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America once led the world in building transit and now leads the world in what transit costs, roughly three times the international average per mile, measured not against authoritarian megaprojects but against Italy, Spain, and Japan. On this episode of Volts, David Roberts talks with Will Poff-Webster of the Institute for Progress, who put together the new Transit Abundance Playbook, and Stephanie Pollack, former head of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and former acting administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. Their argument is that the costs are a policy choice: federal funding rules teach transit agencies to plan on a napkin and do the real work years later, to hire the lowest bidder over the one they know will deliver, and to defer to anyone holding a veto, while highways operate under looser versions of the same rules. As Pollack puts it, "if you hate transit, you should spend less on it." A surface transportation reauthorization bill is coming, and two of the playbook's proposals have already reached the House version.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction: why cars work against cities

03:25 Agency culture or federal law: where does the fix come from

11:31 Planning: how federal funding enforces bad habits

20:10 Overdesign: the Green Line stations and the frequency-first test

23:40 Buses: why every agency orders a custom fleet

26:53 Procurement: lowest bid versus best value

32:56 Veto points and Italy’s conference of services

39:56 Permitting: environmental review as a NIMBY tool

45:28 State capacity: why consultant brain took over

51:46 Labor costs, automation, and Section 13(c)

56:19 Is any of this politically achievable?

1:03:28 Final question: one reform each

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

Volts

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