The US is terrible at building public transit. Here's how to get better.

0:06All right. Hello. Greetings, everyone. This is Volts for July 22, 2026. The U.S. is terrible at building public transit. Here's how to get better. I'm your host, David Roberts. The great benefit of cities, the reason they have been engines of progress throughout human history, lies in what social scientists call agglomeration. It's a fancy way of saying that if you put a lot of people close together, they produce a ton of cultural and economic value. That is why urbanists are always going on and on about density. Density is how you produce the benefits of agglomeration. Cars work against agglomeration.

0:59Whether they are gas cars, electric cars, autonomous cars, flying cars, it doesn't matter. You simply can't get enough people living close enough together to produce the benefits of agglomeration if every one of those people is carried around by their own two-ton vehicle. Individual car ownership inherently reduces the value of cities. If you want to move large numbers of people around efficiently in a tight space, there is simply no substitute for public transit, trains, subways, streetcars, and buses. In the 19th and early 20th century, the U.S. was a world leader in public transportation, building trains and urban streetcar systems quickly and cheaply in ways that turbocharged its economic growth.

1:55But in the modern era, this story has flipped on its head. These days, the U.S. builds the least, takes the longest, for the most money. From planning, to permitting, to funding, to procurement, to building, every step of the process has become dysfunctional and sclerotic. You've probably heard this a million times by now, part of the common lament that the U.S. can't build anything. But what can be done about it? At the Think Tank Institute for Progress, they recently brought together a group of experts to propose ideas on that subject. Released last month, the Transit Abundance Playbook contains a series of essays and proposals on how to improve the various stages of the process of building transit.

2:50To talk through some of those ideas, I have with me today Will Poff-Webster, the Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Institute for Progress, and Stephanie Pollack, a longtime transit veteran at both the state and federal levels, who is currently a senior fellow in the MIT Mobility Initiative and a consultant on transportation policy. Both Will and Stephanie have seen firsthand how this process works or doesn't work. So I'm excited to talk with them today about how to get it moving again. All right, then, with no further ado, Will Poff-Webster, Stephanie Pollack, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

3:31Thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks so much, David. Will, I'll start with you with a couple of broad questions. I read you sent me this report that NYU, the Marin Institute, put out a couple of years ago about transit costs. In many ways, this playbook you have is a response to that report. And one of the things they conclude in that report is that most of the reforms needed are sort of internal to the agencies. They're about the culture and competence of the agencies themselves, which could be cured without new laws, they say, just with sort of internal reforms. Yet almost all of the pieces in this transit abundance playbook recommend legal changes at the federal level.

4:18So I'm sort of curious to hear your thoughts and Stephanie's, whether this ultimately is about the agencies themselves, internal reforms to the agencies, or whether we need federal action, whether we need new laws to address this stuff. Yeah, what a great question. So I think the first thing to say is that the overarching problem, one of several in U.S. public transit delivery, is that it's really disaggregated. No one is empowered to actually build. And that means the transit agency is not empowered. The federal government sees their role mostly as compliance rather than construction. And so what we are trying to do here is empower the transit agency and also take advantage of upcoming opportunities for change.

5:05There is going to be a surface transportation reauthorization bill. So there's an opportunity to reform the way the federal government thinks about transit project delivery. But you're absolutely right that that is not all of the problem, that there's a lot transit agencies can do on themselves. There's even more that state governments can do to clear the way for their own transit agencies in their states to do a better job. So it's going to take a lot because we are in a morass right now of constraining the ability of transit projects to be delivered at every level of government and across transit agencies themselves, which have a culture of compliance, the federal government, which mandates that culture of compliance rather than actual project delivery and everything in between.

5:46So our immediate focus on the federal surface reauthorization bill is because that bill is coming up. And, you know, part of that is that I come to this project as a former congressional staffer. And I tried to write a bill after talking to the NYU mayor and folks on fixing transit costs. And I realized it was really hard to do because there was a lot of research out there on why costs were high. And there was not a lot of research out there on how specifically you could amend a bill to fix it. And so we set out to solve that problem, but it's absolutely correct that that's not the only problem.

6:19Part of what I think about here is that transit agency culture needs to change, but transit agency culture is broken not only for its own. It's not entirely transit agencies fault. It's that they are worried about all the I's they have to cross a dot and T's they have to cross. They are worried about being targeted. they are rewarded for defensive proceduralism and compliance with every procedure rather than actually delivering something that the public wants. And this is something Stephanie understands better than me having actually done it. But part of what we're trying to do is take advantage of the levers that are available while acknowledging that there are a number of levers.

6:59I would say our number one audience for the transit playbook is federal policymakers in Congress and at the Federal Transit Administration, the FTA, because there are these upcoming opportunities for them. But our number two audience are transit agencies themselves. And number three is state legislators. And number four is actually private standard setting bodies like the Fire Protection Association or the American Bar Association, which also bears some of the blame for these problems. So because it's a complicated problem that has a number of solutions, the fact that U.S. transit costs are three times higher than internationally, it requires a set of solutions that different folks all have to act on.

7:36Certainly fixing the FTA and the federal grant process would not fix the entire thing. But it is also true that the FTA funds most major transit projects. Most major transit projects get some federal money. And so if we don't get the right federal strings attached, if we continue to have the wrong federal strings attached that, you know, put projects in difficult places, we are not going to get projects built the way we want them to and at the cost and the speed that we want them to. Does that make sense? Yeah. And the one thing I would just say, I've been able to see at both the state and federal level how highways and bridges get built by state transportation departments and how transit gets built by transit agencies.

8:17And the culture and capacity are very different, but they also live in a completely different world in terms of how they get their money and how they build things. We're going to return to that in some detail in a minute. So the question is that the culture and capacity are shaped by these external rules. And the proof of that is that highways and bridges have different and more flexible rules. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of cost overruns and schedule delays on big highway projects, too. But I think transit operates under a set of rules that we would never impose on highways and bridges.

