The thought of someone on the spectrum who doesn’t handle disagreement at all well managing a job like that that’s 90% soft power is like, hilarious if you don’t care but terrifying if you do
He doesn't run his companies operationally. He highs high skilled operators then spends his time cutting through anything he sees as a bottleneck to the organization. He is like an outside consultant ... but with the internal political ability to actually get shit down. Often it is productive when he's done the research to know what might work, and not of value when he hasn't.
Disagree. For one thing they really need to be somewhere where all their technical knowledge about transit can be put to the best use, and I don't think DOT is that place, even though they might do some good things there. For another, I don't think they should go anywhere near US politics - they have said, and might do, some really unpopular things regarding non-transit stuff which would make him a liability for Dems nationally.
Putting them in charge of a big important transit agency would be much better on both those fronts. They would both be in the position to make a lot more positive change, and also in a place where their general politics outside the nitty gritty of running a transit system would be be both welcomed (because they'd be in a liberal city that largely agrees) and irrelevant (because they wouldn't have power over non-transit stuff anyway).
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that can handle a transit agency with overlapping and conflicting political stakeholders, entrenched labor interests (unions and otherwise), or interest groups. WMATA would turn him into hamburger.
I love Alon's thoughts on policy generally, but they're disagreeable to the max. Maybe someone who reads the blog but has a shred of political acumen is a better choice...
Don’t threaten me with a good time! (Although gov owned grocery seems to have little upside considering how much of elected officials’ attention they would demand
I'm going to be annoying and annoyingly point out the obvious:
You cannot have a good public transit system unless you have sufficiently high population density, which means, at minimum, some combination of single-family and multi-family dwellings. A neighborhood made up entire of single-family housing ain't gonna cut it.
Ultimately it's a geometry problem: you need a high enough population density to provide enough transit riders within easy walking distance of each transit stop. Otherwise you're either wastefully running empty buses, or you're trying to match supply to demand and end up with a sad, lonesome bus that comes by once an hour at best.
I live in Orange County, aka Sprawl Central. Just for kicks and giggles, I sometimes use Google Maps to look up how long it would take to travel to a given destination by car vs. public transit. It typically looks something like 20 min by car vs. 1 h 30 min by transit (because you have to walk to the nearest transit stop, ride the bus 45 min, get off and wait 15 min for the next bus, then ride that bus for 25 min). And then a single tear runs down my cheek as I remember the wonderfully walkable and public transit-friendly Boston where I used to live, and then I get in my car, because I care about the environment, but I'm not a masochist.
If I were running OC Transit, I would give up trying to compete with cars on every trip and focus on the “markets” where you have a lot of people going to the same place at the same time. For example, offer to help dying shopping malls by establishing park-and-ride locations with express commuter service to Irvine (which is essentially “downtown Orange County”). And those same locations could also offer express buses to Angels games (though the way the Angels are playing, a couple of minivans could handle that traffic).
I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago and didn’t want to drive-commute downtown during rush hour and worry about parking, so I took the bus. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was! Due to dedicated bus lanes on the freeways and one of the arterials, it was as if rush hour wasn’t a thing at all. And it was clean - at that hour there were 14 other people on there who all appeared to be white collar workers. (Everyone I saw paid their fare too, I took notes) I would do it again in a heartbeat!
The only downside was having to wake up earlier than I would have, that bus only ran every 25 minutes during morning rush hour, and to make sure I didn’t miss the bus I had to try for the bus before the one that would get me there right on time. But that may have been a wash with driving given rush hour traffic that the bus zoomed past.
Yep! I was still pleasantly surprised considering what and where my neighborhood is (a SFH zone that’s 20 min away from downtown when there’s no traffic). And pleasantly surprised to see people taking it. The bus had 32 seats and there were 15 people on it when it entered the freeway. It was a hybrid diesel-electric bus. That feels sustainable and worthwhile.
