Key Takeaways

• In this blog, Russell King and I discuss the pros and cons of free fares and car pooling in response to the oil crisis.

• In favour of free fares:

  • Removing fare collection speeds up boarding times, improves schedule reliability, and creates a positive ridership spiral that benefits the whole network.

  • Free or heavily subsidised fares send a powerful signal that travel is a right rather than a privilege, shifting the cultural default away from car dependency.

  • In some cases, the administrative cost of processing fares can actually exceed the fare revenue itself, making subsidisation not just socially beneficial but economically rational.

• Against free fares:

  • Free fares are a blunt instrument. The financial incentive to switch from driving already exists when fuel prices are high.

  • Fare subsidies are rarely funded by new progressive taxation; in practice, they tend to come at the expense of maintenance and capital investment.

  • Once introduced, free fare policies are politically very difficult to reverse, even when their shortcomings become apparent.

  • Overcrowding is one of the most powerful deterrents to long-term public transport use, and free fares can accelerate it.

  • New public transport patronage driven by free fares often comes from people who were previously walking or cycling, not from former drivers.

• In favour of car pooling:

  • High fuel prices have created a rare window of opportunity where people are genuinely more open to changing their travel habits.

  • Pulling multiple policy levers simultaneously: HOV lanes, matching apps, tax incentives, and parking charges, is what delivers successful carpooling.

  • Unlike free fares, carpooling once established largely sustains itself without ongoing public subsidy, making it a crisis intervention with genuine long-term benefits.

• Against car pooling:

  • Even a shared car trip is still a car trip, and in most cases, the better long-term investment is in robust public transit that removes the need for the journey entirely.

  • The logistics of meaningfully matching carpoolers are complex enough that the administrative burden often outweighs the benefit, except in a handful of naturally occurring cases like workplace commutes.

  • Over-incentivising carpooling risks inducing car trips that would not otherwise have happened, potentially making congestion and fuel consumption worse rather than better.

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    Introduction

    This week, I’m back with Sam Sklar of the Exasperated Infrastructures newsletter for the second instalment of our ongoing series on policy responses to the oil crisis. If you missed last week’s discussion on improving bus services, you can catch up here.

    This time, we’re turning our attention to two topics that sit at the heart of the transport policy debate: public transit fares and carpooling, a measure long championed as a magic bullet, yet one that has stubbornly resisted successful implementation almost everywhere it has been tried.

    As before, Russell and I will be laying out the arguments on both sides and leaving the verdict up to you.

Part 1 - Fares

Even before the current oil crisis, the idea of cheap or free public transit fares had been gaining serious traction in policy circles. Nowhere is this more visible than in New York, where Sam is based: the city’s newly elected Mayor campaigned on a promise of free buses for all New Yorkers, although he has since conceded that this won’t be happening in the immediate future.

The crisis, however, has given the debate fresh urgency. Several jurisdictions have already moved from discussion to action, including here in Australia, where both Victoria and Tasmania have announced free fare policies in direct response to the crisis.

The Case for Cheap or Free Fares (Sam)

This is a particularly hot-button issue in New York City at the moment. Our mayor, Zohran Mamdani, ran on an affordability platform that included, among other promises, “Fast and Free Buses.” There are lots of arguments to do this, but I’ll cover three here: economic, political, and operational.

First and the most contentious argument: economics. Someone has to pay for bus operations, and often the user fees cover very little of the actual cost to run the buses or trains; the rest must come from operating subsidies, often funded by taxes or special assessments. If the farebox recovery (what percent of the costs are covered by user fees) is low enough, the question becomes, “Is there a reasonable source of dollars to replace user fees?” with, “Is this the highest and best use of these dollars?” Who wins and who pays? I think the benefits outweigh the costs in many situations, and what a good problem to have, “too many transit riders.” In the face of an oil crisis, great and free transit is a lifesaver where it exists.

Second, political. This is a campaign promise that the mayor can…partially deliver on. The City of New York controls the streets and sidewalks, but the State operates the actual buses and Subways. The Mayor, and to an extent, City Council (in New York—structures are different in every place) can pass laws and issue directives to create, clear, and/or enforce bus lane operations and build benches and shelters to encourage a dignified wait for the next bus. The Subways are a different economics, and a fare-free Subway is always challenging. Here, I’d look to start smaller. Instead of transferring the burden of cost all at once, perhaps the City and State can think of partial fare-free offerings. Perhaps the busiest trunk lines are free, or the buses are free on weekends. The idea here is twofold: deliver on a campaign promise and parlay this win into bigger and better wins, and to do meaningful policy to create a regime where transit is the default option in many cases for many people.

Free doesn’t always mean better, but this policy has ramifications beyond the economics. It signals that travel is a right, not a privilege, and driving is a choice with multiple other options, should gas be too expensive to make many trips, or driving be too burdensome to have it as the only choice.

Third, there are operational considerations. Fast and free often go together when it comes to bus operations, or at least there’s a strong correlation between the two. If the driver doesn’t also have to monitor fare collection, they are free to focus on excellent service and not crowd control. If the driver doesn’t have to collect fares (faster now that cash is mostly phased out and OMNY is a “tap”), they can keep to a tighter schedule, which increases route reliability, which increases ridership—the positive spiral to counter the negative funding spiral we hear about. If each rider takes 5 seconds to tap in and there are 10 riders…that’s almost a minute saved per stop. On a 50-stop route, these small savings add up. Across a whole network with thousands of buses, imagine how much time this generally saves, and goes back into the pockets of New Yorkers. You’re trading upfront dollars for economic activity.

At this point, your problem is how to communicate these benefits. One is real dollars and cents, and the other is “the economy.” Tell stories all the time, and this is an easy sell.

On the back end, agencies no longer have to process payments and administer relationships with vendors or processors. In some cases, the cost to process a fare will continue to rise even if fares remain static. The unit economics can be very tight, and sometimes—in some cases—the cost to administer each fare actually exceeds the cost of the fare. Everyone loses.

There are a ton of reasons to heavily subsidize or make fares free for transit riders. There are examples where this has been successful and others where it hasn’t quite worked the way boosters expected. In any case, it’s worth piloting and seeing if we can’t provide a better city that runs on mass transit.

The Case Against (Russell)

Read Russell's Response HERE

Part 2 - Car Pooling

Carpooling, the sharing of car journeys between two or more people, is one of those policy ideas that seems almost too sensible to argue with. Fewer cars carrying more people means less congestion, lower fuel consumption, and reduced travel costs for everyone involved. In the context of an oil crisis, the logic is compelling: no new infrastructure required, no large public expenditure, just better use of the cars already on the road.

So what are the pros and cons of promoting car pooling in response to the oil crisis?

The Case for Encouraging Car Pooling (Russell)

Read Russell's Arugment HERE

The Case Against Car Pooling (Sam)

Carpooling is a demand management technique that encourages drivers or would-be drivers to share a ride should they start in *relatively* the same location and end in the *relatively* same location. In theory, two people per car saves gas, time, money, and helps to shrink the burden on our roads via a reduction in traffic. Promoting carpooling as more than a tiny piece in the traffic puzzle is unrealistic and should be considered a fringe case for three reasons. First, all else equal a car trip is still a car trip, even if it’s shared. Better would be to build and operate a robust transit system so that both trips could be transit, bike, or pedestrian. Second, the logistics to match people requires luck and trust, along with an understanding of demand dynamics that certainly overcomplicates what should be a simple idea. Last, and related to mode shift, is a density shift. If travelers know a car trip exists and don’t have access to reliable transit, that’s another car on the road that either could have been left at home or operated with one to many passengers. A car trip is still another car on the road that may not have been there otherwise.

It Diverts Attention from Building Robust Transit

First, even during the first of what will likely be many oil crises in the next decade, we need to be investing in public transit as the preferred option in many cases. In all but the most obvious cases, we should look to invest in “super” car pooling, where perhaps 20-50 people gather in a single vehicle, perhaps with a driver, to head in the same direction. In cases where that’s not possible, we shouldn’t be encouraging vehicle trips of less than 6 or so people instead of driving alone: technology is here to help in the form of autonomous shuttles, driverless buses, and robotaxis. Frankly, “carpooling” is a twentieth-century idea, and promoting it when there are so many other options is selling human ingenuity short.

Logistics, Logistics, Logistics

Second, the dollar and environmental cost and mental burden to facilitate beneficial carpooling often outweighs simply driving alone—especially if AI is involved. The only way to make carpooling work, really, is if there’s a natural and unstructured way to offer it: to and from work if enough people live together and, famously, on slug lines, in places that have high vehicle traffic, lots of demand, and an incentive for fuller vehicles.

For example, for many years, EZPass offered a discount for a car with 3 or more people to cross the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey into New York. Often, a single-occupancy car would approach the bus stop and pick up a few strangers to take advantage of the discount. The driver would get a smaller toll, and the bus passengers would get a free trip over the bridge, compared to a few or so dollars. Lots of risk here, no? It proves the natural market exists, but it’s often such a headache to regulate that it would be worth understanding the incentives and offering a transit alternative.

It Induces Car Trips

Last, there’s simply a volume problem. If we incentivize carpool trips even a little too much, we’re inducing car trips that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred, exacerbating the problem we’re trying to address. What’s the right incentive structure? In a bafflingly complicated world, it’s impossible to get perfectly correct, and we’ve made our problem …worse. It’s counterintuitive, and it doesn’t help travelers survive an oil crisis.

In all but the most obvious cases where transit makes little sense, the technology hasn’t caught up, and we’re sure of administering logistics (who administers?) to make meaningful change, encouraging carpooling on its own is benign with little actual benefit.

Conclusion

Both debates we’ve explored today reveal a recurring tension at the heart of transport policy: the difference between what looks like a solution and what actually works.

Free fares and carpooling share a certain intuitive appeal. They are easy to explain, easy to sell, and easy to reach for when a crisis demands visible action. But as we have each argued, from different directions and on different issues, even the most superficially appealing interventions have unintended consequences.

We’ve tried to lay out the arguments fairly and leave the verdict to you. We’d love to hear where you land, and what we’ve missed.

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

MAP-21:

“Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act”

Twelve years in and we’ve made …progress that we should …move ahead …for. Congress aimed MAP-21’s text at program reformation—hopefully allowing for a better spend. What could we achieve if the methods by which we disbursed authorized dollars were more closely related to the expected objectives without these intentions being too hard to implement, track, and measure?

MAP-21 did not answer this question, even with its best intentions. Though it did seek to consolidate discretionary (competitive) programs from SAFETEA-LU and TEA-21, it still encouraged lots of highway spending and incomplete performance measures that allowed for some wacky results from our state DOTs. For example, tied to some dollars here was the promise to make our roads safer through design and construction intervention—but the performance measures didn’t hold recipients to some objective standard. If [insert state here] sought to reduce fatalities, all it had to do was to set a higher target than the number of crashes last cycle and then do…nothing.

So what are we spending our tax dollars on, really?

Power: State >> Regional >> Federal >> Local. MPOs get some more power here with “transportation alternatives” programs split between the regions and the states, though one can imagine what a state DOT (highways) would do with its share, and one might even imagine the state gumming up these funds for “flexibility” reasons. Really, though, the ownership/responsibility matrix continues to be goofy and wholly American: should a state own a “local” road only to forget about it when the time comes to reconfigure it? Should we signal that we want to install bike/ped infrastructure on state roads—most of which are limited access or highways that probably should separate modes more than the allocated funds would allow? The logic doesn’t follow once you realize the whole funding game is akin to “telephone.”

Mode: The omnibus bill reauthorizes spending for the modes, separately for the most part. Safety remains a big issue (but not really). It provides separate funding for the first time for “transportation alternatives,” which include non-highway related, non-auto-related spending dollars specially set aside and applied both formulaically and competitively.

Complexity: This bill was the first time the Fed made a concerted effort to shrink/consolidate the number of discretionary programs to administer them better. Some programs (New Freedoms?1) simply fell by the wayside.

MAP-21 continued USDOT’s approach to performance-based planning, asking recipients of federal funds to more thoughtfully organize project development, selection, and construction. Projects have become significantly more challenging; much of the easy ones are accounted for, and the land is developed in the densest of places. There are competing priorities and limited space. How best to organize and tie funding to its highest and best use? Who is the right actor for this?

Flexibility: The TA program compelled states to reckon with non-highway spending in earnest, in theory. “Flexibility,” as we entered the 2010s, was heavily tied to very specific definitions of what was and wasn’t allowed, rather than by mode. Lots of discretion is afforded to the Secretary to decide what does and does not meet certain thresholds. Lots of DOTs understand flexibility to mean they can flexibly ignore DOT directives by flexibly claiming the funds should flex to highway spending.

Geography: No earmarks here, so the geography of MAP-21’s investment is devolved to the states and the consolidated discretionary programs. There’s horse trading inside the distribution of competitive funds. My take is that this actually made corruption worse because it wasn’t as nakedly obvious to follow.

Here’s a great guide from T4America that says more:

Making the Most of Map-21

Catch up on older posts in this series below:

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

SAFETEA-LU (2005):

There might be too much “tea,” even though it continues to be a great sequence of letters to put transportation, equity, and act together in a row. SAFETEA-LU is remembered for a few pieces of fun Congressional whosawatsits:

• Pork, a precursor to the pullback on earmarks in MAP-21, is out of control. We’ve got the “Bridge to Nowhere” mini fiasco, Dennis Hastert insider trading, and a huge handful of questionable dollars wasted as quid pro quo. I maintain that spending too much to root out graft is a relatively huge waste of money, and that we can afford a little hagglebacon to get the majority of what we want done, done.

• New Starts, Multimodalism, and the belief that if the Department of Transportation should exist, it should support movement by means other than highway spending. Remember, we’re only about 18 or so years out from the practical “completion” of the Interstate Highway System, and many of the Congresspeople who understood transportation very little then, understand it even less now.

Continuing the series:

Power: State >> Federal >> Regional >> Local. The big shift is in environmental review. The overwhelming confluence of new and complex projects intersecting with NEPA review (written and ossified in the 1970s) hasn’t kept up with our governments’ ability to monitor and certify projects. Time adds cost and risk, and no project can withstand an indefinite hold while the different authorities fight over who’s left holding the football, and lawsuit after lawsuit results in an injunction, while we debate whether a bird species’ habitat can be moved.1 So the Fed did the only logical thing: devolve NEPA review to the states to “self-certify.” Certainly, nothing could go wrong.

Mode: Added more support for transit (New Starts in 5309), extended TIFIA and RRIF programs. The “New Freedoms” program focused on transit applications specifically for seniors and people with mobility challenges/disabled people. Safe Routes to School was added as a priority funding program for the first time.

Complexity: This bill feels like a hold steady; more sections added for hazmat, motor carriers (trucks/lorries). For the first time, there’s a specific pilot program authorized to leverage federal dollars with private investment—PPP or P3s take a prominent place. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics is established here, demonstrating the need for more data-driven decisions at the federal level. ALSO included are University Transportation Centers for the first time—devolving / and funding to our higher education institutions to work on complicated research projects.

Flexibility: Little mention of flexibility in this bill. I do find it strange that Highway Safety Improvement Program dollars were not incorporated in Title II Highway Safety, but that’s probably because we’re way too focused on the administration of roads and whose fault traffic deaths are to notice the interconnected nature of safety. We’ve lost the thread here a little—highway/road safety at its core is not about who’s responsible, but working at all cylinders to prevent these crashes/injuries/deaths.

Geography: Multimodalism focus and a focus on intergovernmental affairs and right-sizing the relationship between regional governments and states. Nothing about cities or sub-regional governments at all.

Included Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe’s (R-OK) (the guy who brought the snowball onto the Senate floor to argue against climate change) “midnight rider,” which sought to usurp EPA authority for oil and gas in sovereign territories in Oklahoma only. Not great and maybe a final straw for pork in these omnibus reauthorization bills.