8:55Right, right. And so this is just clarifying that this is targeted at that upcoming bill. So another one other broad question, Will. I noticed that almost all the specific stuff in the transit playbook is about building is about building transit. There's one exception about automation, which we'll get to. But for the most part, this is about building. And when I talk to transit people, what they'll say is one of the biggest levers you can pull to improve transit is just improved frequency. And then there's also questions about safety, you know, about boarding, about how to board, how to pay. There's all these sorts of operational questions about transit.

9:38But most of this is about building. Curious why that is. Yeah, I mean, the basic reason is that over the last five or so years, we've had a lot of really good evidence come out from NYU, but also the Eno Center for Transportation and Circulate Planning and Policy in California about just the fact that U.S. construction costs for transit are so much higher than other countries. And so our attempt is to translate that into policy. There is not that equivalent evidence about higher U.S. operating costs. We just don't know how U.S. operating costs compare to countries around the world, other than that there are these difficulties with automating U.S.

10:16trains, which we know would reduce operating costs a lot. So we can get to that. But we don't know if we have an operations crisis in U.S. costs. We certainly have a crisis in funding operations in America. But I think part of what we're trying to do in this transit playbook is say, as lovers of transit, as advocates for transit, we need to care as much about the costs as we do about funding. But it is not to say that funding for transit isn't important. And after you build it, you've got to fund the operations, too. First, you've got to fund the building of it up front, and then you also have to fund the operations.

10:53And we don't yet have the evidence that there is, you know, that one simple fix, other than maybe the automating thing, to make operations work better. I think what we do want to offer is, hey, you could buy a third more to twice as many buses as you can now, and thereby make it much easier and cheaper to operate a bus fleet where the bus comes every 10 minutes instead of every 20 minutes, if the cost per bus was$500 ,000 instead of a million dollars. So those are just conditions that we need to solve in order to make the operations work well. But you're right that we also have to get operations right and we have to do operations correctly.

11:30All right, let's start getting into some details here. Let's start with planning. You mentioned this, Will. One thing that really comes across in the report is, and I don't know if people even really understand this, is that almost all big public transit projects depend on federal funding. So this is why the big focus on the Fed and the way that the Feds fund them almost teaches and enforces bad habits, including around planning. So we'll just talk a little bit at a general level. What is it about the way the Feds fund these things that makes them difficult to plan well or to plan in a way we'd like them to be planned?

12:12Yeah, actually, maybe you let me start with a simpler answer to your earlier good question about why federal, which is just that most big transit projects in America are funded, at least in part, by the federal government. And so they have to comply with federal rules and they have to follow a federal process. And that process, as Stephanie can speak to, is broken. The planning process is the first step. And it's one of the most broken steps because essentially we require transit agencies to plan on the back of a napkin and submit it and then do all their planning later. And we know from all sorts of project delivery that early planning is crucial, that if you're able to do more of the planning upfront, you catch things you might otherwise only catch later and you're able to solve them.

12:57And so there are great examples of this in other parts of the federal government. One of our authors, Eric Goldwyn, who has also done a lot of the work on high transit costs, identified how the Federal Railway Administration, which does inner city rail, has a corridor ID program where federal government helps you do earlier planning on your project to make sure you get it right. We don't have anything like that in public transit, mass transit within urban areas. He proposes creating a transit ID program that would do the same thing in transit. Part of what I love about this idea is when you talk to policymakers and you say there's an easy precedent for what we're doing, it makes it easier for them to say yes.

13:31So that's a great place to start. There's also all sorts of permitting and regulatory hurdles that impact planning as well. we don't let transit agencies buy land while they're doing their planning. They have to complete all of their federal permitting first before they're able to buy any land. So guess what? That raises the price of land. That makes transit agencies less willing to buy land. It makes them more likely to build a transit project in the middle of a highway median instead of a place surrounded by dense housing where people actually want to live. And so you get projects like the Silver Line in Northern Virginia, where any pedestrian has to walk over four lanes of highway in order to get to the train station.

14:08So it's not a great way to do it. And if we fix planning, that would help fix all this. But Stephanie, I think you probably have more thoughts on this. Yeah, Stephanie, this is where the difference between how we plan highway projects and how we plan transit projects sort of comes into this. Talk a little bit about how that plays out in planning. Yeah. So state transportation departments get most of their money through what are called formula funds. They're big chunks of money. They're incredibly flexible. And you get five years. You know how much money you're getting in year one, year two, year three, year four, year five.

14:43So you can have some projects that you're doing environmental review on, some projects you're buying land on, some projects you're permitting, some projects you're building. And if something goes wrong and you need more money, you can kind of borrow from a different one. The states have incredible flexibility. The flip side of that, very little accountability. I mean, accountability to make sure they're not committing felonies or fraud, but they're not which projects they pick, whether they run over cost, less of an issue. Transit's the inverse. They get no flexibility. There is this very dictatorial federal program.

15:21There are 60 ,000 words of guidance, regulations, and statute for this one federal funding program that has to be followed. And that's the main federal program, by the way. And that's the biggest federal program. And you get the money as a grant, and you have to put all your money up first to do the environmental review, the permitting, the planning, and you can't get reimbursed. Even if you then get federal money, you've laid it out. So if you have a community or a state that just doesn't have the resources, they can't even get through the door. And then the last thing I want to mention, which goes back to your initial opening about agglomeration.

16:04One of the reasons you build transit is to make the communities around transit more valuable so that you put more stuff in them so people can use the transit and you get riders. So it seems pretty self-evident that as soon as you announce you're thinking of putting transit somewhere, land costs go up. So we should want transit agencies to buy the land and then announce, right, that they're going to do a project. They'll get the land for less, but they can't get federal money to buy the land until they're years into the process. So they're buying inflated land for the train itself. It's just backwards.

16:46All right. And so what would you recommend in terms of recommendations, just quickly, Stephanie, on planning? Would you recommend that the highway model be ported over to transit? Or is there something more sort of specific that you would recommend or just fewer requirements? Because, you know, as the kind of playbook makes clear, a lot of when you set out to do a transit project, in a lot of ways, you're designing toward this rules. You're designing toward being able to get the grant rather than designing toward what would be best for the project. So is it just less requirements, Stephanie? What's your quick recommendation on planning?

