategy is to build more housing where people want to live. And you might be here for the environmental reasons, because density is good for the environment. You might be here for anti-segregation. You might be here for migration – people should be able to move around. Or you might be here for economic growth. Or property rights.”

I didn’t quite understand. There’s not a goal? Isn’t housing the goal?

“You might think your goal is to buy a house,” she said. “But when you think about it, the goal isn’t to buy a house for its own sake. Your goal is to buy a house in a certain area. Your goal is ‘I want to live near my parents’ or I want to live in a place with good job prospects or I want to live in a place with a good school.”

Trauss herself recently relocated from Oakland to Berkeley in search of a more walkable neighborhood and streets where she feels comfortable letting her kids ride their bikes.

I note that there is clearly a lot of overlap between YIMBYs and advocates for urbanism, walkability and public transit. That’s true, she said, but she believes it’s important the two causes remain separate. That’s the message she sends to YIMBY Action’s more than 80 chapters around the country.

“We’re always telling them, don’t do mission creep,” she said. “Focus on housing.”

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When my wife and I relocated from Austin, Tex. to Ambler, Pa., one of the big draws was the 170-year-old train station that offers direct rail access to Center City, Philadelphia. After a decade in a city where public transit is largely regarded as a safety net service for the unfortunate few who lack cars, it was exciting to be back in a place where transit is good enough that many people choose it over cars.

Talk about bad timing. On June 26, two weeks after we moved into an apartment building whose branding is tied to the train –– The Crossings at Ambler Station –– the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority approved a budget to decimate its extensive bus, rail and trolley service.

If the service cuts were fully implemented, we’d still have a train, but off-peak service will decline from once an hour to once every two hours and it will stop running entirely at 9 pm –– a major buzz kill for date nights in the city. Five other regional rail lines would be eliminated entirely, along with more than 50 bus routes. To add insult to injury, the gutted service would come with a 20% fare increase.

It was frustrating enough to watch Austin try to build its first ever light rail line only to be besieged by cost-overruns, NIMBY lawsuits and, above all else, a stubborn belief that trains simply can’t work in Texas. But the prospect of watching a stellar century-old transit system get destroyed is much worse. Don’t these people understand what they’ve got!? In my conversations with many lifelong Philadelphians, the answer is ambiguous. They both take SEPTA for granted but hold it in contempt for its shortcomings, including its oldest-in-the-nation trains that are frequently late due to mechanical issues.

In a city where 25% of commute trips are made by transit, such drastic cuts will cause serious pain. Not only will it lead to longer travel times for transit users, but it will almost certainly prompt many to abandon transit altogether, clogging the roads with more cars and prompting Philadelphia to follow in the footsteps of so many other American cities –– Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland –– that abandoned transit and walkability in favor of auto-dependence in the mid-20th century.

So much of Philadelphia’s charm and culture derives from the fact that it still looks and feels like a city, rather than a sprawl of subdivisions and office parks. But that vibrant urban experience is premised on robust transit. Its absence could prompt more people and employers to move to the suburbs or put pressure on the city to try to make the city friendlier to cars by building more highways and parking lots. Either scenario could suck the life out of Philly.

The agency said it had no choice but to approve a 45% service cut unless the state of Pennsylvania came through with funding to fill the $210 million shortfall in its operating budget. Unfortunately, the state legislature, split between a GOP-controlled Senate and a Democratic House, could not agree to a funding deal. The Senate proposed simply raiding a state fund for transit capital projects; House Democrats and Gov. Josh Shapiro rejected that as an irresponsible short-term solution that would prevent SEPTA from making long-needed improvements to its aging infrastructure.

The full cuts were scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, but in late August SEPTA implemented a preliminary 20% service cut that led to major delays, jam-packed buses and an apparent decline in school attendance.

On Sept. 4, however, a judge ordered SEPTA to restore service because the cuts disproportionately affected low-income people and minorities. With no long-term funding deal in sight at the legislature, Gov. Josh Shapiro essentially embraced the Republicans’ plan and authorized SEPTA to dig into the capital budget to cover its operating costs for the next two years.