Aren't we seeing direct evidence that the best thing you can do for transit use is to incorporate congestion pricing for car access? The New York experiment has been remarkably clear in showing that it is a good thing.
That is, as much as it annoys public transit fans, the biggest hurdle to people using it is just how convenient and cheap using your car is.
Congestion pricing actually makes it more convenient to use your car! Just less cheap. Which is great, since the point of the car is to be the convenient option for the moments when convenience is all-important.
That is kind of my point? It is showing as one of the best policies you can do, if you are interested in results. Remarkably so.
What it is not, is a good political move. You have to contend with taxes being a legitimate tool in controlling behavior. Which is hard to do, as taxes have been poisoned in the discourse.
You have to build the transit system before you start making driving inconvenient/expensive or you lose what political will there is. Not that this should be subject to democracy or anything, it shouldn’t
I completely disagree. Congestion prices etc have benefits even when you do not have a robust transit network at the time of institution. It would be genuinely beneficial to have congestion pricing something like statewide and just reduce the sales tax a corresponding amount (or a little less so we can actually pay for road repairs). Drivers benefit from better roads and more dispersed traffic patterns and non-drivers benefit even more from paying less sales tax. And if it makes sense to improve transit options in specific areas given more new demand for such options, then do that.
I'm not clear where you are going with that. The general point is that you have to make it economical to get people to use transit. This means you have to do the big spend to build the infrastructure to support it, and then you still have to make it more expensive to just drive.
The problem a ton of transit discourse ignores, is that cars are extremely convenient if you have one. This is true even in places that have high transit use. People with cars have a huge convenience advantage.
Until there’s a subway stop across the street that comes every 2 minutes and connects to a spaghetti network. I’m just saying that you can do stuff like price parking, implement congestion pricing, whatever, make it inconvenient to drive to privilege transit - but you need a super convenient and comprehensive transit system first
As a frequent public transit user (not looking forward to SEPTA cuts), I think that making public transit smell better would create substantial amounts of positive good will for marginal users. I don't have a car, so I can't really complain when I'm waiting in the station and it reeks of urine and vape smoke, but I have a hunch that scent, more than things being visibly dirty (I don't think a subway station is measurably dirtier than any other urban surface) contributes to the "it's gross" complaint a lot of people have. I lack the knowledge of odor prevention necessary (or empirical evidence backing my claim) to come up with concrete policy solutions, but I will say that the last time I was in DC, I was impressed at how neutral WMATA smells compared to SEPTA (and it was a hot DC summer day, so I was expecting substantial BO).
A complete unwillingness to acknowledge that mass transit beings poor people and their attendant problems into an area that didn’t have them before.
People have a reasonable mistrust of public transit in the states because the state has decided not to keep the bad poors off, and making it cheap to get to McLean has costs that far outweigh the benefits.
Same problem with voucher housing. In principle great. In practice the 7 feral teens in the house down the road are nooooot great Bob.
Places like NYC and Tokyo are much safer than Dallas or LA, and that’s not even taking car-specific deaths and lifestyle factors into account. I mean NYC has some of the highest tax rates in the world; if it were uniquely unsafe for rich people too they would just leave. Instead they take mass transit to work every day.
"Places like NYC... are much safer than Dallas or LA"
I'm going to leave Tokyo out of the conversation because that's another ball of wax altogether.
But a problem I see with a lot of these comparisons is people aren't clear about what they're actually comparing.
Like, usually when people from Dallas or LA are worried about crime they might experience on their trip to NYC, they're not comparing NYC to the equivalent urban core of Dallas or LA, they're comparing NYC to whatever super-safe suburb of Dallas or LA they live in.
And while to be sure, those people absolutely have an exaggerated perception of crime in NYC, and are usually surprised by how safe they feel once they get there - they're not wrong about the direction of the crime rate difference compared to the neighborhoods where they live and spend most of their time. So coming at them with "ackshually NYC is safer than your city, here are the numbers" just falls flat.