17:27So I'd say three quick things. Less requirements matters. The statute should be paired way back. And then the Federal Transit Administration should actually be told, don't add to all the statutory requirements. We really want to give flexibility. That's number one. Number two is that the best project delivery is iterative. You do some work, you buy some land, you get some permits. Maybe you do some early construction. If there's a highway crossing a rail line, you fix that crossing. Highway does it that way all the time. Transit is like if you know the difference between agile and waterfall and software development, right?

18:06So highways are agile. Transit is waterfall. You work and you work and you work for years and years with your own money. And then there's this big bang called the full funding grant agreement. And that's when you finally get federal money. And so you can't iterate. You can't do it in steps. And so the process should be backed up and made more iterative. That's the second thing. And then the third thing is that an increasing number of highway projects are built using very creative ways of procuring the contracts to build it and to get the materials. And transit is still living in a world where these transit agencies that have the wrong culture and capacity are bringing the projects to 100 percent design and then putting them out for the private sector to build and then getting basically walked all over by their contractors.

18:56And that is a terrible idea. And so in the Federal Highway Administration can actually accelerate innovation in its programs because they can give waivers from procurement rules as long as they make sure that there's basic accountability and value. And the Federal Transit Administration has no parallel authority. So just giving the transit authority the same legal authority that highway has had for decades to allow transit agencies to be creative in how they do procurement would make a huge difference. Awesome. One general point here, David, that we've gotten, since the playbook has come out, we've gotten reactions from a lot of people who work at or have worked at transit agencies in the past.

19:42And one of them, Andrew Miller, who actually wrote one of the pieces, but also used to run a bus rapid transit development, he said that when he was working on public transit delivery, he was judged every day on, did he comply with all the rules? He was not judged on, did he deliver the project? And I think if you read Stephanie's piece in the Transit Playbook, overall, she is looking for a cultural shift to judge people on project delivery rather than on compliance. Got it. Moving on, one of the pieces I found really interesting about this is how the U.S. overdesigns projects. Stephanie, you were sort of instrumental in kind of saving the Boston Green Line extension.

20:26And one of the big ways was by attacking this. So by the time you took over the stations they had planned, each one was this sort of gigantic architectural marvel that cost a kajillion dollars. And you paired them down to make them smaller, more standardized. And this, of course, something they do in Europe and other places where they build transit better is just these sort of smaller standardized stations that are still nice. So I'm curious, like, did riders lose anything by by you paring down these stations? Like, why do why do they end up bloating like this? And do we lose anything by by standardizing the way they do in Europe?

21:10So the why question has a lot to do with the planning process, because there is this sense that it's monopoly money, that you're building this transit project with money from someone nine states away. And so why not have the nicest transit station, right? It's like if someone would let you renovate your kitchen with your money versus their money, you'd get a different kitchen, right? Like the one you do with your money, got to be a different kitchen. So there is a lot of pressure, right? But going back to the point you made earlier, the reason you build transit is to operate it frequently and reliably because that's what gets people to use it.

21:47And so when we had to look at taking a$3 billion cost bid from a contractor, which we could not afford, and getting it back down to closer to$2 billion, which we could afford, we actually made the decision. We're not touching anything that actually affects the frequency of service or the number of stations. We needed to ride in trains every 10 to 15 minutes to seven stations. And if we needed something, if we needed a maintenance facility, if we needed a certain number of cars, those were off the table for money saving. We held that constant. And the flip side was anything you could do that saved money that didn't affect the frequency and reliability of service was like a nice to have, not a need to have.

22:30The Green Line in Boston runs from these fairly well off western suburbs. I live in one of them. And now it runs farther north of the city to actually the dentist community in Massachusetts that didn't have transit before it, that really was going to benefit. In my community, where the housing near these transit stations is worth a lot, we stand on a slab of asphalt. If you're lucky, there's a covering when it rains. If you're unlucky, it is literally a slab of asphalt and you wait until the train comes. and yet it is some of the highest value property alongside a transit station. So if you ask me, do we need Taj Mahal transit stations in Somerville, Massachusetts, to get the benefit of the green line, the answer is no.

23:16And in fact, if they're going to get them, why don't I get them? Right? Literally, the other end of the green line is decades old and it's never gotten them. But it wasn't so much stations versus not, but like, is it an investment that will make the train frequent and reliable? Yes. Is it an investment that will make it nicer, but not more frequent and reliable? Can't afford it. Got it. Got it. Another piece of this is buses, Will, which it turns out almost every transit agency that orders a bus fleet has these sort of bespoke requirements about what they want on their buses. And of course, you know, one of the things we've learned over and over again on the energy side of things is the technologies that win are, and the programs that win are standardized and repeatable.

24:10And this is the opposite of that. So why, why do agencies do this? Again, is it, is it because they're playing with someone else's money and how do we fix that? How do we standardize these buses and how do we standard and how do we solve whatever problem that causes agencies to want to do this? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first, just to talk about the problem, an electric bus, unfortunately, is more expensive than a diesel bus. And an electric bus in the United States can cost around a million dollars and a diesel bus can cost around$500 ,000. And each of those numbers is about 30 % more, sometimes double what it is in comparable countries.

24:49So we are paying more for electric and we're paying more for diesel. You know, personally, I care a lot about electric buses. I care a lot about the climate. I don't think we should spend a million dollars on each one. The most evocative example of this to me is the vendors who offer to build and customize these buses to agencies. They will say, we can give you a floor that is so customized that looks, the bus floor will be different than every other bus in the world. You'll have your own special floor. I can tell you as someone who commutes on the bus every day, I never look at the floor. I look at the schedule and whether the bus...

25:20Well, this gets back to Stephanie's point, like what affects frequency and reliability, right? And it's not the aesthetics of the floor. Right. I care if the bus is going to come in five minutes, not whether the DC Metro has a very special floor. So the reason for these special custom floors and every other type of customization, or at least most parts of customization, is actually pretty simple, which is that the federal government reimbursement reimburses 80 to 85 cents of every dollar spent on a public transit bus. So if you're a transit agency and you want to make your bus a gold-plated million-dollar gizmo, you're actually only spending a small fraction of that amount of money.