One point that consistently comes up in my research and my socialization of these ideas is that there has to be more to each bill than a straighforward read of the text. And there is. We should ask questions like what was left on the House/Senate committee floors? What if we had just 1% more leadership for transit, rail and non-highway spending? What stories give excellent color to these bills that tell a bigger tale about power and Federalism? I hope my literature review gets into this eventually, so stay tuned.

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1. 80% of the battle is showing up.

How does anyone meet anyone? Whether you’re new to any field (I’m specifically going to talk about planning) or you’re a seasoned professional, you won’t meet people to build your “network” if you’re not in the rooms. Part of the problem is access and availability. How should you know what room to be in if you’ve never been in one? How can you find out about happy hours, lectures, events, conferences, meetups, and activities if you’re very new to the field? Practically a few starter tasks:

• Find your local chapter of a professional organization. If you’re younger, find the “Young Professionals of xxxxx”. But there are a ton of organizations in every city or region that help to organize our profession: the American Planning Association has a local and national chapter in most places in the US, the Institute of Transportation Engineers unironically loves when planners join, and the Women’s Transportation Seminar is a good place to start. Membership can be nominal and each organization likely also hosts free events sporadically.

• Separately, so it doesn’t get lost: there are local groups that also have lots of great influence and organizing power. These groups may be hyperlocal down to the block level, but they might also be more niche depending on your particular interest, and they may be political. You may be able to do meaningful work right away that helps you develop a reputation. Often, you can find out about these groups from the larger umbrella ones mentioned above.

• Individual outreach might be a good path. It’s OK to cold email someone whose career path interests you, who works at a place that might be hiring, or someone who you’ve seen talk and you’d like to follow up with. Warning: do not ask for anything right up front except perhaps to buy them a cup of coffee where’s most convenient for them. This person does not know you, and you shouldn’t develop a parasocial relationship with them. Most people will agree to a quick cuppa somewhere, and, honestly, it’s a red flag for someone to say no for any other reason than they might be busy. Their time is not intrinsically more valuable than yours, and it speaks directly to their character. I really do believe in karma in this instance.

Takeaway: Be confident, be in the rooms, and be willing to sacrifice quiet time for this endeavor.

2. Be interesting and interested. (Thanks, Dave)

It’s really hard to know what it means to “be interesting,” and there’s no one way to do it. Here’s where lots of people—interesting and not—falter in their quest to connect with strangers: being yourself is enough, but there is a way to prepare for situations like this. If you’re involved in any hobby or have any interests whatsoever, you can learn how to present them in an engaging manner. Warning: do not be boring. Bragging is the fastest way to get anyone to stop listening to you. Unless someone asks you to elaborate specifically, keep descriptions of your accomplishments in gruesome detail for your grandma. But talk about how you got started, what practicing or honing looks like, and share some thoughts about it. This shapes you as a person because how you spend your time says how you value it QED.

Being interested is much more straightforward. Don’t talk over people (most times), don’t look to one-up them, don’t think about the next thing you’re going to say instead of listening. Do ask questions and expect an equally pompous answer: if you’re asking a question to set yourself up to talk more about you, that sucks. If you’re asking a question because you’re genuinely interested in the answer, that rules.

Takeaway: The key to being interesting and interested is how vulnerable you’re willing to be.

3. Follow up and be persistent, but not annoying.

Most neophyte networkers think that shaking hands with someone is the activity, and having the conversation is the relationship. But I beg you this: it’s not. Most people don’t follow up, send the text or email, connect on LinkedIn, or ask for a meeting or coffee. Then they wonder why their counterpart isn’t doing the same thing out of…pride? Fear? I promise you, if you’re not thinking of doing it, no one else is either. No one’s not thinking about you that much. That said, send the email and follow up a week later, once. If you hear back, great; if not, time to move on. That wasn’t meant to be. It does beg the question of why this person is sharing contact information if they don’t intend to be contacted.

Important: Just because someone hasn’t responded to you doesn’t mean they won’t. It just means they haven’t. If something is urgent, pick up the phone. Your preamble is less than urgent.

Takeaway: Send a follow-up and then follow up once. Don’t write your life story in an email, and don’t bury the lede. You want a meeting or call, and you’re free at these times, etc.

4. Give way, way more than you ask for.

This is true in marketing and in sales, and it’s true in relationships, especially in romantic ones, but also in professional ones. Assume that your give/take ratio is 60/40 and that your partner’s is also 60/40. I would modify this to 80/20 in a professional context if you want something: a job, a connection, a contract, someone’s actual billable time, etc. It’s one of the reasons I continue making exasperated content: my “give” is the ability to help a person publicly tell their story and philosophy to over 2000 people. It’s fun and non-threatening and takes about an hour of someone’s time, which is often available, especially if planned months in advance.

If you’re interested in making a new connection, ask what YOU can do for THEM, or even better, use the information you learned through your follow-ups and synthesize and ask to take the burden of through off your connection even more. “Hey, I saw you’re working on this project and met someone who’s doing similar work—can I connect you?” Something like that.

Takeaway: Don’t ask for people’s time or connections without offering something in return. Nuance: it’s not quid pro quo since there’s always asymmetry in an ask, but remember when someone did something helpful for your unprompted or didn’t want anything in return? Be that other person.

5. Don’t gatekeep, but do protect your network.

Here’s a weird one: if a new someone asks you to introduce them to one of your established contacts, when, if ever, should you say no? The answer is almost sometimes, and it’s situational. Sending an email doesn’t cost anything (for now), but connecting a valued friend to someone you don’t know carries reputational and diminishing returns risk.

• Reputational risk: if you’re not an excellent judge of character and don’t believe you can read people incorrectly, by all means connect the dumbest person you’ve ever met who asked for a favor to someone that you’d die (professionally) for. What does that say to your friend about your ability to make good decisions with limited information? Not a really hard one here, but be careful about the person who’s asking too much too quickly and isn’t interesting or interested. Spot the users and ditch the losers.

• Diminishing returns: There’s only so much you can do to help someone who won’t also help themselves. There’s such a thing as too much inch-deep connectivity that can waste everyone’s time. Avoid this.

Pro tip: When you’re asking for a connection, don’t say: “Who else do you know?” apropos of some basic search. This isn’t always a bad question, and like every bit of advice you’ll ever get, it is situational, but coming forward without being prompted with a handful of people you think someone might know and you’d like to speak to is better than the alternative. There are instances where the conversation is very specific—or very new—and there might be a reasonable time to ask an open-ended question, but I’d much rather tease out some homework for myself rather than burden my connection.

Takeaway: Don’t hide people you want for yourself, but be careful about connecting people you don’t know to people you do. Use good judgment and err on the side of the person you do know.

6. Also, protect your peace. Don’t overdo it.

Once you get somewhat good at this, it’s tempting to broaden your horizons and find rooms to be in all the time. It’s exhilarating to be sought after and to seek out the next person that can become your friend/partner/colleague/wife??1. You can practice small-to-medium talk by simply doing it a lot. Eventually, you’ll walk into rooms where you know more people than you don’t, that’s comfortable, and now you’re not learning anything. And you’re exhausted. And you’ve got too many meetings that only happen once or not at all.

Avoid: Being a serial coffee hopper. It’s too exhausting and expensive if it’s on your own dime. You’re not learning or helping, and you’re known for it. The industry is small.

Takeaway: It’s okay to say no and rot on your couch instead of pushing to your fifth networking event this week.

7. Don’t always seek out mid- or senior-level folks. There’s lots to be learned from your younger peers. (Thanks, Renee)

I love this advice that was given to me by my friend and fellow exasperated human, Renee Autumn Ray2. It’s tempting to seek out folks a career level higher than you for advice and mentorship, but remember, unless you’re literally a baby, you have advice to offer others, too. Seek out folks who look or are younger than you—they definitely understand social media better than you do and have their own lived experience to share that’s different from yours. You might learn a new trend or how young people are consuming information, which can make you better at your job and a smarter thinker because you can communicate better. And so on. Don’t be arrogant and assume that your experience necessarily means expertise.

Wow, Big Brain Alert: Except in one’s own literal lived experience, I’ve found that how long someone’s been practicing often has very little correlation with how good they are at their job. There are definitely benefits to experience, like knowing how to work and being able to heuristic some scenarios to save time and energy (and money), but be wary of the person you meet, younger or older who starts any sentence with, “As a xxxxxxx, ….” or “In my experience as a xxxxxxx, …” or “I went to the University of xxxxxxx, so ….” Reject credentialism and reject experience as proxy for good ideas ipso facto.

Takeaway: Don’t be an elitist or an ageist in either direction. Everyone who’s interesting and interested deserves your attention.

8. I’m split on whether carrying a business card is worth it in 2026.

This was surprisingly the most controversial tip on this list when I socialized the list during drafting. I’ll keep it simple and do a quick pro/con here.

I’m split on this. I use stickers with a QR code of my face, so.

Takeaway: Do you, and it can’t hurt to have some, especially if someone else is paying for it.

9. It’s okay to talk about things other than work; people are interested in getting to know you as a whole person.

If you’re at an industry event, it’s probably fine that you’re talking about topics related to your industry. Try to avoid being overly contentious with people you don’t know (unless you have a reputation for it, like me, and even still, I’m relatively careful about directly offending someone when I first meet them unless they work in “AI” on purpose). And if you’re seeing someone for the second time or more, try to remember a little detail about them or the conversation you talked about last time. It doesn’t have to be about work or a project, but it does have to be fun. I like pop culture and media, I like Formula 1 racing, and I like traveling to new places to eat. Maybe those came up last time. Ask where they’ve been recently or where they’d dream of going and why. Ask about their family if that was a topic that came up. Share a French fry. My god, it’s not that serious.

Takeaway: Ketchup doesn’t belong on French fries. But you belong in the room you’re in, remember that.

10: Remember: it’s not networking, it’s relationship-building. These people can be your friends, acquaintances, partners, or nothing at all.

Some of my best friends are people I’ve met at professional events. We work together and we hang out and do other stuff, too. But don’t force any of this. It’s okay to make professional acquaintances, too. People you can grab a beer with, or someone who makes you feel comfortable being in a new room, because you recognize them from last time. Go say hi and then don’t hang around like a weirdo. My philosophy is this: I want to work with people that I like who can hold their own on their own. I want to hang out with these people and absolutely foam or get excited about anything that’s in front of them.

Takeaway: Thanks for reading 2,500 words on how to be a human being in 2026.

Key Takeaways

• Oil supply disruptions consistently expose how deeply car-dependent countries like Australia and the United States are.

• A crisis creates a rare window for bold policy action that would otherwise take years to gain public and political support.

• This blog, in partnership with Russell King, debates the opportunities for bold reform. Each of us will argue a position (pro or con) for each post.

• We start with bus services. Opportunities include:

  • Dedicated bus lanes. One of the fastest tools available to make buses more reliable and competitive with the car, but only if they are properly enforced and run end-to-end along a corridor.

  • Increasing bus frequency. During peak hours is largely off the table in the short term due to driver and vehicle shortages, but shoulder peaks and weekends represent a more realistic opportunity.

• However, these suggestions might be too ambitious. Instead, we should focus on:

  • Better signal timing and flexible street design. These can improve conditions for existing buses without requiring new infrastructure or significant additional resources.

  • Transportation demand management. Tools such as employer incentives to stagger working hours or subsidise alternatives to driving can reduce pressure on the network without major capital investment.

What Next?

Have you considered the opportunities for structural reform to our bus services that the crisis might make possible?

Introduction

This is not the first, nor will it likely be the last, time a conflict disrupts the OECD’s absolute reliance on crude oil for transport. Since at least 1960, when OPEC added “predictability” to global markets, each international conflict that involves oil suppliers or the Middle East gets governments scrambling for policies to respond as their populations feel the pain: high prices at the petrol (gas) stations, improbable and unreliable flight costs, and so, so much more (did you know that over 99% of plastics are refined from crude oil and natural gas?).

For large, geographically sprawling countries like Australia and the United States, where car dependence is baked into the built environment, the exposure is especially acute. Whilst governments are inevitably focused on managing the immediate pain, the crisis also makes structural reform to reduce our dependence on oil for transport easier. As Rahm Emanuel, former adviser to President Obama and Mayor of Chicago, put it bluntly: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Indeed.

That’s the premise of what follows.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be working through six policy responses to the oil crisis alongside Sam Sklar, a planner, writer, and the voice behind the Exasperated Infrastructures newsletter, who brings over 15 years of experience working in New York City (and across the world). Rather than simply advocating for our own views, we’ll be arguing sides, including, at times, positions we might personally question. Making the strongest possible case for a position you don’t hold is a time-honoured way of testing ideas, and we’ll employ it here.

The six areas we’ll cover are:

1. Improving bus services: How do you make the bus a genuinely attractive alternative to the car?

2. Lower or free fares: Should public transport be free, and if so, when and for whom?

3. Promoting cycling: What would it take to make cycling as appealing as driving?

4. Fuel and gas taxes: Is a crisis the moment to hold the line on taxes, to cut them or even increase them?

5. Carpooling: Should we encourage carpooling as an option instead of driving alone?

6. Speed limits: Should we “lower” speed limits on our roads where we can to promote safe driving?

We’re starting this week with buses, the workhorse of urban public transport, and arguably the policy lever with the most immediate potential.

Improving Bus Services

The case for improving bus services rests on a straightforward premise: better buses mean more people leave their cars at home, reducing fuel consumption and easing the pressure that transport costs place on household budgets.

Research consistently points to the same handful of factors that determine whether someone chooses the bus over other options: reliability, frequency, speed, convenience, personal safety, and cost. Shift any of these in the right direction, and ridership tends to follow.

A wide range of policy tools can move these levers. Dedicated bus lanes, smarter ticketing systems, revised timetables, improved policing and CCTV coverage, and reformed fare structures all have a role to play. The challenge is timing. Many of these interventions take months or years to bed in. New timetables must be planned and communicated, operational improvements require procurement and coordination, and meaningful changes to policing take time to resource and deploy.

That makes the question of immediate impact worth asking separately. Three interventions stand out for their ability to deliver results quickly: new bus lanes, stronger enforcement of existing lanes, and increased service frequency. The rest of this piece focuses on these, exploring what the evidence says and how they might be implemented effectively.

The Arguments Against (Sam)

Overview:

• It’s too controversial to simply install bus lanes where there’s limited right of way, especially if ridership doesn’t support them. Slicing the street will only make traffic and congestion worse.

• Bus lane enforcement will require extra resources that are already hard to come by. What’s the point of spending capital dollars if there’s no operating budget for it?

• More frequent service requires more buses and drivers. These cost centers come with challenges to delivery: bus manufacturing is backlogged, and drivers are expensive.

Now is not the right time to focus on improving bus service: ridership numbers simply don’t support it, our cities do not have the resources to enforce new policies, and new buses and their drivers simply aren’t available to scale to the necessary size to make a significant impact. Worse than not improving bus services is pursuing a policy and then not delivering parts or all of it.

Instead, we should be focusing our efforts on improving traffic on our streets so the buses we do have can move faster and more reliably than the current service our city provides. We might seek to implement better signal timing, changing the configuration of our street designs where appropriate, and employing transportation demand measures (TDM) to control demand.

Signal timing changes help all road users by making movements more legible: these signals can be programmed from a central artery to ensure the timing, like length and frequency of traffic signals, responds to current and local demand. By prioritizing the needs of most users, we can ensure that our streets are serving the traffic as we measure it.

We might also wish to highlight our most congested routes and reconfigure the street design to relieve pressure. Since we’re in a city and bound by tight geometries, widening lanes or the street bed is not feasible; instead, we might seek to shift parking lanes to elsewhere or eliminate them altogether. This newly “found” right-of-way can be shifted to increase road capacity or sidewalk capacity, depending on time of day or day of week. The key component here is flexibility. With more roadway capacity, buses and other traffic can move more quickly and reliably.

Last, we might also seek to employ demand tools to reduce the incentive to drive during certain times of day, when bus traffic is likely to be highest, for example. These include employer incentives to work from home or to stagger working hours, or they could include subsidies to ride the bus, bike, or walk to work, depending on how far the employee lives from their place of employment.