In other words, we’re kicking the can road. In two years, SEPTA will again be on the brink of massive cuts unless the state can agree on a permanent funding source.

This crisis was not inevitable, but it was predictable.

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In contrast to most transit agencies around the country, SEPTA has no dedicated revenue source besides passenger fares, which cover about 36% of SEPTA’s operating costs –– actually an extremely high “farebox recovery ratio” for the U.S..

The rest of its operating budget, however, comes from the state. While there is no shortage of state and local taxes in Pennsylvania, the state has thus far resisted allowing local governments (cities, counties, transit authorities) to levy taxes for transit.

For many years this wasn’t a problem. A 2013 law set aside hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue from state toll roads to local transit agencies, including about $180 million for SEPTA alone. But that law expired in 2022 and some legislators were not keen to divert money that they believed should be used for road maintenance to transit. This left SEPTA and other transit authorities at the mercy of the chaotic annual state budget process, which almost never actually concludes before the June 30 “deadline.”

Like other transit agencies, SEPTA’s budget was dealt a severe blow when ridership cratered during the pandemic. Bus and subway ridership has climbed back to 82% of pre-pandemic levels, but the more expensive regional rail service is only at 71%.

The drop in fare revenue, paired with rising costs due inflation, meant that SEPTA needed more money from the state. An influx of federal pandemic relief funds allowed the agency to get by for a while, and last year Gov. Josh Shapiro plugged the hole with a portion of federal highway dollars, but this year there were no quick fixes left. The state had to pony up.

Once upon a time, a partisan split at the state legislature wouldn’t have posed an obvious threat to urban transit funding, but in a political shift that mirrors national trends, rural Pennsylvania has grown redder while the cities and inner-suburbs have become bluer, leaving urban transit agencies without much standing in the GOP. Only one of the Senate’s 27 Republicans hails from Philly and only a few others represent districts with a significant number of public transit riders.

Many legislators from other parts of the state not only lack a political incentive to support transit in Pennsylvania’s largest city, but they are eager to portray SEPTA’s crisis as the “haves” from the big city asking the “have nots” from the country to bail them out.

In a fiery speech to his colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman contrasted the pleas for help for Southeastern Pennsylvania with what he described as the indifference to the plight of his constituents in the coal-producing region of western Pennsylvania, “whose livelihoods have been threatened and continue to be threatened by bad environmental policies.”

There are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Leaders of the “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia have signaled a willingness to levy new taxes to fund SEPTA.

In my view, the best bet long-term for SEPTA will be a local revenue source, paid by taxpayers who are keenly aware of the service’s value. Perhaps a local sales tax levied in the areas SEPTA serves. Relying on a source as distant and capricious as the state is a recipe for disaster. Hopefully even those who are totally indifferent to urban transit will allow the communities that value transit to fund it.

My hope is that SEPTA will not only survive this crisis, but emerge from it stronger, with not only greater financial support, but with greater appreciation from the hundreds of thousands of people it moves everyday. No matter how frustrated they may have been in the past with old or late trains, they now hopefully know that it could be much worse.

CoMotion's mobility goodness brought to you by:

Jack Craver,
Editor, CoMotion NEWS
jcraver@comotionglobal.com

Write to us if you would like to suggest content for more deep dives!

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There’s a lot to love about New York City’s eight-month-old “congestion pricing” toll on vehicles entering midtown and downtown Manhattan. The controversial levy has already significantly sped up travel times and generated hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the Big Apple’s beleaguered subway system.

But simply erecting a virtual fence around a neighborhood and charging drivers a hefty entrance fee is not realistic in most other American cities. In New York, the toll is generally a “progressive” tax since relatively few low-income people are moving around Manhattan in a personal vehicle. But most American cities lack robust public transit systems, so a flat toll to enter downtown would hit low-income commuters the hardest.

One alternative is “credit based decongestion pricing,” a concept that has been tossed around in various forms by economists for decades. Recently I spoke to Kara Kockelman, a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas who is one of its most prominent champions.