25:58And our authors, Rohan Aras and Alex Arlovich, have a very simple solution, which is just we should set a benchmark price for a standard uncustomized bus, and we should reimburse for that amount. So if the transit agency buys a bus off the shelf, then they're going to get it for almost free. If they want a really customized bus, then they're going to be paying for most of the customization. Obviously, there are a few differences you need across the country based on climate or which system they use for GPS or what have you. But guess what? We have school buses all over America that look identical and they work pretty well.

26:30So we could do that here too. And the bus is the unsung hero of transit policy. Many more communities in America have buses than trains. and many, many people across the country, especially low-income people, commute by bus. So it's really crucial to get this right. And we could have one and a half times as many buses in the United States for the same price if we just bought a bus off the shelf. Interesting. All right, all right. We got a lot to cover. So I'm gonna move on again to procurement. This is a slightly technical bit, but really important. Stephanie, then again, getting back to the Green Line extension, you did something differently on this project.

27:07instead of sort of dictating every little detail of what you want and then going out and asking vendors, well, how much would it cost you to get this? You told bidders, here's the maximum price. Here's how much money we'll pay. And then had them compete for how much they could offer under that cap. And it worked to get costs down. And again, it's got all the equipment you needed. So why is that approach so rare? And what is the more typical approach? Hey there, everybody. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts.

27:49It is supported entirely by listeners like you. If you'll indulge me for a second, I'd like to ask for your support. I started Volts because we're all surrounded by depressing news about climate change and misinformation about clean energy. and it's never been more important to share the stories of the real people on the ground doing the real work of transition and all the ingenuity and courage and public spirit they are bringing to it. People are hungry to hear these stories, to learn from and find inspiration in them. I've heard from people who change majors or careers after hearing episodes of Volts, people using it in classrooms and community groups, even state legislators who have passed bills inspired by specific episodes.

28:32Sharing these stories matters. It makes a difference. If you have found value in it and want to help me continue doing it, I hope you will join the community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. It's about the cost of a cup of coffee a month. If you don't like subscriptions, you can make a one-time contribution, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or just tell a friend about Volts. I am grateful for any and all support. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you. And now back to the show. Why is that approach so rare? And what is the more typical approach? So let's take a step back because I'd actually like to convince some of your listeners that procurement is actually not technical.

29:15It's the most important thing because agencies don't build, right they oversee others building procurement is how you buy the team that's going to deliver your project so again if we do the house renovation thing procurement is how you would pick your general contractor or your plumber or your electrician and if you were renovating your house and you talked to a couple different companies you would definitely think about price right but you would also like check their references and like if someone told you they didn't do what they promised or they took two times as long or they changed the price four times in the middle, even if their initial price was low, you'd never hire them, right?

29:55You'd pay a little more upfront and you'd get what you wanted. In public procurement, in many areas, but particularly in transit, mostly we make them take the low bidder. So even if - By law. By law, federal and sometimes state. So even if you're looking at this bid and you know this company and they screwed up the last project they did for you, but they come in a hundred dollars less, you have to pick them. And this just creates the obvious incentive for these bidders. Companies that are really good at figuring out what the right number is. So, and in other countries and in some states that actually literally choose not to use federal money because of the procurement rules, they use what's called value-based procurement.

30:44You're trying to get the best value for your money. And that doesn't always mean the lowest cost. So we actually had to go to the state legislature in Massachusetts to get permission for the MBTA to use value-based procurement. And just to give a quick example of the difference it makes. And we talked before about how communities care about these projects and they want them to be nicer and they want other things. So with the green line, there was a very expensive parallel community path for cyclists and pedestrians, and there were just parts of the green line where building it was going to be really expensive.

31:21And we tried and we couldn't figure out how to do it within this cap, which was set by, honestly, the governor and the board said, we're just not going to spend more than X billion dollars on this project. So the way we did the procurement was not just that we said, tell us how you're going to build it, but we also said, here's the cap. Here's stuff you have to build, seven stations, a maintenance facility. Here's three things the community has asked for. Whoever can build the most of those three things and stay under the cap is actually going to win. And the winning bidder figured out how to build all three extra community desired amenities within the cap, even though the staff couldn't do that.

32:00Right. So you can you get way more for your money if you switch from a mindset of least cost to a mindset of best value. And concretely, most states require lowest bid procurement or something where you're allowed to consider the expertise of the contractor or the past work of the contractor, but only for a small percentage of the total bid. And most of it still has to be on price. And so our author, Anthony Potts, says anytime the federal government is putting money into a transit project, they should require that the state exempt the transit project from lowest bid procurement and allow best value like Stephanie was able to do on the green line.

32:39And then Elan Levy also writes a piece about how we should know how much transit components cost and we should have unit-based procurement where you're able to do procurement based on the cost of each foot of concrete. And you just add up the number of feet of concrete you use rather than having a massive lump sum up front that can be adjusted for reasons that no one can really understand. And then the transit agency is on the hook for some change order coming from the contractor. And the transit agency wants it built, so they just pay them off and pay for that change order. I mean, you'd like states to change these laws.

33:13I mean, ultimately, wouldn't you, rather than doing exemption after exemption, it'd be nice if states came in and reformed this. So the good news is that states are actually reforming procurement on highways, on bridges. Colorado has pretty much switched all of its infrastructure bidding to best value instead of low cost. Utah has been a national leader. And they actually have to choose between accepting federal money and then following the federal rule and using their legal state mechanism for a smarter procurement. We should never, never penalize a state that is doing innovative things on procurement by making them follow federal law.

33:55Got it. So changing the federal law would probably help states change our laws. Well, a lot of states say, why should I bother to change my law? Because we need the federal money and it won't make a difference. So I think it would really unlock. You know, there's this thing about we should use 50 states to be our laboratories and to learn how to do things smarter. And if this federal rule sort of pushes everybody in one direction, you can't blame the states, right, for not changing their procurement rules. Got it. Let's move on to the next one, which is, again, very familiar from the energy world, which is every one of these projects has like a dozen veto points.