There are policies the city might implement that don’t include potentially unpopular bus lanes, extra resources to enforce bus-only lanes, and making promises that will be hard to keep in the short-, medium-, or long-term. Only after we exhaust other options should we seek to directly develop new bus infrastructure to complement the existing lanes and chassis we already have.

The Arguments In Favour (Russell)

Russell's Argument is HERE

Conclusion

Should we be improving bus services during an oil crisis?

On one hand, dedicated bus lanes and higher off-peak frequencies offer a genuine opportunity to make buses faster, more reliable, and more attractive to people who currently drive. A crisis shifts public tolerance for bold moves, and interventions that stick beyond the immediate emergency can lay the groundwork for a less car-dependent city over the long term.

On the other hand, more frequent services require drivers and vehicles that most operators simply don’t have to spare. And in cities where ridership doesn’t yet justify new infrastructure, there may be smarter first steps: better signal timing, flexible street design, and demand management tools that improve conditions for the buses already running.

Should cities seize the crisis to make structural moves that would otherwise take years to get through? Or should they focus on getting the most out of what already exists?

We’d love to know what you think.

I’m trying hard to help others as I help myself, and was lucky enough to be invited onto1 Kate Gasparro’s excellent podcast and platform, which she so aptly named “Building Better Cities.”

It’s an open-ended statement because it means different things to different people. Citybuilders, practitioners, citizens, nomads, everyone refuels here, some lay their heads here, and there are millions of us who call a different place “home.” Kate’s (ehem, Dr. Gasparro!) premise is straightforward, but no less complex than the topic deserves. She brings on experts (and me) to help work through questions she’s grappling with. It’s an excellent way to break barriers and demonstrate that, while less exasperated than I am, we’re all working toward the same goals.

Part I: Why Zoning Reform Isn’t Solving the Housing Crisis

with Yonah Freemark

It’s worth noting that Yonah is also one of this country’s preeminent scholars and communicators about building better cities.2 So this conversation was a delight to hear. From the description:

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why upzoning doesn’t guarantee housing gets built—and the market conditions that actually drive development

• How land values absorb the gains from rezoning before construction ever happens

• The role of interest rates, developer equity, and financial feasibility in urban housing production

• Why no single land use policy will solve the housing crisis, and what a more complete urban planning toolkit looks like

All super good questions with non-intuitive answers. I especially enjoyed point #2’s brain tickle: why indeed.3

It’s worth 23 minutes of your time, but really, I could have listened to this conversation over many episodes and, oh, wait…

Part II: Why transit investment is really a city-building decision

With Yonah Freemark and Sam Sklar

I joined this conversation halfway through to add some alternative perspective to Yonah’s and Kate’s. We also did a lil bracket of top transit projects for your pleasure.

From the description: in this episode, we discuss:

• Why transportation infrastructure is land use — and how the space cities dedicate to roads, and highways shapes what’s possible for housing density, walkable communities, and sustainable urban development

• Why transit-oriented development alone won’t save struggling transit agencies

• Our March Madness bracket of transit investments reshaping American cities

This one has me! Listen if you want to be learned some knowledge or love my surprisingly deep voice as you go to sleep!

Shout out to Kate, who also has a consulting practice. Learn more here:

Contact Kate!

And Yonah, who leads a deeply insightful practice for the Urban Institute and also maintains a fantastic resource on transit projects with commentary here:

The Transport Politic

And me! Make sure you’re following along for content, mostly weekly if not more:

I’ve been meaning to give John, Bern, and Andrew a fair shake at the exasperated alter through conversation and a reading of not only their 1st edition, but also a rapidly decaying policy prescription in the 2nd edition of The End of Driving.

First, a spoiler and a note about this review. No, this book is not calling for the end of cars (or life after them), and it’s not calling for a revolution to pull all planning and infrastructure development toward the vehicle, autonomous or not. It’s not an AV apologists’ book; rather, its authors write matter-of-fact and it’s this approach that lends credence to their words. Their words, written with decades of experience, seek to put a pin in the current moment, which, just now, is behind us. This technology is evolving rapidly, and these authors—Bern Grush, John Niles, and Andrew Miller have caught a moment and given us tools to evaluate the next iteration.

Second, John and I speak fairly regularly about goings on across the country in AV policy and beyond. Our friendship will not affect my objectivity in this review. That serves no one.

The Premise:

This book could be a ~casual~ beach read.

It’s written in chapters — 15 of them — with compelling titles:

• Hype, dissolusionment, and reset

• A challenging transition: two competing markets

• Backcasting: Steps to achieve desired futures

• Nudging ride-buying with microsubsidies

It sounds like I’m joking and poking fun, but these are honest-to-goodness hot-button issues that we as an industry are working through. If nothing else, it puts all the issues these authors sought to explore all in one place and you can have access to them,. decidedly argued and dressed up with research and conclusion, in this one book.

Reading this cover to cover is certainly a choice and with so many other things you could read, taking this one slowly—or attending a session with the authors—might be your best course of action.

You might also choose to read this as an academic text or a reference guide.

My argument here is this: deeply understanding the questions associated with vehicle automation will allow you to develop authority as a serious scholar on the topic. AVs aren’t going away, but they’re also not going “replace” transit as a mode. There will be a centerground that this book will allow you to figure out for yourself because this topic and its component “solutions” move at multiple speeds and many directions.1

Questions you might want to ask:

• What does automation actually mean?

• How should we reorganize our public space to accommodate these vehicles?

• Will AVs replace or enhance solo driving or public transit? To what extent?

• What are the macro, meso, and micreoeconomic questions we still have to develop differential solutions for?

• Who should lead the policy forums? Locals, states? USDOT? The private sector

And so on. This book has been, since its first edition in 2018, the best tome for helping practitioners and policymakers understand these very complicated issues.

Leave a comment

The Prose:

John, Bern, and Andrew are gifted scholars with a long-tail view of this technology and its accompanying economics and policy. This book, though, is not an easy read by any means. It expects basic-to-intermediate-to-advanced literacy in transportation planning and economics and policy analysis and without graduate-level coursework, much of the layered nuance will be relatively inaccessible.

However, that doesn’t mean this book is out of reach. With its sources and a hefty inquitision The End of Driving might be the way in for you or a colleauge or friend.

For an example of this duality:

Dual diffusion is not new. There have always been two markets for mobility: the ownership of a private conveyance vs the hire of a provisioned ride. In the 20th century, this tension was expressed as private car versus transit and taxi. The regulation of for-hire vehicles stretches back at least to the 1650s in the form of hackney carriages. Surely travelers hired rides long before that. The portion of any population that owns a private conveyance versus hired rides has always varied over time, place, and wealth. The fact of variation likely will never change, and the assumption that a technology enabler alone is enough to eradicate this multifaceted interplay is naive. Will person-travel in 2050 be predominately satisfied by optimized fleets of shared vehicles? This outcome is possible but has neither a guaranteed nor even described path to realization. This book argues that such an outcome is appealing and, for planners, superior to the alternatives. This is the basis of the proposed approaches to flexible, automated public transit in Chapter 11: Microtransit Rising and Chapter 12: Nudging Ride-buying with Microsubsidies.

—The End of Driving, p.66

What do we get here. The language is stiff and correct, and aware of both. What I won’t argue is that it’s boring or not a welcome addition to the canon. This, however, is the policy equivalent of a word cloud and would have been better either bigger, simpler, or left on the editing floor. This is one of a bunch of graphics that could have used some more thought before publish.

My criticisms are light and straightforward. I’m proud of this book and while I don’t agree with everything the authors argue, it continues to be important to argue the broad and fine points with people with whom I agree and disagree. The book is well-written and well-argued and the base knowledge given is superb.

The biggest problem I have with this book is its price and limited access. At its cheapest, the book is $100, which puts it out of reach for a non-professional, non-academic, or non-very-bad-gifter. This price is not the authors’ fault, but it does prove to be a significant gatekeep for how important this knowledge is to not be locked behind a literal paywall. That said, I’ll put a link below to do my friends a favor.

Buy it here

{Placeholder for 4/1 recording}

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

TEA-21:

“Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century” (1998)

Seven years after ISTEA…new tea for the next century. It took 7 years to reauthorize federal funding for transportation, and then seven more to get us to SAFETEA-LU in 2005. The margins between funding paradigms and parameters continued to increase as priorities became more complex with multimodalism, federalism, and technology needs.

Power: State >> Local >> Regional >> Federal. Bike/ped-specific funding was identified for the first time here, which brought the Federal fight to the street level, which is, by definition, local. Funding is still allocated to the State (or MPO) first for passthrough and stickyfingers, but the increased focus on the human-powered transportation starts to tell a story that hadn’t been prologued before.

Mode: Focus and funding still on highways (fun fact, this still hasn’t changed) but there exist new and more programs to that focus on other modes, transportation “enhancements,” bike/ped funding specifically for the first time, recreational trail funding. scenic byways -- this bill specifically calls out these sub-modal programs for the first time and sets the stage for the future of a national vision.

Complexity: Added modal support means added complexity. TEA-21 added additional guidance for MPOs. The bill also introduces a narrower focus on ITS, or “intelligent transportation systems.”

Flexibility: “With the ‘intermodality’ mandate comes the need to match with appropriate flexibility; this is necessary on a two-axis basis. One: modal, including the flexibility of funds to be used for capital and operating costs and shifting between highway spending and *other* spending and two: state and local. This bill devolves a lot of the spending “”priorities”“ to state and local decisions. Good on paper, challenging in practice. Standard spending paradigms helps USDOT understand what’s working at the expense of solving local problems.

Also in TEA-21: the establishment of TIFIA for infrastructure finance. For the first time the federal government will issue and secure debt financing for eligible transportation projects. Debt enhances the resiliency of the system by filling market gaps and leveraging local dollars for projects that can self-sustain or attract statewide debt service monies.

TEA-21 also established state infrastructure banks (SIBs) pilots, capitalized with at most 20% federal funds and 80% non-federal funds.

Geography: Several thousand earmarks in TEA-21 and an even greater oversight of what an MPO's responsibilities are vis-à-vis regional planning and coordination with state DOTs.

TEA-21 aaaaalso established the idea of a Minimum Guarantee that formalized the return of surface transportation formula funds to states to be set at 90.5% of the amount it puts in and adds other guards to ensure geographic parity.

Reference (will be at the top of every post):

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

ISTEA:

“Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991”

Four years after STURAA, we’re chillin’ with the MPO-maker. Multimodalism rears its ugly head. Transportation might be “intelligent.”

Power: State >> Regional >> Federal >> Local. The big shift here is the focus on MPOs, long required and long quasi-dormant because of the chasm between required activity (long-range transportation planning at a regional level) and the funding (you know, to build1 the stuff). Nearly 30 years since the Federal government mandated substate, regional planning, and crucially, the end of Interstate Highway spending, the authors of this bill turned their attention to regional planning—where most trips actually happen.

Mode: This bill unsticks the surface modes from their rigid silos (sort of) and, while it still focuses on highways more than (probably) reflects the national handle-grabbing that’s the highway system, the focus on mass transit and shift toward “intermodality” as a system is a reflection of contemporary thought around surface/aviation/maritime at the time. It was a novel approach.

Complexity: ISTEA acknowledged the growing complexity of movement. That the Interstate Highway System was nearly functionally done, this was likely a turning point for the “point” of USDOT—if its original purpose was to coordinate, manage, and fund the majority of the national highways, what was the need for a federal agency (bigger question)? I bet there was a growing sentiment to toss it out and devolve the spending to states; this is a common refrain for anti-Federalists whose sole purpose is seemingly to shrink the size of the Federal government. Intermodalism / multimodalism was a very obvious way to demonstrate the need. For the first time, the bill talks about “intelligent” transportation systems.

Flexibility: ISTEA promoted and recentered the idea of regional planning as a necessary dominant form of vertical federalism to spend and allocate resources most efficiently. While a political boundary is set by the states, a travel boundary is driven by commutes and movement patterns. What’s a reasonable purview for a single or chained trip to work, school, doctor, etc? What does that look like now and in the future? By imposing these rules from the federal standpoint, the government could compel states to think more flexibly about the future of spending, and hopefully(!?) rethink how to build and maintain our system, which is both broadly and nationally complementary and competitive.

Geography: MPOs and regional authorities were a big idea in ISTEA. The money still needed to passthrough the state DOTs (more on that) and earmarks still dominated a majority of the bill text, but ISTEA demonstrated that there was a possibility to rethink how we distributed money. Also important to note is the inclusion of “high priority corridors,”—which had the added benefit of being politically popular with the pork parade.

The Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987 (STURAA) was landmark legislation for a few reasons, not least of which is that it finally, finally, got us to cool acronyms.1 This bill also couriered Federal spending from Interstate Highway spending only to more multimodal spending, toward what it looks like today, albeit not yet and very slowly.

PRE-STURAA:

Since 1916, the Federal government still subsidizes state and local spending on transportation and infrastructure projects. The key changes to Federal spending in the 110 years since the aptly-named Federal Aid Road Act of 1916*2 …are the point of these next nine posts, so buckle in. We’ll examine them through the lenses proposed in the previous post.

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

A fun fact, because these posts are all only fun forever, is that because of this bill, each state, if it hadn’t had one already, created some vessel to collect and administer these Federal dollars.3

ANYWAY. Here’s some analysis I’ve been sitting on for months because I didn’t know how to share it.

Power: Local >> State >> Federal >> Regional. In the beginning, the power—and the knowledge—was dispersed at the local level. Roads were built and maintained by some checkerboard of public and private builders and were sometimes paved and continuous and sometimes not. The locals used their state as a Constitutionally-driven passthrough for much of this work, until MPOs were created in the 60s. Spoiler alert! MPOs become much more prominent later.

Mode: The first bills from the early 1910s focused mainly on highway and road building. The first transit bill came 8 years after the landmark highways bill, in 1964. This program established a dedicated, albeit smaller, funding source for mass transit. It established both formula and discretionary funding sources, including the Capital Investment Grants program (CIG) that still exists to day. Many transit bills are included in overall transportation reauthorization and often are not passed standalone (instead, omnibus) because of the direct tie to the highway trust fund (HTF) authorization. This is what makes the 1964 bill so special.

Complexity: Increasing level of complexity that continues and will need to continue, starting with the exponential ramp up of maintenance funding for highways -- the IHS had been built and will continue to be built going forward through the late 1980s and early 1990s but that’s rolling disrepear that continues today because we never and continue to not account for the maintenance. Transit (especially trains) is a different beast. More moving pieces; assets that can be sold or rehabbed off-site or replaced by newer technology. There is a real challenge with maintaining a transit system and railroad network that simply doesn’t exist in road building. If only cars weren’t so damn inefficient.

Flexibility: Continues to change. The Highway Trust Fund -- the major source of ALL transportation funding not specifically authorized from the general fund -- was created and endowed in 1956; the mass transit account came in 1982. Because of the dissasociative nature of spending in general the Congress and USDOT have created over 100 different discretionary programs to fund all sorts of projects that don’t fit into the narrative of older laws; lots of different authorizations are carry-forwards and amendments to older ones. There have been attempts to reform the HTF funding sources over the years; only a few before STURAA, but the main source of funding, the federal gasoline tax remains free-based around a 1993 level of a gas tax. There’s no appetite to increase it as of 2024.

Geography: Earmarks made it much more obvious which projects would get funded from which districts/states. Remember the “geography” here needs to be parsed and thought of in so many different ways: there’s vertical and horizontal federalism; one relies on the stack of gov’ts that track funding through a usually impenetrable tube of tumble. The other is how nicely locals, regions, and states play with each other. There was a moritorium on earmarks in the 2010s but they’ve since been eased back in. There’s a good balance of earmark versus competitive blind-spend that makes it more or less useful for politicking and logrolling. How much ~corruption~ is acceptable to fund the better part of our system?

STURAA:

“The Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation and Assistance Act”

Fast forward 71 years and 33 bills and we’re at the Named Bills.