It doesn’t cause the comparison to fall flat, it just adds some nuance. People like the idea of being able to drive somewhere cheaply, and are worried in the abstract about their safety on public transit, but in practice we see that at least some cities can do congestion pricing and mass transit in a way that people prefer. We should learn from those wins instead of getting stuck in 1960s Jim Crow Atlanta thought for the rest of our lives.
The city I think of is Philly. Philly’s burbs would probably be more open to transit if they had any hope that Philly would prosecute assholes on the train.
This is kind of true in LA as well but LA is doing pretty well on transit over the last 15 or so years.
The problem with LA is the severe declines in ridership over the couple decades preceding COVID. I would love to be able to give them more credit as it seems like they've done better than most of America at the construction side of things, but unfortunately, when it comes to actually getting people to use transit, whatever they're doing isn't working. And this is in California where they have the advantage of gas prices approaching European levels.
I generally agree with you, and don't agree with Jimmy Hoffa about transit increasing crime in neighborhoods. Was just making a narrow point that people, afraid of crime in NYC, who come from cities which have higher crime on paper, aren't *quite* as irrational as they may appear (though they could stand to be be more rational).
When I said fall flat I meant in terms of persuasion, not in terms of fact.
Caltrain (serving the poors of... Palo Alto) and the MBTA commuter rail (... Weston) are very badly managed. This is a grant to improve them. Ds not being tough on crime is not the root of all evils
One question I have: it seems like mass transit policy is dominated by how things should work in big cities. But I've lived in small cities (<200,000) and in suburbs for most of my adult life, and public transit in those places seemed not to work so well. I have this vague intuition that a suburb-focused kind of mass transit might look really different from what works in Manhattan. Maybe it's just Uber or Waymo or some similar thing, but I wonder if you could have something that was more responsive and played better with low population density than the usual once-per-hour large county bus that has five riders on it.
There were some low hanging fruit in the low to mid population places I have lived in.
For instance, in Binghamton NY, all the local busses would leave the greyhound station simultaneously, on the hour, which seemed idiotic to me. (The intercity bus station is the only practical, non-car way of reaching nyc from there, so this is kind of a big deal and a big inconvenience).
In Salt Lake City, the local authorities seemed fixated on building out and extending the tram system further south instead of adding more small buses that would efficiently navigate the foothills. It is good that they have a tram to take you to the airport, but does that tram have to run all the way to byu? on a somewhat related note, i was once in a hurry and left my bike parked at one of the bike rails near the mormon temple while catching the tram to the airport. when i came back a week later, the bike was gone.
I live in a suburban part of Seattle city, and we have this service available in my neighborhood. I’ve never used it but I do think running vans instead of buses to low density areas is a good thing.
Yep - the 'well actually' pro transit uber alles crowd conveniently ignores the settled reality of life as most Americans currently experience it. Would it be great if you could wave a wand and pull half the population out of the exurbs and somehow convince them of the pleasures of apartment living and offer buses or micro transit options so awesome it causes them to junk their big ass trucks? Maybe - but literally none of that is going to happen - you can engage in progressive urban planning on the margins (Hank Hill grousing about flex posts in Arlen is actually pretty funny), but we've poured a lot of concrete in the last 100 years and the interstate highway system and the American love of SUVs isn't going anywhere. I hate to be Eeyore but the facts on the ground mitigate against radical change, esp for a party like the dems who need to actively re-earn voters' trust in their judgment and values.
Even in European countries with dense cities, extensive public transit and heavily taxed fuel, there are still a lot of cars on the roads. Maybe more little ass Fiats than big ass trucks, but people everywhere still like their own wheels.
The U.S. has thousands of miles of underused or abandoned freight rail corridors in urban and suburban areas. Many of these corridors could be converted into rapid transit or commuter rail lines at far lower cost than building new rights-of-way. However, legal, regulatory, and inter-agency barriers often stall these conversions for years.
Proposed Solution:
Establish a National Rail Corridor Conversion Program (NRCCP) to fast-track the transformation of disused or lightly used freight lines into passenger service.