34:37Everyone involves a bunch of different agencies, a bunch of different parties, all of whom want to get in and get their little piece, get their little special, get their little special extra. And so things just add up and get out of control. So the obvious solution here is to have one controlling person or agency at the top that can coordinate all this stuff. They do it in Italy. But I'm sort of, Will, maybe you can address this. I'm a little baffled how we could do this in the U.S. Because the power company could be a private entity. There could be agencies from city government. County government, state government, like you got a lot of cats to herd here.

35:26How practically could in the U.S. could a big project like this be brought under a single agency to make executive decisions? So I'm going to jump in here because this is a problem with all linear infrastructure. Transmission lines, water pipes, cranes, transit. Right. You go through a zillion communities. The United States gives local government. So we're not even at the state level. Right. We're now at tens of thousands of local government. There was a transit project in Boston, not the Green Line, needed to get wetlands permits from 39 cities in town. OK. Not going to happen. On the other hand, there is a strong aversion to what's called preemption, which is telling the city in town.

36:15No, you no longer have that authority. So I would actually take advantage of the fact that most large transit projects are built with federal money and make doing your local and state permitting better a condition of getting the federal money. Right. The carrot is the federal money. And then each state and its communities will have to figure out their solution. But, for example, in the Seattle area, which I know you're familiar with, Sound Transit has been struggling to build what it promised people. And the city of Seattle has created a special permitting program just for Sound Transit projects to get them their local permits in 120 days.

36:58And they did it because they didn't want to stand in the way or be asked for more money to get the Sound Transit projects built. So I don't think there's a one size fits all answer. But I think if if the federal government said you're not going to get that full funding grant agreement until you have worked out all of the local and state permitting, we'd get, again, a lot of creative solutions. I do. I love I love the idea of the Italian system. I'm from New England. I mean, if you think the Pacific Northwest has strong local government in New England, it's I mean, kudos to the Yimbys for getting any changes on the housing front.

37:36But it's going to be really hard to take authority away from the local level. And that's why I think incentives have to be part of it. Well, and part of the taking a step back here, the overall orientation of the transit playbook is U.S. costs per mile to build public transit are three times international averages. And those international averages are not primarily informed by China or undemocratic countries. They're mostly Italy and Spain and other places in Asia, Japan, South Korea. So we are way above the costs of low-cost countries. And it's even worse than that because most of our projects do not have tunneling in them.

38:15They are mostly just above-ground projects. And tunneling projects are even more expensive. So we're even worse there. New York City's 2nd Avenue subway is somewhere between 10 and 20 times more expensive than Madrid's metro system. So we are off the charts more. And so part of what we look at in the transit playbook is how do these other countries that are also developed countries with strong union cultures, how do they build so much cheaper than us? And the way they do it in Italy to solve what I think is probably the most important problem, this problem of veto points and coordination and NIMBYism, is they have what they call a conference of services.

38:48And there's one appointed actor who brings together everyone from all the local governments, all the utilities, all the landowners who want something out of a transit project. And they all get in a room and they go through a process together. And the one appointed actor, which our author proposes should be someone appointed by that state's governor, gets to decide who gets what. So rather than it being the way it is right now, which is a long drawn out process where anyone gets to sue and stop the project in order to get their own thing funded, there is one process for everyone to decide what happens.

39:18So that one decision maker could say, oh, yeah, the transit project is going to help pay for that bike ped path right next to the transit station, but they're not going to pay for a police kiosk that's two miles away. They're not going to pay for totally extraneous things. There's an example from Sound Transit of the transit agency having to pay for hydroelectric dam quality cement for the parking garage just because the local planner did not understand that there were different cement grades and that was way more expensive than normal cement. Guess what? You don't need dam quality cement for a train.

39:52So this Italian system really works well, and it's not straight preemption. It's a more discussion-based consensus model. There is a final decision maker and a limitation on lawsuits after that process, but it's also a process where everyone gets a voice, but no one gets a veto. I think if we were to adopt that in American states, it would make an enormous difference. I don't disagree with Stephanie that it would be a big change from the way we do things right now, but we need that kind of change so that we don't have a poor transit agency having to go and beg a local government for a permit to build something that will benefit people once it's built.

40:25But instead, we actually acknowledge that transit is a benefit that we seek and want. I think underlying all this is a sense we sometimes have in the U.S. as transit advocates, that people don't really want transit. And so we have to go to them and beg them to accept it. And the reality is people all across the country vote for sales tax increases to fund transit projects. They actually do want them. I mean, in Seattle, in Seattle, we have voted for transit like a dozen freaking times. I mean, they keep asking us and we're like, yes, we said yes, please. Yes. Like, you know, and then the process grinds on and on and on.

40:59It's not a process that empowers majorities. I mean, sorry, just to say one other thing on this, I think the most surprising thing to me about looking at other countries is people from Paris and Istanbul and Italy will say, why is your local parks department or your local suburb holding up the transit project? Aren't they all part of the same government, the government that's building the transit. And of course, that's not the way that it works in the U.S. And so that's probably the biggest problem that we have to solve. Yes. Okay. Let's talk about permitting, another nightmare, another familiar nightmare.

41:30I mean, a lot of these projects end up having to do these multi-year, multi-million dollar environmental reviews before they even get started, which locks them into some choices that they can't then go back and change later. You know, this is a big fight now. Energy projects, a big fight. Housing projects, big fight everywhere. What to do about environmental review? I mean, one of the proposals in the playbook is just straight up says if the public voted for the project, that counts as environmental review. And so you do not have to do further environmental review on that. Of course, I love that idea since almost by definition, public transit projects are good for the environment.

42:18But I'm a little skeptical about that happening in the U.S. culture. Does that seem realistic, Will? And are there other ideas that are less dramatic? Yeah, well, you took the words out of my mouth with just the frustration I have that the things that benefit the climate and the environment most, we make go through years and years and thousands of pages of environmental review. Like, if you look at the environmental review for congestion pricing in New York City, it is so many binders thick. It's like a bulletproof stack of paper. And it's not the environmentalist pushing that. It's NIMBYs. The NIMBYs are using it.