Power: State >> Federal >> Local >> Regional. The dynamic has shifted. State DOTs are responsible for STIPs and systemwide maintenance (good!) and capcity (read: highway) expansion (not good!) and in some instances, like New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, transit investment and operations. The Feds still cover a majority of these costs by tapping into the Highway Trust Fund and other appropriated dollars, but it still feels like local and regional work gets lost in the mix.

Mode: The focus of this bill is still highways. There’s a greater attention detail for the 4Rs—resurfacing, restoration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction including a set aside for discretionary funding for high-need projects in urban areas. The Federal Mass Transit Act made some changes to CIG and nothing particularly important here.

Complexity: STURAA expects transit to be at least equally complex to highway spending. This lack of distinction, which continues the STAA funding from 1982 but continues a marked changed in spending authority and authorization from older bills pre-1982, when mass transit funding switched to contract authority vis-a-vis the highway trust fund rather than general appropriations from the general fund.

Flexibility: STURAA continues earmarks but makes subtle changes to the idea of spending. Added a 4th “R” to maintenance spending.

Geography: Lots of earmarks here and “demonstration projects” that ultimately led to President Reagan vetoing the Bill before Congress overrode him. A death knell to the Presidents skinny agenda, this veto override also indirectly destroyed public housing in the US.4 Pork/earmarks survived 2010/2011 and then again in 2021. The interesting thing to look out for is how this type of spending shapes national narrative.

We’re entering The Matrix (as promised)

It’s taken me a year to wrap my head around this next post mostly because reading through thousands of pages of bill text is exhausting in theory and in practice and well, I was waiting for more information on the direction of reauthorization. The good news is that the Federal government still exists. The okay news is that many different Congressional offices have begun the important process of information herding and data gathering and stakeholder engagement.1 The bad news is that there’s likely not going to be enough of a consensus (or government) to pass the IIJA’s successor by the end of September 2026, when the funding authoriziation expires.

What’s right now?

In short, three things could happen:

1. The funding authorization simply expires and Federal investment in infrastructure would halt. Not ideal as Federal tentacles extend, vigorously, into many corners of the economy.2 This is the nuclear option.

   Likelihood: .000001% + the slopulism coefficient.3

2. We get a new Bill, called something stupid like the Transportation Reauthorization Ultimate Massive Pavement Act. It will keep many programs that don’t work and cut the ones that do. Pork is back so there will be several hundred pages of earmarks for Rs and a few for Ds that lean right. Because this bill will have multi-year authorization and is generally an omnibus effort, it will bloat like crazy and be filled with hydrogen sulfide, seeking to be odorless but deadly. It will pass at $1.5 trillion in new spending that solves no problems and actually makes all of the existing ones worse. But GDP go brrrrr.

   Likelihood: 4.7% + log(the slopulism coefficient)

3. We get a series of 90 to 180-day continuing resolutions (“CRs”) for the remainder of this presidential term that will authorize funding of the IIJA at some percentage of its current levels indefinitely. This is not unheard of—even in normaler times the Federal government will use this option when they can’t come up with a solution to a required problem, when the solutions matrix is so far apart or when the existing spare tire has more life on it and the required parties haven’t finished their problem-solving.

   A CR might contain an anomaly that reduces funding or alters policy or attention, but it does not allow for new funding to be authorized or new programs that require funding to start.

   Likelihood: 100%. We’re 100% getting a CR this year, especially because this is an election year, and there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to get the TRUMP Act done. We may get multiple CRs

What was there?

I’ve spent too long reading each of the bills not to share this with you. But first:

We’re still in Section 2: Understand some context and history to get a big-picture idea of what’s going on. I have a relatively large spreadsheet that’s gone through a ton of edits and framing to make sure I’ve understood the temperature and tenor of each bill. Big shout-out to Katie Economou of AMPO and Corrigan Salerno of T4America for reading through the crazed notes of someone who’s skimmed nearly 5000 pages of prime government text and providing guidance and feedback.

I have a spreadsheet, and I’m not really sure how to present this so it makes any sense at all, so I’m just going to try this out.

Captain Policy: Or, The Five Lenses of Analysis

With Our Ideas Combined…

It’s always helpful to try to understand the lenses through which advocates and authors might view the development of new policy. For mine, I sought five lenses:

Power, Mode, Complexity, Flexibility, and Geography. They’re all fairly distinct, but I’m going to use these terms in the context of how I would use them.

• Power: How does power influence how, where, and what projects are favored? How has this changed over time?

• Mode: What’s the focus of this bill? How can we tell what the focus is? How should we talk about this? Is it still highways?

• Complexity: How complex does this bill expect our system to be? Are we set up to handle the dispersion of money?

• Flexibility: How can money be used? Does the language allocate spending to specific programs or functions? How much is formula vs discretionary?

• Geography: Where’s the focus of the investment? More spread out? Need or merit?

Let’s go bill by bill — but starting next week with pre-STURAA (“Surface Transportation and Uniform Relocation Assistance Act of 1987”). Subscribe to get it right to your inbox.

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Good afternoon. I’m with Shin-pei Tsay. I’d love for you to introduce yourself to the audience.

I am right now, the Chief Research and Data Officer, City of Boston, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and General Curiosity, and investigator, explorer of public spaces and the public realm.

That’s amazing. Can you go through your titles in a little bit more detail? Can you give some examples of some of the projects you’ve worked on, or what the expectations are?

It’s a relatively new thing for the city. We are expanding the scope and operations of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which has historically been the Mayor’s Civic Innovation team. That’s a team that takes on new ideas, creates a prototype, evaluates it, and tries to embed successful ideas in departments. Historically, that team has worked a lot with data, with new technologies in the public realm. It has worked on everything from how to connect people to the Mayor’s office and the precursor to 311 to investigating what it means to be a city of play, thinking about ways of shoring up people’s trust in government, demonstrating the reasons why we’re doing something, and trying to bring people in to foster a sense of transparency and understanding. We felt it was important to connect it to the analytics side. The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics has been around for fifteen years. The analytics team has been around for ten years, and it has looked at city-generated data to inform decision-making. And bringing those two things together is our effort to support all our chief innovators around the building, starting with Mayor Wu, going through her cabinet. Lots of chiefs are doers and thinkers, wanting to do new things and supporting them in making sure that new ideas are rooted in evidence so we know we’re getting a good sense of what impact is, and that we’re still open and curious and thinking about ways that we can keep on improving.

It sounds like there’s lots of opportunity to ingest what’s happened in the past and engage with the public, private, nonprofit sectors to come up with innovative ideas to thorny, very tricky problems. As my audience will know, the problems in the urban space and the built environment are not usually one-to-one or easily definable or put into a box, if you will. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of leeway and support from the different folks across the city to do that exploration and hopefully be a model to your citizens to show good government and counterparts across the country. Does that sound accurate?

Those are all great aspirations. I would love it if people thought that this felt good, but more importantly, that they see that the government is working for them. We feel like that’s really important.

Now, you didn’t work your way up through the city of Boston, right? You haven’t been in the City of Boston your whole career. Can you talk me through the highlights of how or what it takes to become someone in your position?

I’ve worn a lot of hats. This is my first stint in city government, and I think all the different steps that I have taken were propelled by interesting questions. The first one was, as I got started in my career, an interest in how cities got shaped, what shaped cities, what were the decisions? Initially, I thought: design. I thought maybe it was community engagement in public spaces. I went into bicycle advocacy, learned a lot about how policies shape cities and how transportation decisions shape cities, and stayed there at different levels of policy. From block-by-block advocacy and campaign building, urban design, to broader national, state, and even global policy, looking at the role of climate change and the ways that we set targets in climate, and how that trickles down into what localities might do at a city level.

I was always interested in design, too, so I thought of the Dark Matter Labs that talks about the invisible things that shape us and the places around us. I always saw that the physical side of things came from those things that we can’t see, so that we experience cities in a way, and the experiences we have result from things that we may not be able to see: the policies, the governance, the funding—things that are maybe a bit more obscure to the general person. I just followed a question of curiosity.

I was at TransitCenter, a national philanthropy working in public transit. What is the role of philanthropy in making sure that we’re centering people in our public transit systems? What about foreign policy as a think tank that would do about this? And then I was at Uber for a bit. Similarly, how does a tech company think about this? Because no matter what you think of them, people have changed their behavior based on the product. I haven’t owned a car in over twenty years, largely because there are services like that that are very available these days in most places. And now with the city, it was a curiosity, what is it like inside government? I’ve always been adjacent to it. I’ve been adjacent to policy making decision makers, been in many rooms with them, and helped them and supported them, but not actually part of the government. So this was an opportunity to test that out.

I would say follow your curiosity, follow your questions, and see where it takes you.

Can you distill your first year or two in government into one thing that surprised you about working for a public agency like the City of Boston?

I was brought in to be the head of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. It’s known as the Civic Innovation team. A lot of thought went into this. Mayor Wu is a certain kind of mayor at a certain moment in time in history, especially for a city like Boston, the first female, first person of color, first mom mayor. It wasn’t just any city government that I was interested in. But even knowing that about her and knowing that she had worked so hard as a city councilor to be showing the way and being such a strong leader in carving a path for these changes, there were a lot of people in the city government who were doing similar things. There were a lot of innovators who were interested and made those connections, and wanted to make those changes happen.

This past year, we all wanted to row in the same direction. We don’t always agree. And I think that’s also good. You can see why there’s layers and layers of history, of policy, of norms and culture that necessarily drive what they do because they are supposed to be an institution of stability. Why is it so hard in some cases to make those changes? Part of what was interesting about the role that I took on was that it was necessarily positioned as a place where we’re going to do short-term things. We’re going to show the value in something tactical, short term, and try to scale it. An example of that is Boston right now, with the climate going through more heat waves than blizzards. And it’s a city that is more constructed for cold than it is for heat. Heat is a newer thing. A lot of these ideas also aren’t generated by MONUM necessarily, but by the amazing people around the building. This [idea] was generated by Nayeli Rodriguez, who was at MONUM but joined the Green New Deal team and the Office of the Environment. And she kept a list of 30 things that we should look into and try, and this was one of them.

But it required actual design and fabrication. We had a wonderful industrial designer, Caroline Smith, who happened to be able to do something like that and got it through procurement. That was a whole other journey that I think a lot of people working in government would be sympathetic with. At every point, because of that openness, they were really keen on looking at ways of hitting double goals, like, oh, who could we get to pull these things together? Oh, we have this new fire cadet program. That’s a really great place. And it all fell in line with a general orientation from the Office of Emergency Management, who got a new chief, Chief Adrian Jordan, last June, who was really thinking about ways of turning emergency management into climate response and climate resiliency. What do we do to support our communities and neighborhoods in responding to some of these things? They pop up, you get two days’ notice, and there’s suddenly a heat wave. That’s a really good example of both the amazing entrepreneurial realism that is in City Hall and also the challenges that need to unfold.

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It sounds like you’re learning a lot every day from colleagues, from the process.

Obviously, process is one of those things where, you’re in the private sector, if you need something, you just get something, with some caveats. But the public sector is a whole other beast. It’s not necessarily pushing risk down, even though the solutions that we require going forward require a little bit of risk. How do you square that circle? How do you convince the right people who are necessarily risk-averse that not acting is the risky move? Historically, they’ve always been very “small c” conservative. It’s public dollars: We have to be accountable to folks working hard, paying their taxes, and they expect certain things in return. And one of them is not going out and spending a bunch of money on unproven technology. But this is where the tech and the communications must come into play. And comms is such a huge part of everything that we do that requires consistent attention to detail, consistent attention to the changes that we’ve made and continue to make at the decision-making level, up and down the chain.

Let’s transition into the meat and potatoes of our chat here. What’s an area of urbanism, of transportation that you think we’ve really not hit the mark on or really missed the mark on in the past?

I imagine that a lot of people start with, our cities are car dependent, and this and that. And it came out of a federally funded program. And there was a certain orientation. But the thing that I wanted to home in on as a result of some of those past decisions is the things that are going on in parking. Part of the reason I’m bringing it up is that it is, in so many ways, a retail experience for the average city person that rubs up against these larger systems and policy structure ways that transportation advocates tend to look at issues.

I’m not saying that that’s wrong, but I do think parking is a way of understanding how people experience that very challenging problem of owning a car in a city or in a dense area that doesn’t have a lot of other options. And I think that’s at the heart of it, is that parking absorbs all the ire of not having other options, and it absorbs that because we don’t have enough space for everyone who needs to store their car. People feel very stuck. They don’t feel like they really have an alternative. We have a lot of examples of what other places have done. We have a lot of examples now with technology solutions that could be put in place. And even in those situations, we are still very challenged about telling the story about why you should change your mind about this. It goes back to communication, that experience of hey, I bought this car. You told me I could park on the street in front of my building. That’s why I got it, and now you’re doing all these things that make it hard for me to do that. I think there’s a bigger swing that we can take. I don’t think there is a silver bullet, but that experience is really what we need to address head-on.

One can spend their whole career thinking about parking. It’s really interesting that you honed in on this, and I love the way you described it as like a retail problem because it affects car owners and non-car owners every day when you are searching for parking, paying for parking, or picking up a parked car, or if you’re in a non-car mode, let’s say you’re walking or biking, intersects with your ability to get around safely, quickly, visibly, legibly, with dignity.

All these things that affect everyone, whether you are a car owner or not, or whether you’re taking a particular trip by car or not. And it’s interesting to think about the lens of urban mechanics, if you will, through the eyes of parking. We lost one of our great scholars in the field, Don Shoup, last year, and he did, in fact, make a whole career out of parking and left a really, really long legacy for folks to glom on to, to use the data tools that we have and the technology that we have to deconflict the idea of parking versus not parking or how you can get around without a car.

It’s just these ideas of telling stories and communicating the true cost of what it takes to park. The challenge there is that that’s not how people think when they’re just trying to park. They’re not thinking about global climate issues or citywide parking, supply, and demand. They’re thinking about how to get their car in a safe, legal spot that they would like to pay nothing for out of pocket. How do you square the communications needs of citywide parking challenges or even land use challenges, versus the everyday experience of the average Boston resident?

I think that we could do a better job of understanding what it is that people are going through. And I would say it’s across the board. The people who live in the neighborhood that might have a car and the people who live in the neighborhood, who don’t have one, sometimes there’s a tendency to gloss over that. This is on my mind, too, because I’ve just been chatting with people about a couple of projects in our city. It’s interesting when you keep on asking, but why? Why does it bother you, or what’s really going on? One guy said to me, “I don’t like those bike lanes. They took away all the spots down the street. So now when my daughter comes to visit me late at night after her shift, she can’t park in front of my house, and I worry about her.” These are real things that people experience because maybe we don’t have that granular understanding.

I sometimes wonder if cities really understand how much parking there is, that is available to the residents in a neighborhood, both on street and off street, and thinking more creatively about the entire inventory that is available so that it can be more balanced. There has been, over the last fifteen years, like, “Oh, we should just put a parklet there,” or “We’re going to create some other great use,” which is absolutely the right thing to do.”

What are we doing for these other people who don’t have options or are trying to accommodate something else in their lives? If we can say to a neighborhood group, “You have 535 spots on the street right now, that is what it is,” or “You also have these garages. They have this much.” We need to find a way for this to work for everyone. I don’t think people necessarily hate this or that. I think that they don’t love the inconvenience to their lives, and yelling into a void makes it even harder to stomach when those changes come along. We should get creative, and maybe there are incentives and things that we can do to maximize whatever parking there might be, or the cars that are in the neighborhood. I don’t know if there’s a ton of that happening, to be honest.

There are so many angles, and there are so many different scales that we’re talking about here, which is why I make this such a thorny problem in my mind. It’s that story you told about the father and making sure that his daughter can get home or park in front of the home for whatever reason. There are so many things you can take away from that. The number one thing is that people’s experiences matter. People feel unheard a lot of the time. Even if the city or someone else decides on their behalf, they feel like they haven’t been heard. That’s the onus on the city and the folks making these decisions to make themselves heard. I keep going back to the story from Veronica Davis’s book, Inclusive Transportation, about how she used to hold meetings in the bus stop at seven o’clock in the morning before any decisions were made about the bus line or the bus, or change the layout of the bus stop, or any decision that the city would make. It’s hearing these stories and making sure the folks that we’re planning for, with and not at or to.