Kockelman envisions a system where every resident of a city gets a certain “credit” in their account every month. Let’s say $20. Each time you drive, you are charged a congestion fee that fluctuates based on the current demand on the roads. If you’re driving downtown at rush hour, the fee will be higher than if you’re driving at 3 a.m. Tolling points would be dispersed at bottlenecks throughout the city, and drivers would all have tags on their cars that allow them to be charged digitally. The prices will be dynamic, shifting in response to demand on the road.

Once you’ve exhausted your credits, you start paying the tolls out-of-pocket. But the credits would at least offer people a way to drive a certain amount for “free,” reducing the resentment that comes from being charged to use a public resource that you have already presumably paid for with your tax dollars.

“The people who live within the region don’t want to start paying for a resource that they’ve long shared,” she says. “The road is a public resource. It’s like a community garden. You can’t suddenly put fences around it and start charging people.”

In sharp contrast to traditional tolling schemes, Kockelman’s system is focused entirely on reducing congestion, rather than paying for infrastructure. Her ideal system would be as close to “revenue-neutral” as possible.

The way Kockelman sees it, a car traveling during rush-hour doesn’t impose a greater cost on the road than one traveling in the middle of the night, so there’s no reason the former should pay more to fund the roads –– or anything else.

The point of the congestion fee is merely to put in place a “price signal” that will prompt people to consider when they’re choosing to drive. When one more car enters a crowded road at rush hour, it slows down everyone else. That extra delay is a marginal cost imposed on others, but the driver doesn’t typically pay for it.

“It’s making the marginal cost visible to the traveler,” says Kockelman. “That’s how markets generally work. They’re supposed to be marginal cost based.”

If we’re looking for ways to pay for infrastructure, Kockelman believes the gas tax, which in the U.S. has not been raised in 32 years, is a far more sensible mechanism that prices the negative externalities of driving, from the toll it takes on the road to the environmental and health costs of carbon emissions. As EVs replace combustion vehicles, she says the best way to raise revenue for roads would be a simple tax tied to mileage, which has become increasingly easy to track via the connected devices embedded in new cars.

Ideally, people could use their congestion credits for other forms of transportation, including public transit or bike-share.

The closest thing to Kockelman’s ideal that exists is Singapore’s Electronic Road Pricing, which has now existed for 27 years. However, that system doesn’t include credits and the prices are fixed based on time and location.

Kockelman acknowledges that crafting a new system will involve some tough political choices. If it is a city or region implementing it, do they give everybody the same number of credits, no matter where they live? Should people receive more or less based on income? And what do we do about drivers visiting from out-of-town?

The exact price of a commute may vary by city, but the principle is universal: time has value, and treating it that way benefits everyone.

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jcraver@comotionglobal.com

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It’s hard to look at the success of Waymo, Tesla and other companies operating robotaxis and not believe that driverless cars will soon be the norm rather than the exception. I use “soon” flexibly –– it could be five years or 20 years.

What is far less clear, however, is whether driverless cars will fulfill what I’ve always considered their most exciting promise: allowing more people to abandon car ownership altogether.

Will the absence of a driver make ride-hailing so cheap that it no longer makes sense to buy a personal vehicle, even in a place like Dallas or Phoenix, where car-free living is almost nonexistent? And will it translate into meaningful cost savings for people who currently spend an average of $12,000 a year to own, maintain, fuel and insure a depreciating asset?

To answer that question, I talked with our own Jerry He, Head of Innovation & APAC Partnerships at CoMotion GLOBAL and Executive Director of the Corporation for Automated Road Transportation Safety (CARTS), a Princeton and New York-based nonprofit think tank.

To be clear, Jerry’s not the kind of guy to make sweeping, vibes-based predictions à la Elon Musk. He is a sober-minded data wonk. So I was stunned when he told me he believes that by the end of this decade, robotaxis will not only be widely available in the U.S., but they’ll only cost about a quarter as much as an Uber or Lyft today.

“I think in the grand scheme of things, we’ll shift towards a Mobility as a Service model,” he says. “What’s keeping society from achieving the car-less vision that Uber and Lyft promised 10 years ago is the high cost of labor and insurance.”