Key Elements:
Federal mediation between freight railroads and transit agencies to negotiate shared-use or sale agreements.
Streamlined environmental review for projects using existing rail alignments.
Dedicated capital funding for track upgrades, stations, and electrification.
Land banking authority to preserve corridors at risk of abandonment.
This would allow cities to deploy new passenger service in a fraction of the time and cost of new rail construction, especially in growing suburbs and secondary cities.
While smarter transit policy and management would go a long way, I wonder how much effect it will have when the rest of daily life in the US is so auto-oriented. Slow boring of hard boards indeed.
1. Increase capital grants for automated rail projects relative to other rail projects.
2. A large research award to build open-source bus driving software.
3. Incentivize projects in corridors with highly zoned density
4. Create strict time limits on delay over and above those caused by NEPA (to the extent we can't remove NEPA as an obstacle). Thus local politicians have to take tough decisions instead of punting them.
Literally just put Alon Levy in charge at the DOT
I think a "special advisor" role might be better
The thought of someone on the spectrum who doesn’t handle disagreement at all well managing a job like that that’s 90% soft power is like, hilarious if you don’t care but terrifying if you do
elon seems to be doing well...
He doesn't run his companies operationally. He highs high skilled operators then spends his time cutting through anything he sees as a bottleneck to the organization. He is like an outside consultant ... but with the internal political ability to actually get shit down. Often it is productive when he's done the research to know what might work, and not of value when he hasn't.
Or if he doesn't want to do that, at least find somebody that is reading everything coming out of the Transit Costs Project.
Disagree. For one thing they really need to be somewhere where all their technical knowledge about transit can be put to the best use, and I don't think DOT is that place, even though they might do some good things there. For another, I don't think they should go anywhere near US politics - they have said, and might do, some really unpopular things regarding non-transit stuff which would make him a liability for Dems nationally.
Putting them in charge of a big important transit agency would be much better on both those fronts. They would both be in the position to make a lot more positive change, and also in a place where their general politics outside the nitty gritty of running a transit system would be be both welcomed (because they'd be in a liberal city that largely agrees) and irrelevant (because they wouldn't have power over non-transit stuff anyway).
He doesn’t strike me as the kind of person that can handle a transit agency with overlapping and conflicting political stakeholders, entrenched labor interests (unions and otherwise), or interest groups. WMATA would turn him into hamburger.
I love Alon's thoughts on policy generally, but they're disagreeable to the max. Maybe someone who reads the blog but has a shred of political acumen is a better choice...
DoT is mostly roads and airplanes though.
Nah, Sound Transit
I would like to be able to ride a free bus from my rent controlled apartment to the government owned grocery store.
Havana beckons!
why not enlist then?
Don’t threaten me with a good time! (Although gov owned grocery seems to have little upside considering how much of elected officials’ attention they would demand
I'm going to be annoying and annoyingly point out the obvious:
You cannot have a good public transit system unless you have sufficiently high population density, which means, at minimum, some combination of single-family and multi-family dwellings. A neighborhood made up entire of single-family housing ain't gonna cut it.
Ultimately it's a geometry problem: you need a high enough population density to provide enough transit riders within easy walking distance of each transit stop. Otherwise you're either wastefully running empty buses, or you're trying to match supply to demand and end up with a sad, lonesome bus that comes by once an hour at best.
I live in Orange County, aka Sprawl Central. Just for kicks and giggles, I sometimes use Google Maps to look up how long it would take to travel to a given destination by car vs. public transit. It typically looks something like 20 min by car vs. 1 h 30 min by transit (because you have to walk to the nearest transit stop, ride the bus 45 min, get off and wait 15 min for the next bus, then ride that bus for 25 min). And then a single tear runs down my cheek as I remember the wonderfully walkable and public transit-friendly Boston where I used to live, and then I get in my car, because I care about the environment, but I'm not a masochist.