It’s making sure these folks are heard and doing that work up front and not doing what Roger Millar used to say don’t, “Design, Display, Deliver: Here’s your project. You’re going to like it.” I don’t necessarily think that planners should be spending a lot of time thinking about getting feedback on a proposed solution before getting feedback on understanding what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. We do so much of this heuristically, right?

We think we understand the problem because this is how it was in the past, or this is how they do it in this city and that city. And we take these things for granted in a lot of ways, because even if the problem is right, it hasn’t been designed by the community members. People feel that sense of loss and change more acutely in a situation where they haven’t been consulted about their street or their built environment. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about that or anything to add there.

I also don’t agree about over-litigating it. I don’t think constant intake is the right process. But I do think that the acknowledgement of experiences that don’t fall within the paradigm is messy. Human experience is messy.

I think that is important: getting creative about solutions, demonstrating effort about that initiative to accommodate the diversity of experiences, people get a lot of points for that. We tend to try to close down these kinds of conversations.

There are some policy changes that would make it easier, right? There’s probably some co-mingling of private and public parking that would make it easier for us to find a balance. All of this is in support of better bike lanes, parklets, and all those other things. But we must deal with this. We can’t keep on squeezing one segment without expecting a lot of pushback. I think we’re just getting started on how to finesse this, how to have this conversation, how to get creative about those solutions, and to also position technology as a tool to potentially manage it. But it’s not the end and be all; it’s alongside everything else.

One of the challenges is that land is finite...but Boston might be a different story. They’ve been dredging and filling in the Bay for hundreds of years at this point. However, the neighborhoods are set, and there’s limited space.

We must deal with that parameter. This is where good data science and technology, and machine learning, and being able to identify the inventory using data and understand, here is the number, helps. This is a finite number. Everyone can agree with this number or not; we’re relatively sure we’re correct, and that’s one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is learning what their experience is and asking, “Tell me the story of your commute.” And you go around and you do it for months, and you really spend the time canvassing the community, canvassing the neighborhood, talking to businesses about how they observe their customers, and talking to folks that live in a mixed use neighborhood or in a residential neighborhood, how their commuting patterns are different, or what their experience is like on an individual basis.

That’s the other side of the story, the qualitative side. From that, I think you’re armed with enough information to define your problem. It’s not about necessarily coming up with a solution just yet, even though we’re running up on serious problems that we can’t spend forever relitigating over and over and over again. But there’s a balance. I’m curious if your office or folks at the level that you interact with on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, what’s the tenor and tone toward that approach in Boston right now, of taking time to think about problems methodically?

I like the way that you put it, that it’s about the data and the evidence, the quantitative side of things, as much as it is about the experience and perception.

We’re in this moment where there’s quite a lot of transformational initiatives underway that are exciting. One of them is around parking. Another is around permitting. We’re rethinking the entire zoning book because not all of Boston is in code. These are huge pieces of work that are going on that really require this approach. The problem definition, as you were saying, there are these different levels, right? There’s a very high level: all of Boston is not in code. Maybe we should look into it.

But then you keep on drilling down, chipping off one problem, getting closer to where to start. Is it the thing that needs to happen against these major transformations? That’s a lot of the work of this team, always putting into practice that impetus of problem definition. What are we really trying to solve? What would be different if we solved this? Sometimes it feels small, but it’s a piece of something much bigger. I’ve always felt like that was relatable. It makes it concrete. It creates a doorway for people to understand what you’re trying to do, even if ultimately, you’re going to be rewriting the zoning code that sits on screen somewhere that is applied by developers or builders. But you need a way in. You need a way to help people understand what exactly is going on and what the problem is.

And part of the messiness of city government is that you can’t wait for a perfect time. There’s no time to start right now. You just go do it. And that’s why you need the leadership of a singular mayor, but also the ability of that mayor to recognize surrounding herself with such incredible talent and letting them cook, giving them the tools to go do the job and saying, “I trust you have the right ideas to help the citizens of Boston and our visitors and our businesses and our future guests and the future of the city and our kids.” I know Boston’s a big university town. I went to BU fifteen years ago. I’ve seen Comm Ave become a great corridor that connects Boston going west by bike, by bus, and by train. It’s exciting to see these changes that are incremental, but they’re visible. Excit

We can dilly dally around ideas all we want, but at some point, we have to do something, and we’ve got to act. Certain things require longer-term thinking, right? You can’t build half a bridge. You can’t build a piece of a transit system. You need to build the whole thing eventually. You can do it incrementally, but you’ve got to have connections, right

You can create road diets and chicanes and mid-block crossings, all these different tools. We know the solutions available. But the real thinking comes in, what’s the order we do these things in? How long do they go up for? How do we elicit feedback that’s useful for us in a way that’s actionable as well? There’s the project pathway of problem definition. You gather your data, you turn it into information, create a narrative, go act, and collect feedback. But then the piece that is so often either missing or left off the end of a budget for reasons is, how do you communicate these successes?

How are you and your team and your partners across city government, with your public, private, and nonprofit partners, communicating your successes? What channels do you go through, and how do you know whether you’re getting the right feedback?

It’s something that we are constantly trying to work on and improve. Something lately that the team has been really focused on is bringing stories from people in Boston. Rather than it being a video of the head of [name your department], it’s someone who literally got to stay in her house because of a program that was created by the Mayor’s Office of Housing, or two friends who can finally buy something because of a co-purchasing program.

It’s those kinds of things that ultimately make it land; it’s not the face of government in a way. It works well for the people it’s trying to serve. Having people essentially give testimonials of what exactly was going on in their lives and what this program did to help them is really persuasive. Something that the mayor has been doing, which I hear about from people who don’t live in Boston and people who are not in this space whatsoever, is her “commute with me” videos. She’ll meet someone, and she’ll commute to wherever they’re going, whether it’s a job or school, or whatever. What I love about that, and someone on my team also made this observation, is that this is not a conversation like, “Look, they could do this, and we should get this better…” That is not the conversation. The conversation is being present in a space with someone else and just seeing what they experience. It’s really moving.

I’m sure the production of that is more complicated than I’m going to simplify it here, but it really is that easy. It’s that easy to just show up, number one. And number two, connect with someone. Really talk to them about what their issue is without an agenda. It’s hard to do because you’re taught to have an angle, you’re taught to…

…to pitch.

Yeah, exactly. To have some sort of deliverable, and with this, the deliverable is the video, but there’s no report. There’s no findings pathway that must then sync up with four other departments. And I think that lets the city breathe a little bit. It brings attention to the strategy, “Let’s talk to someone in Jamaica Plain today. Let’s go out to Charlestown or out west to Allston or Brighton, in that area, and let’s highlight the values of these different parts of the city and give people some neighborhood pride.”

And then we’ll also talk about transportation a little bit. But we’ll let the commuter talk to me, right? This is not me coming in with, Gotta fix the 66 bus. Gotta fix the 57. That’s not useful. That’s too far on the solutions. Let’s just talk about, tell me about your commute.

I do this in my public engagement as well. It’s really that easy. You just ask and be genuine about it. Ask someone, “How are you experiencing your city today?” People are very excited. They’re experts in their own space. It’s free data. Basically, they’re going to tell you something you’ll never be able to figure out on your own. It’s incredible.

Yeah. It’s very rich. People have a lot to share, and it’s a privilege, honestly, to be able to go on that journey with them. There’s just a lot of opportunity there.

We’ve intermingled the “what can you do better right now?” portion of this. Let’s get into the planner’s dream of what a successful future looks like to you personally and then to your team, if they’re different or the goals are not necessarily similarly scaled.

The future I think about isn’t so far off. I’m not thinking 2050, I’m thinking 2030, which has always been a big target year for climate issues. In many ways, I think people for the big solution sets in the climate space feel like we’re behind, right? Like, we’re just not hitting these carbon reduction targets. We get hampered by politics and this and that.

But on the other hand, the next several years are where we’ve seen technological solutions in the last few years get really proven out. Solar panels are cheap; we know how to do microgrids. We can redistribute electricity. The future I envision is one that is very people-first and has those accommodations down to the detailed level. But it also makes use of every technology that makes sense and really helps. And I don’t think of it as being just utopian, only walkability or only walking or biking, but that we are making use of all of these different innovations, whether they’re technology-driven or not, even AI.

I also imagine a time, hopefully soon, when maybe we could shed some of the things that don’t work. There are a lot of policies that cities have that were created once upon a time and calcified into a practice. “That’s just how we do things,” kind of thinking, and we can let go of some of this stuff. Boston has a lot of it. It’s one of the oldest cities in the country, so there’s a lot of funny and funky policies coming from its origins, but I would love to see some loosening around, let’s say, commercial buildings.

Does it need to be so prescriptive? Is there more flexibility we can build into how we think about our built form? Can we encourage people to try things out because we don’t know what our downtowns are going to look like? There should be a few tries, two to three years of, “Is that a viable business?” Think about pop-ups beyond the ground floor, right? Pop-ups in the bigger, taller buildings because there’s a lot of commercial vacancy right now across the country. You can just go on and on. I would love to see an interrogation of the process by which this was created to do this thing. Does it achieve its goal? Does it cost us more to do this? Are there other ways we can achieve that goal? And there are a lot of intersections here with things that are untouchable, like worker protections. Very important. But not letting go of any of those ideas? What are other ways we can ensure that we have those protections? Because we’re in a different economy now, an entirely different kind of economy. I would love to see some of those things happen and see it manifest in our public spaces so that it is more integrated. Boston is a minority-majority city now, but you don’t necessarily feel that. We have a long way to go. We’re dealing with all these climate crises. We have a long way to go in terms of showing how that climate infrastructure should be along the coastline, like our harbor. There’s just a lot that could be built up and done.

Not to distill the great nuance you just used, but it sounds like where we’re heading toward: here is land use and zoning reform. And that does consider transportation as well, because I would love to remind my audience that roads are a land use. It’s how we’ve decided to split the land by building these lanes, whether they’re wide, narrow, or somewhere in between. And allow more things by right. Let’s think about performance zoning rather than exclusionary zoning. Let’s allow the market, whatever one means by that, let’s allow folks with ideas, either government or not, to reflect the needs of the people and the density people want.

We can still have a gradient of density in our cities because I think we want to have that legibility of where downtowns are and have certain guidelines. But the metaphor that I use is: four line segments can still make a square, depending on how you put them together. Let’s have more design freedom and allow things by right. And if they don’t work, then they don’t work. But we’re stuck on this old way of doing things because right now, folks understand the zoning code, whether it’s arcane or not. They understand what it means, what you can’t do, right? This is what you have to do here. Here’s how the process works. Are we trading our ease of process for a vision of the future that reflects the people who choose to live in a place like Boston or New York, or one of our other growing cities, or one of our smaller towns, one of the thirty thousand or so places in this country that have their own quality of life, but also a zoning code.

I think what’s ironic about what you just said is that I don’t know if the process today is easy. But there’s comfort in knowing and doing what you know. If we can trust that the next leap will take us somewhere good and that there are things that we don’t even know will happen, that’s going to be pretty cool.

We’re learning how to manage a little bit better with new technology, with our better communications techniques, and we’re understanding these risks at a deeper level for climate risk and human risk, interaction risk, and all these different areas where we’re trying to measure these things.

Our team is new, so I appreciate the opportunity to share some early thoughts about it and get feedback. Hopefully, all of this will be put to use!

Okay, I’m going to switch this one up and remind my Exasperated subscribers that I actually do work and I don’t simply complain on the internet. I do that, too, but for this Mini Exasperation, I’ll share a little behind the scenes of some of the design work I do on a day-to-day basis. This week, Space Syntax.

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What Is Space Syntax?

Space Syntax is the theory; Depthmap is the software. Space Syntax is a science-based, human-focused approach that investigates relationships between spatial layout and a range of social, economic, and environmental phenomena. Depthmap is the open-source tool that allows planners and exasperated laypeople to help make sense of the lines and spaces on a map.

Learning the right buttons to push is about 10% of the value and expertise you can develop with this tool—the rest is network and/or architectural drawing data prep and interpretation. In my 2+ years of learning Space Syntax, I’ve improved my:

• Understanding of the value of open-source street network data and its limitations.

• Ability to use CAD software to prepare and modify architectural drawings for analysis.

• Communication skills to help organize science- and data-backed solutions to thorny problems whose answers are often educated guesses. Space Syntax at least provides some sense of order to erratic human behavior.

• Ability to help places improve their street network design, more efficiently provide transit and micromobility services, and ensure land use and transportation are more closely aligned than they would have been otherwise.

This is a software whose outputs enhance traditional Geographic Information Systems—GIS—analysis and whose use complements traditional simulation modeling software (PTV Viswalk, Legion, Cube, others).

Space Syntax is NOT an agent-based modeling software.

Agent-based models combine enriched spatial models with behavioral object-oriented programming.1 Space Syntax is much simpler to program than a full model required for meaningful results from an agent-based model. But because it’s lightweight, the miasma of inputs and outputs needed, and how to interpret them, is much more nebulous. That’s why I get paid the medium bucks.

Instead of an enriched network and pixels to act like humans, Space Syntax is agnostic. Inputs to the software are CAD-based and can be IDd as street centerline segments.2 For example:

From here, there is a series of menus and buttons to press (which I’m happy to walk through if readers want it, later), to understand:

• Choice: how often a particular segment would be used by any road user traveling a specific distance starting from any location.

• Integration: the software can also help an analyst understand how connected any segment is to all other segments.

What does this mean?3

A Choice Example

Remember: “choice” in this context refers to a prediction of what routes a traveler will choose as they pass along or through the community along the network.

The grossly over simplified thoughts you might include in a presentation:

• Observation: Certain segments—notably many of the North-South connector routes are chosen no matter the trip distance. Interpretation: It’s important to maintain throughput for all modes, but motor vehicle and bus traffic should be prioritized—new routes could be considered for the reddest segments.

• Observation: It makes sense that the shorter distances are bluer / chosen less and the longer trips are redder / chosen more frequently. Interpretation: An evenly-spaced grid throughout an entire study are will likely always be blue—a traveler would be fully indifferent among a particular route. Remember, this analysis doesn’t take into account origin or destination, route preference, speed limits, and human behavior.

• Observation: It makes sense that the central arteries are brighter—there are more nodes and more total possible connections. Interpretation: Compare this analysis to observed traffic patterns and enriched data—does it make sense? Are the most “chosen” routes also the most used for moving through the neighborhood?

An Integration Example

Remember: “integration” in this context refers to the relative density of the network. How relatively connected every node (intersection) is to every other node for the determined trip length.

Integration is mostly useless on its own in this context—the major interpretation is if you’re looking agnostically at building a gridded network, as you increase the length of the trip, the whole network should glow red. Integration is always best paired with land uses in a GIS to undferstand whether your network is supporting the public economics or not.

Takeaways

This post was a tremendously oversimplified basic overview of Space Syntax as a non-consquential activity and really gets at about 40% of the power of this software. Here are a few problems that I left in on purpose (I swear):

• The network is likely too small for the actual area I’m seeking to analyze.

• The network may or may not be fully connected. I did not check the nodal connections. The software is not geospatial and is not itself aware—nor can it be made aware—of place.

• There are stray segments that are likely distorting the model. Remember (or I guess learn for the first time), Space Syntax is gravitational, meaning that it will pull choice closer to areas of complexity, or as you should interpret it, mess. A human actor won’t act like a Space Syntax output model necessarily.

• I chose specific trip lengths, but did I choose the correct ones? Why not 1500m or 250m for a small network? How can I know I chose correctly?

Articles I Liked

DOT wants to prohibit free buses. That could be a problem for Mamdani in NYC. by Chris Marquette for Politico

Regardless of whether you think free buses are a good idea or not, the Fed meddling in policy decisions without clear economics is more idiocy from the dumbest people who hold so much money and power. This is regulatory capture run amok and manifest in the Road Rules guy sharing a single brain cell with the President.