According to Jerry’s research, today you can expect to pay $2-3 per mile for Uber’s standard service, UberX, depending on geography (urban/suburban) and excluding tips. He believes that within the next 2-3 years, robotaxis will be able to achieve profits at only $1 per mile. Within 4-5 years, they’ll be able to operate profitably while only charging 50¢ per mile.

The evidence, he says, is what Tesla is doing in Austin. Musk’s many detractors have been eager to highlight errors made by his company’s small fleet of robotaxis, but overall the performance has been pretty good. Moreover, Tesla is delivering a strong performance at a lower cost than Waymo, the Alphabet-owned company that has by far the most extensive and successful commercial robotaxis on the road in the U.S.

Tesla, which has forgone LiDAR entirely, only spends about $60,000 per vehicle on hardware. That’s far lower than the six-figure sums other robotaxi providers have been spending for hardware.

Musk’s vision of turning every Tesla owner into a potential robotaxi operator is likely far-fetched, but the fact that Tesla is already mass-producing the vehicles it intends to use for its autonomous fleets gives it a major leg up over other companies trying to compete in the robotaxi space.

Jerry breaks down the cost of robotaxis into four parts:

1. Hardware –– vehicle, sensors, camera, EV chargers, etc.

2. Electricity –– to charge the fleets

3. Intelligence –– both human and artificial. In other words, the staff overseeing the robotaxi fleets and the AI software powering them.

4. Insurance – often overlooked by the end consumer, rideshare insurance costs can reach as high as 30%+ of total trip cost in certain geographies such as CA and NJ)

Self-driving cars will 'dramatically change' auto insurance

It is those last two costs that he expects to come down significantly in the coming years. The cost of intelligence “will ideally go down to close to zero since the marginal cost of software is approximately 0,” he says, while the cost of insurance will plummet as it becomes clear that autonomous vehicles are in fact much safer than human-operated ones. The property casualty insurance industry will eventually shift its risk profiling from “human operator errors” to “product liability”.

The one thing that Jerry’s model doesn’t account for is culture and politics. Even if robotaxis prove far safer than human drivers, it’s still likely that in the early years robotaxi accidents will prove more controversial and keep political leaders from fully embracing autonomous vehicles. Society is strangely at peace with tens of thousands of people dying each year on American roads –– as long as their deaths were caused by drivers.

But if Jerry’s analysis proves right, the question won’t be whether Americans can give up their cars — it’ll be why they’re still clinging to them.

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jcraver@comotionglobal.com

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If you spend time following politics, you're likely familiar with "abundance," a concept thrown around in center-left policy circles for many years that has shot to prominence with the publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

The book – currently on the New York Times bestseller list –  highlights the ways that government in the U.S. is no longer able to get big things done. It argues that in many cases it is policies and regulations enacted by liberal leaders that prevent the state authorities from achieving liberal goals, from affordable housing to renewable energy projects.    

But of particular interest to us at CoMotion is the spotlight Abundance puts on America’s sheer incompetence on public transit. The book devotes an entire chapter to the agonizing saga of California high-speed rail, a project that was supposed to run 500 miles between Los Angeles to San Francisco for $33 billion by 2020 but due to a variety of legal, regulatory and political roadblocks has ballooned to over $100 billion and remains years from completion. That stands in sharp contrast, the authors note, to the thousands of miles a year of high-speed rail being built in China. 

The problem isn’t just that America is being out-run by its peers when it comes to long-distance mega-projects. It’s that we’re struggling mightily to build the kinds of basic local public transit that we were building 100 years ago. Even cities planned around robust public transit like New York, Boston and Chicago have seemingly forgotten how to build the transportation systems that made them great. 

Despite incredible advances in manufacturing and construction technology over the past century, building rapid transit systems has somehow become harder and more expensive –– at least in America. Our peers in Europe, Asia and Latin America still know how to efficiently build high-capacity transit.

The big, dumb American way

To get into the specifics of why America spends so much to get so little, I spoke with Eric Goldwyn, professor of transportation and land use at New York University and head of the Transit Costs Project, a group of researchers that study rail projects all over the world to figure out why some cost so much more than others.