If I were running OC Transit, I would give up trying to compete with cars on every trip and focus on the “markets” where you have a lot of people going to the same place at the same time. For example, offer to help dying shopping malls by establishing park-and-ride locations with express commuter service to Irvine (which is essentially “downtown Orange County”). And those same locations could also offer express buses to Angels games (though the way the Angels are playing, a couple of minivans could handle that traffic).
I like your comment overall and I shall overlook your insulting the Angels 😊
True, and transit still could be a LOT better in relatively high density and demand neighborhoods.
Or just run driverless everything empty or full. Seriously, there should be no streets without subways, no matter how rural
Sadly, I think you'll end up with driverless homeless shelters pretty quick if you go this route in modern America.
So much of the discourse around public transit is stuck in unexamined assumptions.
For instance: do the wheels on the bus *have* to go round and round?
Not if it's a hoverbus!
"hoverbus!"
Expand this to 400 words, and you could win a cool two grand.
Tired: hover bus
Wired: the cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro
I had jury duty a couple of weeks ago and didn’t want to drive-commute downtown during rush hour and worry about parking, so I took the bus. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was! Due to dedicated bus lanes on the freeways and one of the arterials, it was as if rush hour wasn’t a thing at all. And it was clean - at that hour there were 14 other people on there who all appeared to be white collar workers. (Everyone I saw paid their fare too, I took notes) I would do it again in a heartbeat!
The only downside was having to wake up earlier than I would have, that bus only ran every 25 minutes during morning rush hour, and to make sure I didn’t miss the bus I had to try for the bus before the one that would get me there right on time. But that may have been a wash with driving given rush hour traffic that the bus zoomed past.
Frequency is freedom!
Yep! I was still pleasantly surprised considering what and where my neighborhood is (a SFH zone that’s 20 min away from downtown when there’s no traffic). And pleasantly surprised to see people taking it. The bus had 32 seats and there were 15 people on it when it entered the freeway. It was a hybrid diesel-electric bus. That feels sustainable and worthwhile.
Aren't we seeing direct evidence that the best thing you can do for transit use is to incorporate congestion pricing for car access? The New York experiment has been remarkably clear in showing that it is a good thing.
That is, as much as it annoys public transit fans, the biggest hurdle to people using it is just how convenient and cheap using your car is.
Congestion pricing actually makes it more convenient to use your car! Just less cheap. Which is great, since the point of the car is to be the convenient option for the moments when convenience is all-important.
The advantage of congestion pricing for transit is it makes buses go faster
That is kind of my point? It is showing as one of the best policies you can do, if you are interested in results. Remarkably so.
What it is not, is a good political move. You have to contend with taxes being a legitimate tool in controlling behavior. Which is hard to do, as taxes have been poisoned in the discourse.
The real point is that drivers should assume the cost of some of the externalities of car ownership
Some is a good start but what if we charged for ALL of the externalities?
Well, they pay gas taxes… but I agree and it also helps begin the transition to taxing them as they use less gas
This.
You have to build the transit system before you start making driving inconvenient/expensive or you lose what political will there is. Not that this should be subject to democracy or anything, it shouldn’t
I completely disagree. Congestion prices etc have benefits even when you do not have a robust transit network at the time of institution. It would be genuinely beneficial to have congestion pricing something like statewide and just reduce the sales tax a corresponding amount (or a little less so we can actually pay for road repairs). Drivers benefit from better roads and more dispersed traffic patterns and non-drivers benefit even more from paying less sales tax. And if it makes sense to improve transit options in specific areas given more new demand for such options, then do that.
I'm not clear where you are going with that. The general point is that you have to make it economical to get people to use transit. This means you have to do the big spend to build the infrastructure to support it, and then you still have to make it more expensive to just drive.
The problem a ton of transit discourse ignores, is that cars are extremely convenient if you have one. This is true even in places that have high transit use. People with cars have a huge convenience advantage.