If I were NYC, I’d simply enroll every New Yorker in some program that qualifies them for fair fares, send an OMNY card or appropriate app (lol) upgrade. Demand-side economics mostly doesn’t work either—it’s harder to administrate and means-testing eats away at gains and can be hopelessly captured by capital—but: tourists and visitors still pay, you still get accurate counts on buses, but you lose the benefit of fast boarding.

Bus lane enforcement first, freedom to travel, also first.

This is what the inside of the world’s fastest train looks like

Meanwhile.

Rep. Simon introduces a bill to nationalize BART’s ambassador program by Jose Fermoso for Berkeleyside

I can’t prove this but I just know Alicia Trost is behind this in some way.

Writer I Support

The Friendly City Urbanist

A newsletter about land use, housing, transportation, and climate policy in Harrisonburg, the Shenandoah Valley, and beyond. Currently living in the Netherlands, enrolled in the Global Urban Transformations Master's program at Utrecht University.

By Brent Finnegan

The goal is to make this entire section practical. I’m going to mostly stick to listicles here because these are the quickest way to get these hitters out. Bing bong.

If you have questions, you should send me an email at samuel [dot] b [dot] sklar [at] gmail [dot] come, and I’ll do my best to answer. Share this with a young planner in your life for ~*fun*~.

Ten Ways to Become an Effective Urban Planner

I’m not defining it. Here we go.

1. Going to planning school is not a decision to be taken lightly. At all.

There’s a lingering question that all 21-26-year-olds interested in the built environment have: Should I go to planning school? There’s a flow chart I’ll make for a later date, but the question flow is: if yes, where and why? If so, where, for how long? There is a meaningful, academic difference between planning, design, engineering, policy, comms, law, and social impact. No matter how hard you think about this there is a very good chance you get it wrong anyway.

2. This field is the ultimate liberal arts degree. You will be a lifelong learner.

You must understand that you can be good at your niche—housing, transportation, landscape, architecture, urban design, community and economic development—and you’ll never be good at this job if you don’t also have at least a cursory understanding of the others you’ve ignored. Didn’t like math in college? Tough. That’s your ceiling. Not great at drawing or design? Dive into the history and the art direction side. The stories we’re required to tell run very wide and very deep.

3. Develop very deep, core values. Stick to them.

I won’t tell you what mine are, because you have to make these and earn these as part of your development as a professional, and, not for nothing, as an empathetic human. You can’t approach each project and each neighborhood as though you’re seeing problems for the first time. Bring your whole self to a place, and your stakeholders, the real people you’re helping, will help you define problems better to apply interventions more clearly. This does have a downside of not being able to shut it off. Maybe this field isn’t for you.

4. Also develop domain expertise and/or some level of people skills. Yes, even you, engineers.

You see, (2) isn’t enough. At the beginning of your career, no one is going to believe you know what you’re doing, and you can’t be 27 and setting yourself up as a super generalist if no one knows that but you. So pick something—GIS, design software, transportation planning—and dive all the way in as far as you think you can. You can come up later if you’d like and expand outward (management), or you can reach the depths (individual contributions). Specializing does not absolve you from communication requirements.

5. Bring a reasoned point of view to your work. There is no atonal planning.

One pitfall I continue to see with younger planners is a decisive lack of perspective right as they’re leaving school. This makes sense—academic planning is very different than on-the-ground planning and it can take time and experience to shed the ideology of what logic, data, and information say is “correct” and realize what is correct for the right context. That margin is your point of view.

6. As a corollary to (5), understanding the local politics and its history will help you make better decisions.

Knowing how local decisions are made (politically) will only help shape any interventions you suggest or how you tell certain stories (narratively). Even if you think a project is relatively routine, I promise you it is not, and seeking this knowledge from local experts will only endear you to them and loosen likely acceptance of (good) ideas. There’s always the question of where do you, a city planner, sit during a planning process. Do you plan from within your organization as an advisor?

7. It is OK and likely preferred as you enter decade two of this long career that you bop among the private, public, and non-profit sectors.

Not every career decision will make full or even partial sense until the end of your career, but I will advise you to look to the people over the place. Rarely will you notice a firm/agency’s “culture” outside your immediate team, and anti-labor policies that come every now and again from management. You, too, will have to shape dynamics and decide labor policy if and when you grow into leadership over time.

There are significant differences among the private, public, and non-profit sectors, and each has its place in your career development. Frankly, I’d rather hire someone with a sorta bonkers journey than a Planner I > Planner II > Associate Director journey. You’ve not seen enough, and I’m mostly already bored.

8. Show up to stuff even when you’re tired as all hell, but don’t burn out.

Ninety percent of relationship building is showing up again and again. Being in the same room as the people you’d like to work with or for is exceptionally important. It’s not “networking,” which sucks. Eventually, you develop a reputation, and what you do with it is up to you. It takes years to build and a second to break.

9. Our industry, especially transportation, is full of counterintuitive ideas—you’ll have to learn with cognitive dissonance.

This counterintuitiveness, e.g., just one more lane bro makes messaging extremely challenging, which makes decision-making even harder, which makes good decision-making even harder, which makes getting anything built in a timely or effective manner nearly impossible. Your job is to find a way to cut through the noise. You may train for a long time before your messaging gets through, to make an impact. Don’t give up.

10. Ask for help when you need it, but don’t be an annoying tryhard.

All the people you look up to in our industry were once where you are (and I am) now, and certainly didn’t get to positions of (relative) power by luck (on its own) or by working hard (by themselves). Reach out to people (politely and respectfully of their time and limit bandwidth) and ask for something small. Then do the 9 other things on the list a lot. You’ll get there.

Here’s what I did.

I showed up for friend-of-Exasperated Infrastructures’ Kathy Park Price’s tour of open space, or lack thereof, in Long Island City. There’s yours truly in the orange coat and backpack. I do look ready for a cold-weather hike. It was 6 degrees Fahrenheit. The tour was part of a larger campaign for the amazing advocacy organization, called New Yorkers for Parks (NY4P), that does exactly what it says on the tin. They research and advocate for parks, and what they don’t say on the tin, they partner with other organizations that care about open space and parks to amplify this message to elected officials, residents, workers, and help give a meaningful voice to the underheard. Don’t ever let anyone tell you your voice doesn’t matter, and don’t ever shy away from being the best version of yourself by just showing up.

But it doesn’t matter. I showed up—along with dozens of friends and fellow advocates who got the Councilwoman (CM Julie Won) out for a press op, and an article in a widely-circulated local paper. We toured a half dozen sites where there have been new parks built, new parks planned, or new ones needed, and heard from local residents who deserve a place to decompress, connect, and learn with neighbors and friends without having to schlep all the way to elsewhere.

We should be building connected communities, and we should be connecting them with parks and bikeways and friendships.

~*_________________________*~

Last week, I also worked with a delegation from Transportation for Massachusetts to help them understand messaging around congestion pricing1 to eventually help convince Governor Healy et al to pilot it forever around Boston. The contents of this talk were off the record, so I’m not going to post any findings or shared thoughts here about it, but it was really great to be in this room with people DOING STUFF.

DO MORE STUFF.

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A Few Small Articles

MUST READ

A Better Billion: Expanding Transit & Housing for a More Affordable New York

by the Transit Costs Project team, including friends of EI, Eric Goldwyn, Andrew Lynch, Nolan Hicks, Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, and Franklin Tang

This report is a masterful guide and vision that looks beyond the limited scope of “what if we just made the buses free.2” It reports on what the future of our system could look like under realistic capacity and geometry constraints,3 but holds cost caps relatively loose.4 The point is to have a realistic and, their words, audacious conversation with anyone who will listen about how we move throughout our city.

It’s not audacious to expect less friction in getting around our city. In fact, this is the best possible deal. For a mere 5% of the total cost of the system5—should it be built from scratch today—we (and you if you don’t live here but want to come visit us for our stuff) get 41 miles of new subways, 64 new stations, and an inducement of 167,000 new housing units.

We also get to collectively vision and foam. I’ll do a longer dive on this soon.

Memo to Mamdani: Bring Back the Weekend G Train to Forest Hills

by John Surico for Streetsblog NYC

John Surico, no relation, wrote this short, easy-to-grasp memo for Streetsblog. We can reëxtend the G train to Forest Hills from its current terminus, Court Sq in Long Island City, on weekends only (so as to not compete for track with the M), sorta…right now. We do not have to build new tunnels, and the community has a history with this connection. The geometry problems are solvable and dovetail nicely with a project I’m involved in, which would support this extension full-time, and that at least two of the authors above are also working on: QueensLink.

“Build more transit, make it work, and figure the rest out later.” Anyway, go read this (it'll take you 2 minutes) and think about how small transit improvements: speed, frequency, patronage (who's riding with you and how many people?), and coverage (where the service goes and when) *thanks to Jarrett Walker for helping me think about transit like this.6

Friend of the week: Paul Salama from “Transform Government”

Loved this post from Paul Salama. Give him a follow and encourage more stream-of-consciousness that makes a lot of sense!

Transform Government

Rapid-Fire 2026

My writing on here has taken the think-piece form. I’ve loved using the writing process to learn, to reveal, to arrive somewhere I didn’t expect. But working through ideas also means a growing weight of topics I want dive into and share, but can’t give sufficient space to do them justice. Other priorities—launching an…

Read more

3 months ago · 1 like · 3 comments · Paul S.

Second Friend of the week: Jon John Wesolowski, aka

“The Happy Urbanist”

The Happy Urbanist

Tactical and practical ways to empower yourself and your community towards a better city.

By Jon Jon Wesolowski

If I’m exasperated, and I am, then Jon Jon, a name so nice you always say it twice, is happy. I love his philosophical musings and especially love his video content @thehappyurbanist. Give a follow to both and think like me—or like you, as if you were me, but you.

I’ve been writing this newsletter since April 2020, starting with a series of posts about books about planning, engineering, and urbanism that I’ve loved and how you can read them, too, to think about things the way I do. Some of you did this (I know), and some are wondering how you see these long lists. I think it’s time to republish them and update them with 6 more years of knowledge, and 6 more years of incredible partnership with Island Press, which has now been folded into Princeton University Press but will remain as a standalone imprint.

Expect something from me in this regard in the next few weeks.

But today’s thought is: you can just do stuff. The same way I started this newsletter on a calculated whim and have kept at it for half a decade. The same way the Mamdani administration filled in a bike pothole within a week of being sworn in, or simply hiring the best people (shout out Midori Valdivia and Mike Flynn!) to go do stuff. There’s a lot of uncertainty from the old guard in this vein: how do you build a weeks-long messaging campaign to combat a half-day activity that will be done and dusted and have captured a handful of media cycles that all say the same thing?

It’s time to start that blog. Or email that contact. Fill in a bike lane bump. Or learn that new skill or hit that happy hour. Go do it. Be like Zohran. Hope to see you there.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

The Reauthorization of Federal Transportation Programs Offers Policymakers an Opportunity to Improve Effectiveness, Environmental Sustainability, and Access

by Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute

In advance of the Reauthorization piece that’s coming shortly, I wanted to highlight this data-backed exercise from Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute. The essay outlines three pathways to success to build on the outputs from the IIJA/IRA:

1. Guarantee Effective Grant Use

2. Increase Environmental Sustainability

3. Leverage Transportation Investments to Fund Communities that Need Them the Most

All good ideas. All just vague enough and progressive enough to never happen. Still a good place to start.

Why New Jersey Has New Comprehensive E-Bike Regulations

by Ximena Conde for the Philadelphia Inquirer b/w GovTech

The classic case of the politically expedient solution in search of an honest-to-god problem, and the perfect metaphor for the Murphy Administration throughout his tenure. It’s also a parable for transportation policy administration in practice: counter-intuitiveness. On its face, a policy to register a motor vehicle—even an e-bike or pedal-assisted one—makes sense. Let’s follow the logic, or at least the triggering event: a e-bike user hits a pedestrian on a delivery. The magical logic of due process follows. All e-bikes are now the problem and must be registered in case a future incident causes the same problem; then the MVC1 can link the incident to the particular cyclist, and an inquiry can begin.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple. Any number of problems arise here. These issues fall into two buckets: administrative and problem ID.

Administrative: The most salient problem here is jurisdiction. The State of New Jersey is responsible for the maintenance of registration records; whoever is responsible for the road2 would likely issue a traffic infraction; whichever court would try a case in (hopefully) the same jurisdiction as where the infraction was issued; the insurance company would need to be involved. The problem here isn’t that we don’t know how to do this, generally. We do it for incidents involving motor vehicles—cars, trucks, motorcycles—all the time.

We simply don’t have a system for bikes, and onboarding all current bike riders in the state will be a long and expensive endeavor. There’s inbound and outbound outreach, internal training. Then there’s the data. These systems are already antiquated, and I fear the cost to update them to whatever modern standard is deemed necessary3 will far outstrip any material benefit…until it doesn’t. At that time, we may have an entirely new tech and governance regime for bikes, cars, trams, buses, trains, and the public realm.

It continues to astound me that our policymakers are simply making this all up on my dime.

Problem ID: Longtime Exasperated readers know I will continue to pull on this thread until there’s nothing left. An essential question that policymakers continue to ignore(?)4 is “What problem does my solution actually solve?” I’m not naive. I know there are big-money interests shaping outcomes that are, quite simply, unrelated to bicycle safety, insurance schema, and process. But it’s curious here since the principal in this equation, Governor Phil Murphy, was already a lame duck, and the agents here—who is this for?

Is there any evidence that tying e-bike registrations to MVC operations increases road safety? This feels more like a capitulation to anti-bike road warriors who have feelings about cyclists and e-bikes, generally, rather than a meaningful policy geared toward safety.

Unwilling to make ‘a bad deal even worse,’ Mayor Johnson drops out of competition to buy back parking meters

by Fran Spielman for the Chicago Sun Times

Long story short, right there in the headline. The City of Chicago sold the rights to many of its parking meters for 75 years to a private operator in 2008. Seventeen years into this deal, the City has lost so much on this deal that its finances are laughable. For example, if the city wants to shut down a street for a parade or a block party…it also has to buy out the parking meters, making this deal somehow doubly bad.

Ever since Mayor Daley (the Younger) sold these rights, trading a short-term fiscal crisis for a long-long-term one, public finance economists have sought to find a way out of the deal.5 Unfortunately, the terms are air-tight and the new Mayor, Brandon Johnson, has ruled out an insane leveraged buyout that would, triply bad, saddle the city with debt, whose service would require raising parking rates to a level that would quash demand.

I guess more people would take transit. That’s a win.

A Writer for You to Follow

I’m a big fan of her publication, the “New Urban Order” Substack; she writes more frequently and often more relevantly than I. Give her a follow! Me too, though.

The New Urban Order

Exploring cities around the world, and the housing, climate, mobility, culture, and tech in them.

By Diana Lind

First, hello to all new subs from DC this week. It was great to meet all of you and you’ll be able to find me here, on LinkedIn, by email, or by text if we bumped iPhones.1

Second, and as always, feel free to share this post with friends or colleagues who you’d think would like a weekly dose of exasperation and policy, interviews and book reviews, and long-form essays (reauth takes are coming…soon).

Third, sorry this is very late. My computer broke last Saturday and no one was happy.

Dispatches from Washington DC

Each January, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) hosts its annual meeting (AM) in Washington DC’s Washington Convention Center.2 And three years from four I attend the hallways and happy hours portion of the conference—meaning I make my way to DC and spend four to five days taking meetings, coffees, and lunches with colleagues and coworkers, new and old, to build and deepen relationships. I’ll say that in my career, gliding through downtown DC for a few days each January has been the most influential week in my burgeoning career.

5 Dos and Donts from a decade at #TRBAM

I’ve been told to use more lists in my screeds.

DO attend the conference if you’re an academic or an aspiring researcher in the field.