According to a TCP analysis, recent American rail projects have cost an average of $626 million per kilometer, compared to a little over $100 million in South Korea and Spain, around $200 million for Austria and Italy, and around $300 million in France. 

The group has published a series of detailed reports highlighting the many different reasons why transit projects here are so much more expensive.

“It’s not just about supporting transit, it’s about clearing the obstacles,” Goldwyn told me in a recent interview. 

Obstacles include other government agencies that demand a say in how the project is built, politicians who interfere to appease various constituencies, a funding model that depends on lengthy environmental reviews by the federal government and a staffing model that leans heavily on outside consultants with every incentive to maximize billable hours. 

When I ask Goldwyn if he sees his work as aligning with the narrative of Abundance, he says, “Of course.” 

Because Abundance sometimes points the finger at regulations and red tape, it has been unfairly maligned by some as warmed-over libertarianism. But the concept actually has a lot to do with making government stronger –– and in some instances bigger. Goldwyn’s diagnosis of America’s transit woes is similar. 

“We’re very much advocates for stronger agencies and a stronger [Federal Transit Administration] and we believe that government can do if it is empowered to do,” said Goldwyn. “And right now it’s not and we’re paying the costs.” 

Consider the issue of labor costs on rail projects. In New York City, labor typically accounts for between 40-60% of the total cost of projects like the Second Avenue Subway. But in countries like Italy, Sweden and Turkey, labor inputs only account for 20-30% of the total cost. As you might suspect, it’s not as if these countries are relying on cheap labor. “Little of the difference” in spending on labor comes from differences in pay, writes the TCP. The miners employed to dig tunnels in Sweden make about $90,000 a year. Furthermore, they are often not local residents, but seasoned specialists who move from project to project around the country (or continent), often living in temporary housing. The mobile workers bring significant additional costs, but it’s worth it because their deep experience makes them far more productive. They know exactly what to do from the get-go, which is rarely the case in the U.S.

Sure, unions deserve some of the blame. Labor agreements impose rigid (and often antiquated) work rules that result in lots of redundant workers. According to experts the TCP consulted, the 46 workers operating the tunnel boring machine for New York’s Second Avenue Subway were far too many –– the MTA could have made do with 30. And the strict seniority system prompted many of the most experienced workers to claim dibs on weekend hours –– when the pay was double. But the problem isn’t the existence of unions, which are arguably stronger in many European countries. The problem is the culture of labor negotiations in the U.S., which tend to leave agencies with little flexibility in managing a dynamic project. 

But according to the TCP, the greatest labor challenge facing transit is not inefficient union workers. It’s the management and white collar workforce, much of which has been outsourced to consultants. When construction began on Boston’s Green Line Extension, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority “only had four to six full-time employees managing the largest capital project in the agency’s history.” This lack of internal capacity means that there are few employees with enough expertise to effectively manage the army of consultants. That helps explain why in New York, design and project management accounted for 21% of the Second Avenue Station’s enormous construction costs, while in Europe they often account for less than 10%. 

When I mentioned that the director of the Austin Transit Partnership, the agency created to build Austin’s first light rail system, had no experience in transit, Goldwyn said that that is the norm for major U.S. rail projects. 

“Our cases show that consultant teams need a client who knows what it wants and is technically competent enough to direct the consultants rather than allowing them to design overly elaborate stations or propose additional studies that don’t advance the project,” writes the TCP.

Indeed, American rail projects are often tragically overbuilt, with transit agencies treating each station as a novel artisanal experience. The first three stations built for the Second Avenue Subway, for example, all differed substantially in terms of design and the number of exits, crossovers and elevators. And all of them were far bigger than they needed to be because of large amounts of space set aside for employee changing rooms, break rooms and other facilities that could easily be offered more affordably above-ground. As a result, nearly half of what was spent on construction went to “station finishes,” (HVAC, electrical, elevators etc) rather than the core expenses of building tunnels and platforms. 

“There’s not a lot of experience” in America, says Goldwyn. “We don’t do a lot of standardization.” 