42:55I mean, it's just so obvious now. The NIMBYs use this as a tool to block things. Right. And going back to your culture point, if you're inside an agency where everybody is threatening to sue and frequently does, you like self-limit yourself, right? Everything you write and do and think about, you overdo it because it's like, well, I'm going to get sued and I want to win. And so it's not just litigation. It's the internal fear of litigation. And the other thing, if you take a step back, I've sued a lot of people under the National Environmental Policy Act at an earlier point in my career when I actually worked for an environmental group who sued to stop highways.

43:38the major purpose of the National Environmental Policy Act is actually to look at alternatives. Right. And then you look at the environmental impacts. But the main thing is alternatives. And so the basis for the recommendation in the playbook that once it's been voted, you shouldn't have to do it is we looked at the alternatives. We picked one and the public endorsed it. So the irony is, like I was at Federal Highway. highways we should look at alternatives we should actually say maybe transit's an alternative maybe a narrower highway is an alternative maybe fixing the roads up maybe diverting trucks to a freight route like there are real alternatives to highway expansion but somehow NEPA doesn't actually require state DOTs to take a serious look at highways and transit agencies do so again we're kind of backwards.

44:29And I think the question we should start with on permit reform is when do you really need to think about alternatives and when don't you? And if you don't, if there's not, if it's an, and same thing would apply in my world to transmission lines, right? If it's an, it's a net environmentally positive thing and there's some form of public endorsement of it, right? In the form of funding or a vote, you're not really going to look at alternatives. So then the whole process is a waste, right? Whereas if there really are alternatives and there isn't a public consensus on the alternative, well, then you need NEPA.

45:01So the goal is not to get rid of the National Environmental Policy Act. It's to only apply it where it makes sense to look at alternatives. And to answer your question more specifically, David, part of our focus in the transit playbook is a range of solutions. We've been talking about Hayden Clarkin's proposal for a kind of more wholesale NEPA exemption for environmentally beneficial transit. But we also more narrow proposals here. One from Jamie Tesler is that transit agencies should get delegated from the federal government authority to do environmental reviews, which guess what highways already get.

45:32So why not give that authority to transit agencies? Meaning the agencies can run their own environmental reviews. Yeah. So the state of Texas runs the environmental reviews for all the highway expansion projects in Texas. But DART could not run the environmental review to build transit in Dallas. And fortunately, both that proposal and the proposal for transit agencies to be able to buy land before they go through all their permitting approvals that Stephanie was talking about earlier. Both of those ideas actually got into the House version of the surface transportation reauthorization in some form.

46:07So we have already had some wins from this, but there's certainly more to do. And as Stephanie will also tell you, a lot of the permitting problems are at the state and local level, not the federal level. So it's really crucial to solve those permitting challenges caused by a local government that is maybe controlled by the NIMBYs and doesn't really want transit being able to actually have to serve their constituents that would ride the transit line if it got built, but is currently listening to the 2 % of busybodies that don't want anything to change. Fear of lawsuits is still lingering there.

46:40It still kind of is going to constrain. You're still going to be constrained. You know, and I don't know what to do about this sort of like litigiousness and like constant threat of lawsuits. I mean, to some extent, that's a broader problem in the U.S. than we can solve through these specific reforms, but it's there. Let's talk about one of my other favorites, a frequent theme here on Volts, state capacity. Yay, state capacity. One of the research has found, and I strongly suspect this is true more broadly than just in transit projects, but research has found that they come in cheaper and are better when the transit agencies employ their own people to do them rather than farming it all out to consultants who, as we've discussed prior in this discussion, have all sorts of perverse incentives.

47:34and are really trying to maximize their own profits as opposed to maximize public value, et cetera. So I guess I would just start by asking, why has consultant brain, why has it so taken over in the US? Is it just that states are broke? Is it just, you know, neoliberalism or whatever you want to call it, this idea that the private sector is always, always more efficient than the public sector? Why did we get to this point where everything goes out to consultants when it seems obvious to me, even based on my limited experience with consultants, it's not that you're better off developing in-house capacity and expertise.

48:19Why did this happen? So I would say two things that are specific, one of which is specific to transit and one isn't. So the biggest difference between agencies that do transit agencies that do highway is highways are all about building. State transportation departments build stuff. They really don't operate it unless you count like, I don't know, plowing or filling piles. But it's construction heavy operations like transit is actually an industry where the culture in good transit agencies is a culture of operations. Let's get the trains out there. Let's keep the buses from piling up like and you want that.

48:52We actually want to keep that. And many transit agencies only build like one big project every few decades. Right. So it doesn't feel like, so the one that's specific to transit is it doesn't feel like it's as important to have in-house capacity if you're only going to do a project. Whereas if you're a highway department, you're doing them every year. The one that's more general, and I'll speak for Massachusetts, but I've talked to other states and it's true. So Massachusetts transportation agencies have two budgets. You have an operating budget and you have a capital budget. Your operating budget is precious.

49:26You have to get the money from the state legislature. States have to balance their budget. They don't print money like the federal government. They can't run deficits. So there's always cuts and you never have enough money for operations. Capital budgets are much more flexible, but states like Massachusetts ban the use of capital budget money to hire permanent employees and they allow its use for consultants. So it is always easier to hire a consultant from your capital budget than it is to hire a permanent employee on the operating side. And again, that is a policy choice, but it is not a great policy choice.

50:02I think that we need to be able to hire highly qualified construction professionals, project delivery professionals with as state employees, even if it's temporary, even if it's a 10-year contract because then the project's built and they don't have another one. But as long as we don't do that, as long as we make it hard to hire and easier to pay consultants, we're going to get too many consultants. And that's one example of a broader phenomenon where it's, you know, talking to transit agency heads, actually one of their biggest burdens is HR, that HR is just really difficult inside government.

50:41And you want to offer someone a job and it takes months and months to actually offer to them and maybe they've taken a different job. You want to pay someone enough to actually attract the best engineering talent and you're subject to a state pay scale. That's actually a little less of a problem in transit because they have sort of a separate agency structure. But, you know, this to me is a core of when people talk about abundance, it's how do we actually unshackle the government from the rules we've used to constrain government that were maybe put in place because we thought it would be a good idea, but then the actual practice of it impedes us from getting the outcomes that we want.