The TRB is a project of the National Science Foundation and is, first and foremost, an academic and research body. There operate dozens of different committees, theoretically, whose function is to manage ideas and research related to the transportation, infrastructure, and inreasingly, intelligent systems field. In between the presentations of research and findings, the committees meet and discuss alll things from structure to focus among other topics related to the committee. If you’re an academic, in school to become one, or are simply the largest nerd, it is worthwhile to attend the conference over its 4 days. If you’re a practitioner, advocate, or lesser nerd, the content of the conference itself may not be your best choice for time spend.

DON’T expect to take in the entire conference at once.

In years’ past, close to 10,000 people have descended upon DC for the conference from all walks of life and relationships to the field. I will say the 2026 conference felt more subdued than usual, even though I didn’t attend the conference. I’ve heard rumblings attendance was down about 40%, somewhat attributable to the ongoing changes in committee structure and operations and the fear to fly to the US as an international presenter or representative. The city itself felt tense and eerily empty. Vibes were way off.

DO attend the receptions, sparingly.

Much ado about the daytime events aside, firms and universities will sponsor receptions each evening starting the Saturday before. Friend of Exasperated Infrastructures, Greg Rogers, organizes a spreadsheet that you’ll have access to if you ask either of us nicely. Here was this years’

Words of advice, you cannot make all of these and don’t try:

• The times often overlap. Most of these run from 6-8.

• These are close to one another, but there’s still a walking distance between them and it’s January in Washington.

• Focus on quality over quantity. You’re not going to fully advance your career in two hours. Meet people that you like and enjoy learning about what they like. Networking is goofy, but making friends you can work with is not.

DON’T forget to follow up.

Use your email, your LinkedIn, your phone and keep in touch with the people you meet. It is OK to send a text or an email a few days after everyone disperses. Following along is only annoying if you, dear reader, are annoying.

DO take some time to recover.

It’s a whole year until TRB reconvenes in January 2027. So do take the time to relax and recover and then get back to it. Dozens of other conferences to attend this year around the country, so let’s not let it all out at once.

Articles I’ve Been Reading

World-Class American Transit

by Transportation for America

A new report from my alma mater produced by friend of Exasperated Infrastrutures, Corrigan Salerno. The takeaway is clear: we must invest and invest wisely into our nation’s fraying and decaying local and regional transit systems to the tune of $230 billion a year for the next 20 years.

This seems like a lot of money but it amounts to an investment of about $676 a person a yea—all in—to helps us compete with our global counterparts. This assumes no user fees, no debt, no outside funding, private or otherwise. I’m not and this report doesn’t purport to naïveté that this number is remotely possible in our current state of…affairs. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need an honest assessment that accounts for decades of underinvestment.

I’ve been told that a few corrollary reports are coming to measure benefits.

The United States needs fewer bus stops

by Nithin Vejendla for Work in Progress (h/t once again)

I like this piece and it’s got the duel benefit of making salient points and being well-written. Transit planning and operations is a game of tradeoffs: coverage versus speed, cost versus service, revenue sourcing versus spending, etc. If you can think of one problem, I have a handful of equal and opposite problems that don’t fit neatly into a single tradeoff. This is where good community problem ID comes in. Yes data and map shed analysis is helpful for determining optimal solutions, but our models can’t capture stories on their own. We need it all and Nithin is right.

And, hey, maybe we can recapture some of those dollars to reinvest in our systems. A little here and a little there can make a big difference in the aggregate.

A Recent Writer I’ve Enjoyed

I want to give a shoutout to Andy Boneau, the writer of:

Urbanism Speakeasy with Andy Boenau

Simple truths about city planning & transportation to help you promote healthy infrastructure.

Andy’s just been named the new Director of the Richmond, VA Department of Transportation. We’re a big fan of Andy in this house and wish him all the best of luck as he steps into lead the city into the future.

My goal is to follow the following format:

1. An Observation with a Focus on Urban Politics and Infrastructure.

Pretty straightforward. This could be a few paragraphs, a poll, a cool map(s), just something that connected with me or very obviously did not. I may highlight a local or state or federal agency that’s done great, interesting, or bad work. I may seek some engagement. Just a way to get the thoughts out. This should be a peek in to my exasperation.

2. A Few Articles That Piqued My Interest and a Contextualization

Between 1-4 articles that I found on my travels through the web. Often, I’ll try to link back to (which you should DEFINITELY subscribe to), or another interesting pathway. I’ll try to give some context that pulls together my exasperated expertise. That’s where the gold is. That’s what you want.

3. A Writer / Substacker I Think You Should Follow

I’m trying to continue to build community online—and so I feel that highlighting another writer whose insights I find inspire mine shouldn’t be gatekept.

Exasperated Survey [~5 minutes of your time]

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE!

I’ve been at this for 5.5 years now, and I’ve amassed almost 2,000 of you as subscribers, friends of the newsletter, and first timers! I want to know more about you, why you tune in when I publish, and what could make you more excited for the future of Exasperated Infrastructures.

I’m going to leave this survey open for about a month and hopefully collect interesting and meaningful data, which I’ll then publish with some other metrics and transparancy.

If you’d like, you can enter to win a free year of archival posts and a handful of stickers to show off your support! All you have to do is associate your email with the response and then tell me you’d like to be entered in the drawing.

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE!

Articles I’ve Been Reading

This week I’ve got three new ones—two rail and an off-the-rail one.

Sound Transit Board Sets Aside Idea of Skipping Second Downtown Tunnel

Ryan Racker for The Urbanist

I’ll let you read this one—and it’s a great example of technical writing made clear for public consumption. A few things to look for in the meta-argument:

• False equivalence: between the different “tunneling” choices. There are often many options to address problematic infrastructure development and management of decay. These are often uncovered during environmental review as the order of operations demands…ideas whose environmental impact we1 need to judge. Alternatives analysis is deeply political insofar as boosters of a specific idea or another, or the no-bult/null alternative, make their case to guide the criteria toward the politically expedient choice. A 3-σ estimate of savings or costs or impacts that puts a hard limit on a specific choice, even if it’s the most logical choice in a vacuum. There is no such thing as an apolitical correct choice.

• Cost comparisons: cost is the one variable a non-technical audience can directly connect to, vis-à-vis a $3, $13, or $30 billion project. These numbers, meaningless on their own, signal a willingness to invest in place. There’s a difference of differences between $3 billion and $0, just as there is a difference between $3 billion and $30 billion. The how and why of cost is what to look for here. What happens if we don’t do the smaller project? What happens if we do the big project? What happens if some of it gets done? Who wins? Who loses? Is there an effort to reconcile these actors/stakeholders?

What do you think?

California drops lawsuit seeking to reinstate federal funding for the state’s bullet train

by Sophie Austin for The Associated Press

“Moving forward without the Trump administration’s involvement allows the Authority to pursue proven global best practices used successfully by modern high-speed rail systems around the world,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

That’s telling and perhaps a bellwether for the future of transportation funding for large projects. California is lucky(?) that it can forego federal oversight for this project voluntarily since it’s entirely self-contained within a single state. It’s not necessarily subject to Interstate Commerce Oversight. Since it’s foregoing funding from the feds, mostly similar. I can foresee a project problem arising with materials sourcing: parts not fully chained in California will be subject to tariffs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these morons running our country into the ground attempt interstate tariffs from “red”-to-“blue”2 states to punish people for existing differently than them. What a world.

Long live the doomed project that is CAHSR!

Are You Enjoying Our Linguine?

by Francesco Pacifco for The Dial

I loved this piece that is both about linguine and determinedly not. I often think about how to be a bobobo3 in a world that pacifies them and reviles them in a great equivocation of the Pale Blue Dot as a matryoshka doll. You see that small dot amongst the great blue shift from Voyager I? That’s us. You see the piazzetta, right there, represented on your Google Map as a Pale Blue Pin? That’s us. You see the agglomeration of all the palest, bluest, likeliest dots on all the panoptical illusions i.e. smartphones? That’s us, in the future.

Don’t be a culture vulture, but don’t ignore travel for fear of not being able to do it “correctly.” As Tony Bourdain made it his life’s work to not be a tourist, but a traveler, so too must you try to experience the world, not through [insert LLM-likely]-colored glasses, which, if you’re lucky like me, will be themselves pale blue dots with a simple dollop of pupil.

I’m going to keep the parable loose here about how this article relates to infrastructure planning, but I promise it has to do with BABA4 and not bobo.

A Recent Writer I’ve Enjoyed

A big fan of Marco Chitti’s “Italian (urban) Letters” as a site of technical essays and fantastic insights that often enhance or bump up against my own.

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I really did like Life After Cars — Doug, Sarah, and Aaron. Bravo, and/but New York’s Secret Subway brought me on a journey detailing life before cars, and it will surely enthrall you, my exasperated friend. The plot is somewhat straightforward: Alfred Ely Beach wanted to build a pneumatic underground railway to show it could be done. His sub-way would not be steam, coal, or electric, but operated using a practical application of Bernoulli’s fluid dynamics: by fanning air through a tube large enough to push a car back and forth. He did it. Kind of. End of story.

Except Matthew Algeo’s New York’s Secret Subway weaves a much larger story about New York City during the height of machine politics and Tammany Hall. Boss Tweed—the notorious Trumpian figure from the second half of the nineteenth century—plays his role as a heel to perfection in this story. But the story’s main character, Algeo argues, deserves a place in the American Inventor’s Hall of Fame beyond his contributions to public transit. Alfred Beach, forgotten to the annals of history until now, is still responsible for about two percent of all patents ever recorded since the United States began keeping such records in the mid-1800s. The pneumatic tunnel he built in secret (in plain sight) remains what he’s best known for. His legacy will continue to grow as long as books like Algeo’s continue to tell his story.

Algeo’s book is a worthy entry into the growing history of infrastructure and political history as a proxy for human ambition and the complex relationships we all share with the built environment. I spoke with him a few months ago about Beach, Tweed, Elon Musk, Robert Moses, and why holding your nose and hoping for the best is the national motto in waiting.

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Tell us a little about yourself and how this book came to be.

I’m an author and journalist. I’m the host of Morning Edition on Kansas Public Radio right now. New York Secret Subway is my eighth book. I first heard the story about five years ago. A rock band called Klaatu did a song called “Sub-Rosa Subway,” which tells the story of Alfred Beach and the construction of the underground pneumatic subway in 1870…which is not typical material for a seventies prog rock band, but it really got me interested in the story. I went down the proverbial rabbit hole and here I am five years later, having written a book about it. It’s just such an interesting story, with such interesting characters in an interesting time and place. And it just, it just kept getting better and better the more I researched it. So here we are.

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of how interesting this book is. When I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters, and I was thinking to myself, “How is this guy going to get an entire book out of this one small project underneath Broadway in the mid nineteenth century?” And as I kept reading, I realized it was less about the project itself and more about the cast of characters and the political climate and the context about which this is telling a story about New York.

No to over not to overhype it, but it was giving very Caro in terms of the approach, the reverence, and the attention you gave to your cast of characters. Can you talk a little bit about your process, about how you decided to put the edges on it?

When you begin researching it, you’re never quite sure if there’s enough there. I have authored books before—I will call them small stories—that talk about bigger themes.

I tried to make a book about life in New York in 1870, which is a period that gets overlooked in US history, that period between the Civil War and World War I. And it’s such a phenomenal period in the history of the country and the history of New York City. There’s so much is going on in this story that gets lost in the shuffle in the grand scheme of things, in the history of New York City. Alfred Beach’s pneumatic subway in and of itself isn’t exactly a huge story, but all the characters that are involved in this and all the themes that are involved in this: mass transit, political corruption, invention and innovation in mid-nineteenth century America, are. It really is one of those stories that has so many layers, so many tentacles going out into so many different subjects.

I did a book about pedestrianism, the competitive walking craze in the 1870s and 1880s, which largely took place in New York, too, and it was constructed the same way. You’re really using the small story to tell a much bigger story about America and about New York at the time. I love to be mentioned literally in the same breath as Caro—something I’m clearly not worthy of. But I love The Power Broker, and I love the LBJ books, and I love the way he is able to weave things in. And I do try to do that in my own little way.

Boss Tweed is one of those characters that is immortalized in this unfinished history of the US between reconstruction and World War I in a lot of ways. He’s not even the prototype because, for sure, before Boss Tweed, there was somebody else who was interested in corruption. His life just happened to coincide with your book; but I’m curious if you see parallels between Boss Tweed and Robert Moses? Do you think that he was Mosesian?

You’re right, Boss Tweed didn’t appear out of nowhere. I mean, he was building on a long tradition of political corruption and graft that, in fact, goes back to the founding of Tammany Hall itself in the late 1700s and early 1800s. I think what he saw himself doing was perfectly normal. He just happened to do it on a scale that had never been attempted before.

If you think of America industrializing in the period after the Civil War, with mass production becoming possible, he just saw himself as an entrepreneur on the scale of Carnegie or Vanderbilt, right? His business was political, so for him, it wasn’t as big a deal.

There are parallels with Tweed and Robert Moses to some extent. I think there are better parallels between Tweed and some contemporary politicians, and I don’t want to get too into the weeds with this comparison to President Trump. I’m not at all suggesting he’s as corrupt as Tweed.

That remains to be seen, but he and Trump both engendered a loyalty among their working-class followers that is just hard to comprehend. Remember, Tweed himself was not Irish. He was of Scottish descent. He wasn’t Catholic, yet he was beloved by the Irish Catholic immigrants who came to the US, and especially in New York, by the tens of thousands in the 1860s.

I see really striking similarities between Trump and Tweed in that respect, and in the respect that he wanted to be perceived as wealthy. Tweed had a huge mansion on Fifth Avenue. I mean, the guy was a state senator. His annual salary was…$5,000 a year. It was hard to explain how he had this tremendous wealth, but he didn’t mind at all. He had tremendous loyalty. He knew how to get out the vote. He knew how to manipulate votes as well. He knew how to manipulate elections. And so, I see a lot of parallels, not just with President Trump, but also with a lot of modern politicians.

Tweed really set the mold for the modern, power-hungry politician. And politicians learned something from him and are more careful about it now.

One of the other things that I loved about this book and I haven’t read any of your other books yet, and I’m excited to now, but I love the way that you take a very “fiction” approach to the way you tell your stories, how you build narratives that weave their way in and out of different chapters. I found this style particularly compelling. You’ll start a story in one chapter, introduce several more characters in the next chapter, and then bring it back around by adding such a rich color of the environment and the people, and some of these names that are very familiar to New Yorkers today, like Astors and the Pierreponts and the Havemeyers, all these different characters. It gives people who live in New York special appreciation and for those who don’t live in New York or who haven’t, it gives a peek under the hood of how New York City politics worked in the late nineteenth century.

I’m curious if you have any tips or tricks for aspiring writers on how to tell a story—maybe a kernel of truth, now, having written seven books besides this one.

The key is finding a story that attracts those characters. You can’t contrive ways to introduce those characters; they have to appear naturally in the course of the story. Going back to Caro, the Power Broker, Moses is the main character, but he’s also the excuse for Caro to write about all these other amazing characters in the story.

As soon as I knew that Beach and Tweed had a connection, you’re now connected to the New York City municipal government in 1869 and 1870, and Tweed gets elected to the state legislature. And now you get to talk about state politics, which was also involved in this story. Right there, you’ve got a whole stadium full of interesting characters that are going to help you write the story.

I tried to spread it out a little bit, bring characters in, and let them rest for a little bit, and then bring them back in again. It was also a way to try to give readers a break from Beach. It’s always Beach, Beach, Beach, Beach, Beach. What you want to do is give your readers a little time away from the main characters and even the main story. I go into these sidetracks about the history of mathematics and George Medhurst's experiments. I don’t know if there’s any interest to anybody, but it gives readers a little relief from the main story. New York’s Secret Subway is a very heavy political process story. So, it’s also helpful to have side characters and stories to make the read a little easier.

The story is also a history of the media in the nineteenth century, which I found fascinating as well, and which I also think is a great lesson for folks looking to read or write about the history of city building and urbanism, and science as well. There’s always commentary on what’s happening in the built environment, and planners would be good to learn about how what they say interacts with the people who are going to be commenting on their work. A lot of planners think that we exist outside of the media circus in a lot of ways.