How Europe gets it right

In Europe, finishes typically only account for a quarter of the construction budget, and the process of station-building is highly standardized. In Italy or Finland, there is a formula for building rail stations. Relentlessly following the formula makes the construction process simple, replicable – and cheap.

Political interference is another big problem driving up the cost of building transit. In America every decision point in a transit project is vulnerable to meddling from political leaders who have a tendency to ask for changes, delays or another round of “community input” to appease whiny constituents or disgruntled interest groups.

In many other countries, politicians give their approval to project funding and then leave the details to experts, whose only goal is to quickly build a system that will transport as many people as possible.  

“You need the elected officials to hold the line and say the project is this,” said Goldwyn. “In Seattle they’re still fighting about where to put the damn stations. This project is now in year nine of planning.” 

And yet, writes the TCP, the politicians who are so eager to micromanage transit in damaging ways don’t seem to get involved when they could be most useful, such as by dealing with “obstinate utility companies” that don’t want to relocate their power lines –– a major pain point for U.S. transit projects. 

Much has been made –– in Abundance and elsewhere –– about the role the National Environmental Protection Act plays in tying up transit projects. The final environmental impact statement required by NEPA for major transit projects receiving federal funding  typically takes between 4-7 years. 

Goldwyn says the problem is not so much NEPA as the way that transit agencies approach it. Because virtually every transit project depends on federal funding, drafting a bullet-proof NEPA application is the overwhelming focus in the project’s early stages. Unfortunately, the NEPA review has little to do with building an effective transit project, and it’s often after they’ve been awarded federal funding that transit agencies start to run into problems with what are often half-baked or infeasible construction plans. The problem is, once you get this funding, it’s very hard to make needed changes to the project. 

In an ideal world, the FTA would be a valuable partner in helping communities build transit as efficiently as possible. 

“The FTA should be more involved in quality control,” says Goldwyn. “Their focus now is safety and making sure the money is spent legally. But they could say,  ‘Why is this station so big?’”  

The problem of “early commitment” also extends to the voters and elected officials who have been promised a certain project. Many of the billions of dollars of projects that Seattle voters approved in a 2016 ballot referendum were only at 1-2% design. They were, a former official said, no more than “a drawing on a napkin.” 

It doesn't have to be this way, obviously. We know the solution to these problems because they are on full display in other countries and in our own past. 

The way forward: building a culture of competence

The TCP lays out a number of recommendations on how to improve the situation, including requiring greater price transparency in procurement and spending more upfront on developing a strong institutional workforce to figure out how to build projects before chasing federal dollars. To gain insights into how to do things right, TCP also urges agencies to “import experts from abroad” and to adopt standards that have worked in other countries. 

But above all else, TCP says agencies need to “find champions” who will make it their mission to barrel through the myriad obstacles that stand in the way of project delivery. It would be great, for instance, to see state governors do more for transit than show up for ribbon-cuttings. 

“Governors tend not to get too involved,” says Goldwyn. “What you’d like for them to do is to say, this is important. We need to get all of the city agencies to sign off. We need to make sure there’s a clear process for getting permits approved. We need to get it right.” 

Right now, however, there are likely very few political leaders who feel a strong incentive to shake things up. For there to be change, it can’t just be wonks like Goldwyn highlighting the problems with the status quo. Citizens need to be more engaged – and  need to step up to  demand more from the leaders they help elect. “Efficient delivery of public transit” may not sound like a sexy issue, but until recently neither was “zoning reform,” which many of those preaching the Abundance gospel correctly argued is key to addressing the housing crisis in many American cities. In recent years the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement has built a strong coalition of environmentalists, social justice advocates and business interests that has convinced city and state lawmakers from both parties to make the government an ally of new housing, rather than an impediment. The same thing needs to happen with transit. 

We know what it takes to build public transportation on the cheap. We did it before and others are doing it now. The solutions are there. The only thing missing is the political will. 

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CoMotion's mobility goodness brought to you by:

Jack Craver,
Editor, CoMotion NEWS
jcraver@comotionglobal.com

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