51:15So one of our authors has a really specific solution here, which is just as a rule of thumb, 60 % of the staff and all of the most senior staff on any transit project should be in-house. And that means you're still using consultants for some components of it, like deciding whether or not you need to freeze the ground because of a soil issue. You know, it might be something you bring in consultants from another state that dealt with that in another state, but you don't have consultants managing other consultants. You have all the senior people are actually in-house, and the majority of the project is done by people in-house.

51:47Because at the end of the day, it's the transit agency that wants to deliver the project. And if they farm that out, then we're subject to billable hours incentives rather than project delivery incentives. Just one more quick thing on this. You got to be willing to pay them. So I actually called the governor and I said, I have the perfect project manager for the green line, the new revisions. And he's going to make more money than you do, governor. And the governor's response was, but will it be more money than the basketball coach at the University of Massachusetts? Oh, yeah, that's the real benchmark.

52:24I think this is an example of these laws that are put in place for a good reason. Like, for instance, on procurement, we have lowest bid procurement because we want to eliminate corruption. Right. We have these limits on payment of state employees because we don't want that article in the tabloid that says, guess how much these people are making? But in fact, we pay costs every time we put in place a rule like that because we make people believe that government can't do big things anymore, that we can't trust it to happen, that you're raiding 20 years and California still has not connected Bakersfield to Merced with rail when in the same time period, China has built something connecting every single city in their entire country.

53:00So we pay these costs invisibly and we need different rules. We need more flexibility for people inside government, for civil servants, so that we can actually deliver the projects that will make people trust that infrastructure delivery is even possible. Well, let me ask about something that's slightly sensitive and in some sense, the flip side of this previous question, which is about labor costs. Again, like all the research shows that one of the reasons U.S. projects and agencies cost so much more than internationally is unusually high labor costs. And for the most part, this playbook doesn't really get at that.

53:39The one place it really approaches it is about automation. So like Paris famously automated its entire system, saved a kajillion dollars. And again, famously, it's very difficult to do that in the U.S. because unions fight it and, you know, liberals think they should support the unions and states, governments want to stay in good with unions, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm curious if you just will why there wasn't more in the playbook about this question, if if it had something to do with maybe trying to keep your your coalition together and trying to trying to be palatable. I'm very curious what your thoughts are about the labor side of this.

54:24Why are U.S. labor costs so much higher and how do we and how do we deal with that? Yeah, I mean, we followed the evidence here and talking to folks that who are experts in this. It looks like U.S. white-collar labor, the consultant problem, is actually a bigger component of the problem. Yeah, we should specify this is not about the guys with wrenches. These are the email jobs, as they're known. And it is true that, you know, certain phases of the New York City subway had too many blue-collar workers for the amount of work they had to do, but not all of them. And it's not clear that that's a generalizable problem across the U.S.

54:59So when conservatives say U.S. construction costs are high because of unions, I tell them actually it's a lot more complicated than that a lot of it is white-collar labor, etc. etc. That being said, we do have a specific problem in the US, which is that we have a federal law that I would argue is not the best way to help unions, which is called 13C. And it says you're not allowed to automate any train. You're not allowed to say that it can drive without a driver without going through an extreme veto prone process called the 13C process. And guess what? You go just over the border into Vancouver and they've had an automated train for 40 years.

55:36Autonomous cars, there are all sorts of questions about them. They're a new thing. With a train, it's on the tracks. So it's actually pretty easy to do. And the research that one of our authors did contributes to the conclusion that the New York City subway and the Philadelphia subway and San Francisco and several other cities, their subway systems would actually be revenue generating for the rest of the transit system if they had automated trains instead of human driven trains. And so obviously that raises the question of, you know, there are a lot of people who have good jobs driving those systems, right?

56:10So we don't want to put people out of jobs, but we also want to deliver the best possible transit and automation in addition to saving money also improves frequency and reliability of transit. You can run more trains at a time. And so our author looks to the Paris model, which is they work with their union, not against them. And they developed a plan with the union where every single person who is driving a train on a specific line could either move to a different line if they were close to retirement, they could voluntarily decide to retire with a nice pay package. And so they managed to automate some of their train lines without losing any jobs.

56:44It was a protect the worker, not protect the position approach. And we suggest that that could be adopted in the U.S. And if you did, we would eliminate this problem where we make it essentially impossible to automate an existing transit line. If you build a new transit line, it can be automated. Like the Hawaii metro is being automated. But when other cities have tried to do this, it's really hard to do. And guess what? At the same time, we have a huge shortage of bus drivers. So we have this big problem that we don't have enough workers in transit. And, of course, we need to pay them well. we need these to be great jobs that have great benefits for people.

57:20But I can't tell you how often I get a ghost bus on my morning commute because there just aren't enough bus drivers employed by my transit agency. So we really do have enough jobs for people in transit. We just need to allocate it effectively. And we need laws that correctly support transit being able to take advantage of innovation. We don't want transit to be this field that can't adopt any technology because it's stuck in the 1960s. We should at least be where Canada was in 1975. All right. So that's about labor. So then kind of wrapping up here, I want to get a sense, you know, another thing I'm very familiar with from the energy and climate world is grandiose 10-point plans to save the world that go on the shelf next to the other grandiose 10-point plans to save the world in an ever-accumulating library of 10-point plan to save the world, none of which ever saved the world.

58:20So I'd sort of like to kind of like get a temperature reading from both of you on how realistic you think these things are. As you said, most of this is targeted at the federal government. So there is like a, there's a defined target here. There's a defined set of reforms. There is clearly, and I guess one of my questions is like, I love public transit. You love public transit. As you say, the public, mostly if you ask them to vote, votes for public transit. But my experience of this area is that most politicians are affluent suburbanites who drive everywhere and maybe do not have the same passion for public transportation that you and I do.