Until there’s a subway stop across the street that comes every 2 minutes and connects to a spaghetti network. I’m just saying that you can do stuff like price parking, implement congestion pricing, whatever, make it inconvenient to drive to privilege transit - but you need a super convenient and comprehensive transit system first
As a frequent public transit user (not looking forward to SEPTA cuts), I think that making public transit smell better would create substantial amounts of positive good will for marginal users. I don't have a car, so I can't really complain when I'm waiting in the station and it reeks of urine and vape smoke, but I have a hunch that scent, more than things being visibly dirty (I don't think a subway station is measurably dirtier than any other urban surface) contributes to the "it's gross" complaint a lot of people have. I lack the knowledge of odor prevention necessary (or empirical evidence backing my claim) to come up with concrete policy solutions, but I will say that the last time I was in DC, I was impressed at how neutral WMATA smells compared to SEPTA (and it was a hot DC summer day, so I was expecting substantial BO).
A complete unwillingness to acknowledge that mass transit beings poor people and their attendant problems into an area that didn’t have them before.
People have a reasonable mistrust of public transit in the states because the state has decided not to keep the bad poors off, and making it cheap to get to McLean has costs that far outweigh the benefits.
Same problem with voucher housing. In principle great. In practice the 7 feral teens in the house down the road are nooooot great Bob.
Places like NYC and Tokyo are much safer than Dallas or LA, and that’s not even taking car-specific deaths and lifestyle factors into account. I mean NYC has some of the highest tax rates in the world; if it were uniquely unsafe for rich people too they would just leave. Instead they take mass transit to work every day.
"Places like NYC... are much safer than Dallas or LA"
I'm going to leave Tokyo out of the conversation because that's another ball of wax altogether.
But a problem I see with a lot of these comparisons is people aren't clear about what they're actually comparing.
Like, usually when people from Dallas or LA are worried about crime they might experience on their trip to NYC, they're not comparing NYC to the equivalent urban core of Dallas or LA, they're comparing NYC to whatever super-safe suburb of Dallas or LA they live in.
And while to be sure, those people absolutely have an exaggerated perception of crime in NYC, and are usually surprised by how safe they feel once they get there - they're not wrong about the direction of the crime rate difference compared to the neighborhoods where they live and spend most of their time. So coming at them with "ackshually NYC is safer than your city, here are the numbers" just falls flat.
It doesn’t cause the comparison to fall flat, it just adds some nuance. People like the idea of being able to drive somewhere cheaply, and are worried in the abstract about their safety on public transit, but in practice we see that at least some cities can do congestion pricing and mass transit in a way that people prefer. We should learn from those wins instead of getting stuck in 1960s Jim Crow Atlanta thought for the rest of our lives.
The city I think of is Philly. Philly’s burbs would probably be more open to transit if they had any hope that Philly would prosecute assholes on the train.
This is kind of true in LA as well but LA is doing pretty well on transit over the last 15 or so years.
LA is actually an unsung transit success story imo, it needs to continue to expand but it’s built a lot more than Seattle for cheaper
The problem with LA is the severe declines in ridership over the couple decades preceding COVID. I would love to be able to give them more credit as it seems like they've done better than most of America at the construction side of things, but unfortunately, when it comes to actually getting people to use transit, whatever they're doing isn't working. And this is in California where they have the advantage of gas prices approaching European levels.
I generally agree with you, and don't agree with Jimmy Hoffa about transit increasing crime in neighborhoods. Was just making a narrow point that people, afraid of crime in NYC, who come from cities which have higher crime on paper, aren't *quite* as irrational as they may appear (though they could stand to be be more rational).
When I said fall flat I meant in terms of persuasion, not in terms of fact.
Caltrain (serving the poors of... Palo Alto) and the MBTA commuter rail (... Weston) are very badly managed. This is a grant to improve them. Ds not being tough on crime is not the root of all evils
So you've decided to negatively polarize yourself into being a classist aristocrat instead?