59:06So I just like a sort of temperature reading from both of you on how much impetus you think there is right now for reform and how realistic you think some of it. Because some of these reforms would be a pretty big deal and would bump up against a lot of pushback. So would require some real spine. just a reading how realistic you think these things are and how much momentum you think there is here. I'll go first. I think there's two things that make me optimistic. One is that if you hate transit, you should spend less on it. And if you love transit, you should get as much value out of every dollar you spend.

59:48So I do think that there's a middle ground, right, where lowering the cost of delivering the transit works sort of wherever you are on your spectrum of loving or hating transit. And the second reason is, I think that a lot of what's in the playbook for me, having experienced the highway side of the street and the transit side of the street, if we just gave transit the same flexibility and ability to innovate and the ability to use different procurement and different delivery methods and make investments in early works. Like, we're not saying transit should be elevated, right, in some way they get special treatment.

1:00:27We're actually saying just, you know what, make the rules so that they work. For everybody, give the transit people the same rules so the highway people work. At least that way, if you have a local community or a governor who is supportive of taking federal dollars and investing them in one kind of project versus another, they shouldn't be choosing which project to invest in based on procurement rules or permitting rules or, you know what I mean? So my argument is always as a starting place, let's just level the playing field between transit and highways that use federal dollars. And then let's see what the states and localities can do and the transit agencies with that flexibility that they have been denied.

1:01:07I mean, I will say that I personally would love to elevate transit over highways, but But let's we can start there. Right. But that's politically, that's a more politically difficult. So let's at least try by making it no harder to build transit than it is to build highways. And David, I'll say we sort of have a couple of different audiences for this playbook, but one of them is people who love transit and advocate for it as much as we do. And for those folks, I think our message is we have actually done a pretty good job at fighting for funding of transit. There are places all across the country that have voted in money for transit, have voted to tax themselves.

1:01:45Sometimes very car brain places like Los Angeles have voted for this. Sometimes places deep in red states have voted for this. So we are actually, you know, self-confident and should be about that. But as transit lovers, we need to care just as much about how much it costs to build because the federal government, because there are enough Republicans there, is just never going to spend more than the few billion dollars that we have every year in grants. But we are going to maintain those few billion dollars in grants, even though Republicans try to cut them because there are enough Democrats on Capitol Hill, like my former boss, that are going to fight for it.

1:02:17And those few billion dollars could either fund two or three projects a year or they could fund 10 projects a year if we built at Madrid's cost. So let's try to get there. This is an attempt to articulate a range of ideas from the small and weedsy to the big and would change everything, right? And so a couple of the weedsy ones we haven't talked about yet, like for instance, one of our authors, Brian Potter, talks about how the U.S. fire protection rules that transit agencies tend to adopt require twice as many emergency cross passageways as Europe. And there's no evidence that these improve safety at all.

1:02:50Yes, this is one thing that I was going to say this. This is true about a lot of the rules about highways too, a lot of the rules about like state DOTs and city DOTs. The more you dig at these things and dig into these rules and these requirements and you dig to the bottom, you find there is nothing, there is no there there. There was no study at the bottom that required, like they sort of come into being almost randomly and then just like it's just like inertia, you know, and you dig in, you're like, there's no reason the code should be this way rather than that way. And the fire codes in the subways is one reason.

1:03:31Like we have these very closely spaced, you know, as you're saying, exits not based on anything. Yeah. And in fact, when Cairo was designing its subway system, they looked at the American design and the European design and they said, why would we ever do the American design. It costs$30 million more for each one of these tunnels, and there's no evidence that it's better. So we can learn from the rest of the world. And as transit advocates, we should be laser focused on costs so that we can get as much transit built as possible in what is sometimes a difficult environment in DC, rather than just taking these costs as built in.

1:04:05I mean, I think I talked to a lot of folks in transit who just think these are big infrastructure projects. They're always going to be expensive. We just got to grind through and we got to fight for more money. And of course, we do need to fight for funding, but we don't just need to fight for funding. We also need to look under the hood at all these little ways, none of which is a silver bullet, but altogether add up to projects that cost two thirds less than we spend today. So our overall message here is if you care about the effective delivery of public dollars, then you should care about improving transit product delivery.

1:04:35And if you care about transit product delivery, then you should care about spending those dollars effectively. And as I always say, if you're a driver, every single person who takes public transit rather than driving is less traffic for you. Like this, you know, like it's better for everyone. The more people who are on public transit, drivers and riders. Okay. Final question. And this is a tough one. I would like to hear from both of you if you had to pick one of these reforms and you could guarantee that it would pass and be implemented, which one would you pick? So one of our pieces is by an anonymous author because it's someone who currently works at a transit agency who has a front row seat to how difficult this is.

1:05:22And that person wrote the piece about transit projects having a single decision maker and state governments copying the Italian Conference of Services model. Obviously, there's some details to work out there, but the piece lays it out in some level of detail. And I think empowering transit agencies to actually deliver the project and empowering politically accountable actors to decide, we want transit to be built. We're just going to get it done. We're going to invite everyone into the process. But at the end of the day, we're going to make a decision. We're going to deliver a project in years rather than decades.

1:05:55I think that's really important. You know, it's hard to pick one of your children. But if I had to, that's what I would do. Okay, that's your favorite baby. How about you, Stephanie? So I would actually fix least cost procurement and substitute best value, which I talk about in my piece, but so does Anthony Potts. And again, the reason is because they're never going to be 100 % public employees. There's always going to be a team, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that you're not going to get the best projects if you can't hire the best teams. Procurement is the rules for hiring your team. The rules we currently have are not allowing transit agencies to hire the best team for the best value.

1:06:35And I think that one change could make a huge difference. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, too. This is so fascinating. And I just love to hear about solvable problems. Love to hear about solutions. There are solutions on the table. There's a vehicle through which to pass them that is coming up that could, you know, so this is all tangible and possible. So thank you both for coming on and walking us through all this. Thanks, David. Thank you, David. And as a longtime Volts listener, it's very special to be able to be here. So I appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to Volts, founded and hosted by me, David Roberts, produced by Nate Peavy, and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you.

1:07:23If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider telling a friend about Volts. That's how this show grows and survives, through word of mouth. See you next time.