One question I have: it seems like mass transit policy is dominated by how things should work in big cities. But I've lived in small cities (<200,000) and in suburbs for most of my adult life, and public transit in those places seemed not to work so well. I have this vague intuition that a suburb-focused kind of mass transit might look really different from what works in Manhattan. Maybe it's just Uber or Waymo or some similar thing, but I wonder if you could have something that was more responsive and played better with low population density than the usual once-per-hour large county bus that has five riders on it.
There were some low hanging fruit in the low to mid population places I have lived in.
For instance, in Binghamton NY, all the local busses would leave the greyhound station simultaneously, on the hour, which seemed idiotic to me. (The intercity bus station is the only practical, non-car way of reaching nyc from there, so this is kind of a big deal and a big inconvenience).
In Salt Lake City, the local authorities seemed fixated on building out and extending the tram system further south instead of adding more small buses that would efficiently navigate the foothills. It is good that they have a tram to take you to the airport, but does that tram have to run all the way to byu? on a somewhat related note, i was once in a hurry and left my bike parked at one of the bike rails near the mormon temple while catching the tram to the airport. when i came back a week later, the bike was gone.
I live in a suburban part of Seattle city, and we have this service available in my neighborhood. I’ve never used it but I do think running vans instead of buses to low density areas is a good thing.
https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/metro/travel-options/metro-flex
Yep - the 'well actually' pro transit uber alles crowd conveniently ignores the settled reality of life as most Americans currently experience it. Would it be great if you could wave a wand and pull half the population out of the exurbs and somehow convince them of the pleasures of apartment living and offer buses or micro transit options so awesome it causes them to junk their big ass trucks? Maybe - but literally none of that is going to happen - you can engage in progressive urban planning on the margins (Hank Hill grousing about flex posts in Arlen is actually pretty funny), but we've poured a lot of concrete in the last 100 years and the interstate highway system and the American love of SUVs isn't going anywhere. I hate to be Eeyore but the facts on the ground mitigate against radical change, esp for a party like the dems who need to actively re-earn voters' trust in their judgment and values.
Even in European countries with dense cities, extensive public transit and heavily taxed fuel, there are still a lot of cars on the roads. Maybe more little ass Fiats than big ass trucks, but people everywhere still like their own wheels.
I asked ChatGPT5
2. Problem: Underutilized Rail Corridors
(≤400 words)
The U.S. has thousands of miles of underused or abandoned freight rail corridors in urban and suburban areas. Many of these corridors could be converted into rapid transit or commuter rail lines at far lower cost than building new rights-of-way. However, legal, regulatory, and inter-agency barriers often stall these conversions for years.
Proposed Solution:
Establish a National Rail Corridor Conversion Program (NRCCP) to fast-track the transformation of disused or lightly used freight lines into passenger service.
Key Elements:
Federal mediation between freight railroads and transit agencies to negotiate shared-use or sale agreements.
Streamlined environmental review for projects using existing rail alignments.
Dedicated capital funding for track upgrades, stations, and electrification.
Land banking authority to preserve corridors at risk of abandonment.
This would allow cities to deploy new passenger service in a fraction of the time and cost of new rail construction, especially in growing suburbs and secondary cities.
Sounds good, but is it true
Seems so:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90713249/4-underused-u-s-rail-lines-that-should-get-a-second-life
Smaller busses running more frequently.
Time of day street parking rates with fees set to achieve ~95% capacity; there is (almost) always a space if you are willing to pay.
While smarter transit policy and management would go a long way, I wonder how much effect it will have when the rest of daily life in the US is so auto-oriented. Slow boring of hard boards indeed.
"Monorail! Monorail!"
1. Increase capital grants for automated rail projects relative to other rail projects.
2. A large research award to build open-source bus driving software.
3. Incentivize projects in corridors with highly zoned density
4. Create strict time limits on delay over and above those caused by NEPA (to the extent we can't remove NEPA as an obstacle). Thus local politicians have to take tough decisions instead of punting them.