My point here is about the history of media and the fact that Beach was one of the founders of Scientific American, which is a magazine that’s now almost two hundred years old and still has a mainstay in our collective experience of science journalism and reporting.

One of the things that I learned about how to read media in the nineteenth century is that major players and stories are all deeply, deeply connected in a lot of ways to distant or recent past. The names that we learn about in the seventeenth century come back in the nineteenth century.

Why do Orangemen march? The Twelfth of July explained

I loved your aside about the 12^th of July protest. That was a great learning experience for me. I didn’t realize that it still exists in New York in some way or another, hopefully not as violently as it was back in the 1800s.

Beach was savvy. He came from a media background, as you mentioned. His father was a New York Sun reporter. His brother, Moses, was a state lawmaker. Beach was no babe in the woods when it came to media and politics. He did not live in a bubble. He knew he had a good idea, but he also knew he had to sell the idea to convince people it was a good idea.

A lot of times, architects don’t know much about the history of architecture, and sometimes they have become so convinced that their ideas are so good that there is no compromise. Beach was brilliant in this way. He invited the reporters down to the grand opening. Those were the first people he thought of—the New York Times, the New York Sun, the New York Post. Absolutely right that he was thinking about how this project would be written about, commented on.

Let’s talk about his role in the patent procedure. You colored this man as not just an advocate for trains and rail. It was one of his many ideas.

I don’t think this was the comparison that you were necessarily going for, and I don’t think there is a one-to-one comparison because there are big differences between these two men, but does the pneumatic tube idea not have this, at least a slight comparison with Elon Musk and his Hyperloop? There’s a little bit of fighting for an idea that no one believes in and thinks the technology is right. Did that enter your in in your thinking as you were as you were learning about Beach?

Yeah, it did, and it has to. The comparison is so obvious. I will say that Beach had one advantage in that the technology he was working with had been proven to be pretty successful. The Hyperloop, using magnetic propulsion, hasn’t really demonstrated that it’s feasible. Beach also started very small: let’s build three hundred feet of this thing and show it can work. I don’t know if there’s been a successful working model of the Hyperloop.

The problem was propulsion, right? This is always the problem: steam locomotives in a tunnel, there’s smoke and cinders and horses pulling streetcars and stagecoaches, there’s effluences, a lot of horse poop and pee. That was the beauty of Beach’s idea. It was so much cleaner than the alternatives at the time. It was so much more comfortable, and it was so much more efficient that it was obvious to anyone who walked down the tunnel, even just rode that three hundred feet, that this was superior to what they already have. And we have yet to get there with the Hyperloop. Someday, we will get in a tube and be able to just even go from Santa Monica to downtown LA. In Beach’s case, people were able to see that this was a superior method.

An obvious difference is we’re now one hundred and fifty years smarter, theoretically, at putting stuff in the ground. There’s very little trench-and-cover building done anymore. I mean, even tunnel boring machines (TBMs) have serious issues, including the Bertha fiasco in Seattle, which got the state DOT commissioner fired, and so modern building is steeped in navigating a different set of political realities.

It is hard to measure what Elon’s intent is here with the Hyperloop. If it’s for selling Teslas, I understand that, but if it’s just he doesn’t like buses, that’s a very different mentality than what Beach and his ilk were thinking about in the 1870s, because the idea was always mass transit first. And it’s hard to say without the benefit of hindsight which technology is going to ultimately win.

If we can turn the conversation back to this period in New York history that I’m particularly fond of in terms of the simply laughable corruption in Boss Tweed…what was something that surprised you? What was a fact that you learned where you said to yourself, “I never in a million years thought that that was the way this played out.” Anything come to mind?

The thing that surprised me most about Tweed and the corruption was simply how transparent it was; he didn’t feel it necessary to hide it very much. Everybody knew it was going on. Again, he lives in a mansion on Fifth Avenue when he is the city streets commissioner. The fact that Tweed actually kept ledgers detailing all the payments that he was making, the kickbacks he was getting…that was his downfall eventually. He had promised the New York County Sheriff that he would pay him $30,000 for some expenses the sheriff had, and then apparently reneged on that. And that got the sheriff angry, and he got his hand on the ledgers.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, but the people’s acceptance of Tweed’s corruption, that it was the cost of doing business in New York City, and if you could get a piece of the pie, more power to you. Tweed’s constituents admired him for the way he was so brash about accumulating wealth, again, in some ways similar to the to the, supporters of President Trump, and as I say it now, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but, it did surprise me how brazen the corruption was and how lackadaisical the public seemed to see seem to be about it.

It’s one of the parables that I like from this book that also rhymes with the current political climate with MAGA and President Trump. Is it that Boss Tweed’s undoing came from such a tiny kernel of happenstance in a lot of ways? When this guy O’Rourke became bookkeeper and suddenly he was like, “…oh, what’s this?” It was the same thing that we saw in the 1975 fiscal crisis in New York, when one bookkeeper at Chase Bank was finally like, “Wait a second, there’s no assets here.”

The takeaway that I have that gives me some hope from this book, which is a really cool thing that I think other readers will have, is that downfall is coming because it always has and it always will, and there’s no way to predict where it’s coming from, and there’s no way to predict who it’s going to be.

I’m reminded of this book that I read in graduate school called Normal Accidents, about the history of the Three Mile Island meltdown, it happened with eighteen small problems and not one big problem. It wasn’t, “Oh, the switch doesn’t work.” It was eighteen things happening at once: this guy felt sick, and this one switch had worked a million times before is stuck today, and the guy was in the bathroom or something along these lines. That’s where this next downfall is going to come from, and there’s no way to predict it.

I take your point, but I hadn’t really thought about New York and the ‘75 fiscal crisis. It made me think of Bernie Madoff and who was the guy who was up in Boston who to tried to replicate Madoff’s books, and he came back in ten minutes later and said, “It’s a pyramid scheme.” And he tried to convince the SEC for years to look into it. That struck me as similar: eventually, somebody will find out, and then eventually, people who need to know will find out.

Hopefully, the people in charge. Now, I use that word very loosely; the people who are feigning leadership at the top right are going to annoy the wrong people at some point. Bernie Madoff is a great example. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos is another example. There are examples throughout history of these hucksters and it happens fast. And this is not different because of the scale. The recovery will take decades.

Things can change fast. History can change quicker than you think. In January of 1989, nobody thought the Berlin Wall was going anywhere. Nobody thought the Soviet Union was going anywhere. Things can change, and they can change fast.

History, broadly, is about one decision, one veto, one loss at a time. If Beach is able to convince one alderman or one senator or assemblyman that his plan was better than another plan and maybe we get the Broadway pneumatic tube up and down Broadway, and that’s the dominant technology instead of instead of electric or steam for awhile. Or maybe the Els [elevated metros] don’t come into play.

There’s very little happening in New York at that level of veracity at this point, but congestion pricing could implode tomorrow, and we have no idea [likely not, but it could]. We could strike something underground along 2nd Avenue and the Second Avenue Subway is indefinitely delayed or doesn’t ever finish. Maybe some state rep introduces a bill to either remove or cap the BQE and Brooklyn’s or Queens’ fortunes change instantaneously.

That’s what I want in my modern leaders and thinkers is the ability to be prepared by having their hands in lots of different ideas and by being prolific in their interests with a mind at work. Beach is such an interesting character to write about because, if not the Subway, he would have found something else to invent or something to build. He just collided with all these things happening at once, which is a very interesting story.

That’s why it was such a cool era because Beach’s day was during one of these times in New York History where there was a weird optimism that any problem could be fixed with an invention. I think there’s parallels today that any problem can be fixed with an app or artificial intelligence, that any problem can eventually be fixed by technology. Back then, though, the problems were more prosaic, right? How do we address it without having to labor over it for twenty hours? How do we move large, heavy, freight over long distances efficiently? It was an innovative time in history, and it was also a time that it freaked people out.

The changes that were occurring shockingly fast, especially after the Civil War, when the number of patents doubled in basically two years. Suddenly there are new inventions everywhere. And I think there’s a fear that people also have now about technology taking over our lives that people had one hundred and fifty years ago. For example, Edison invents the phonograph and he takes it to Alfred Beach to demonstrate it. But just the concept that your voice would survive after you died totally freaked people out. I can hear my mother’s voice fifteen years after she’s dead? That that was just astounding to people. You can understand the trepidation people had.

What can our current leaders learn from Beach’s story? What is the takeaway for our current MTA, using the Subway “wars” between 1860 and 1960? Do you have any thoughts here?

I don’t know if you’re following what’s going on in in Philadelphia with SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, constantly going to the legislature, trying to get funding. And I see exactly what was happening in 1868, ’69, 70 in New York State and New York City, that’s happening in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia right now.

One of the problems that anyone who proposed a mass transit plan for New York City had to overcome was the fact you had to get a charter from the state legislature, right? You had to get a charter from Albany, and you had to convince folks who would never use the system that this was a project worth their support. And I think in Beach’s case, he wasn’t able to overcome that obstacle completely. He did win two charters but not by margin sufficient to overcome the veto.

Sometimes that we must act in the best interests of regions and groups outside our core constituency is something that needs to be reinforced. Eventually, it came around, and American cities for a time had the most incredible rapid transit urban mass transit systems in the world. And if you see how mass transit systems are funded in other countries, you’ll see that the cost is spread much more widely than it is in the US. If Beach had succeeded, would New York City have this amazing system of pneumatic tube subways?

Electricity probably would have proven to be superior as a means of moving people. Building these fans at every station blowing down. Siemens was a genius. He figured out let’s just run the current through a rail. Talk about like, “Whoa, that’s crazy, man. How could we get the electricity to the motor?” That would have happened, but Beach had a role in that. Beach proved you could build a tunnel under Broadway, and it wouldn’t sink. The buildings wouldn’t collapse. A.T. Stewart’s dear Marble Palace wouldn’t fall into the gutter. He proved it was feasible. He proved it was doable.

It’s very unlikely that any modern Beach would be able to do any of what Afred did in private or in secret, especially in our surveillance state. But again, it’s the technology of its time and place. It’s more digital infrastructure that’s happening right in private and in secret now, which makes it a lot harder to see.

Any last thoughts here?

Yeah. Beach really deserves to be remembered. Not even so much for the tunnel as for his contributions to American inventors. For the fifty years that he was editor of Scientific American and the support he gave inventors, large and small, he’s best known for the work he did, of course, with Edison and, Morse and Bell but he would talk to anybody who walked into his office wanted advice.

The most amazing statistic of all is that of all the millions of patents that have been granted in the US. The Beach firm, which went out of business in 1948, still accounts for 1.6% of all patents, ever. A third of all patents in the second half of the nineteenth century went through Alfred Beach’s patent agency. The book is also my campaign to get Beach into the Inventors Hall of Fame.

That’s a good campaign. Your book makes a good case for it. The last page of your book talks about how he’s nominally remembered now for his contributions to education and for educating freed slaves during Reconstruction.

It’s one of the differences between the great industrialists and the robber barons of the nineteenth century. A lot of them, whether they felt compelled or coerced, did give a lot of their money away. And I think it would be nice to see a little bit more charitable giving from some of the multibillionaires today.

It was certainly cultural. There was this idea of shame built into polite society back then, and while they may not have felt it in business, they felt it everywhere else. It would be great to have the modern barons give back. It’s amazing to me that the Met in New York is ever scrounging for money, ever. It’s very confusing to me that we live in a city of billionaires and millionaires, and the biggest cultural institutions are still begging for money and not opening up the museum as a real central square.

Carnegie shot all the strikers, but he did give us a lot of good libraries, right?

Hold your nose and hope for the best.

That should be our national motto.

NEXT Up: Where We Are

Last week (or so), I wrote about reassessing what a successful Mamdanistration could look like. My takeaway was (and is) to frame success differently, to understand that with this historic win, there is an opportunity to yank the trajectory of New York City from the jaws of capital. Somewhat. The agenda will likely stay focused on affordability for as long as it’s possible. Barring a force majeure, this could be four plus four more years of investment in the working-class outcomes of all New Yorkers and the people who want to call it home. The agenda is ambitious, but as I’d mentioned, even if the dedicated people who’ll fight for it for the foreseeable future can only get some of this agenda done, we’ll hopefully have achieved two meaningful structural goals:

We’ll have entwined and intertwined policy, block-level politics, and participatory democracy into knots that capital interests will have to conspicuously spend to untie.

This piece is challenging. It requires base-building and remaking City Hall to de-silo the built environment both horizontally (Chief Public Realm Officer to start; smashing Land Use and Transportation together to finish) and vertically (Community Board advisory, endowing Borough Presidents with more decision-making, forcing City Councilors to work together and more closely with City Hall and with local block associations)1.

We’ll have made meaningful change—if not total reform—in the driving down the everyday cost of living and envisioning a future in New York for lifelong residents and hopeful ones.

If this seems easy, then well, you’re right. It is easy…to envision. Mayor-elect Mamdani ran on this and sold it to people who have been forgotten and forlorn. Let’s start with where we were and are.

And after this, I’ll dive into specific policy areas.

…et al, Bloomberg, De Blasio, Adams, Mamdani

Mayor Mamdani will be the 111th Mayor of New York and will be compelled to craft an agenda that maintains the basic infrastructure of running New York and pushes his affordability programs. I would be remiss here to not discuss the platforms of Mamdani’s immediate predecessors.2,3

Michael Bloomberg (2002, $40 billion → 2013, $60 billion):

“Mainly a Success”: Stop-and-frisk-and-growth over 12 years, 12 years ago. What if you took Croesus and made him in charge of rebuilding New York post-9/11? Like what if you, the one person, could pay for the whole of a year’s budget yourself? Who are you accountable to?

It’s amazing that we forget that you could openly smoke cigarettes in restaurants until 2002.4 Mayor Bloomberg also brought the City’s schools into city government—from an independent board—and implemented a data-driven approach to testing….and the establishment of a charter school regime and a spillover of stop-and-frisk into the classroom. Mayor Bloomberg also led a zoning revolution (though, sadly, not abolition) and sprung major development. It’s taking too long. Zohran can trace the rezoning from Mayor Bloomberg and amplify it just so loudly.

Verdict: The lesson here is that while technocracy leads to agnostically optimized solutions, data-driven investing leaves open wide blind spots. Stop-and-frisk is the best and most visible example of this: data say that “resources” should be “deployed” to “communities” that have had, historically, “crime.” The theory is that in these neighborhoods, preemptive policing can “reduce” “crime”—proving the claim that crime needs to be reduced. The problem, the big fu*kin problem, is that communities of color disproportionately are tagged and targeted and scapegoated. So, at the expense of tenuous trust5 from concentric circles of communities that share really one trait—skin color—the city gets to say it’s tackling crime. It’s racist, it’s ineffective, and it paints people as a manifestation of statistics. Just in case you’re curious where I stand.

Anyway: the lesson is that Zohran can and should de-silo his executive branch and use data-driven policymaking where it intersects with equitable action. People first.

Bill de Blasio (2014, $72 billion → 2021, $100 billion!):

“A Tale of Two Cities”: A smorgasbord of reform and political ineptitude. Ended Bloomberg’s “stop-and-frisk” program, expanded universal Pre-K, implemented Thrive NYC to help New Yorkers manage the mental health challenges that have come out of left, center and right field, and urged City Council to lead on environmental stewardship by passing a Green New Deal. Mayor de Blasio saw the city as a place for those who “have” and those who…don’t—referencing Dickens’ book of the same name. While a vibrant image, income inequality, and wealth disparity continue to plague the City’s checkerboard development, it’s easy to trace a path to Zohran from this kernel.

Verdict: This man is the definition of a broken clock being correct twice a day, except for this guy. The man is truly ambitious and progressive New York stalled behind the inability to broker power and somehow managing to piss everyone off, all while kneecapping his own staff with the Ankh of Indecision that he continues to gesticulate. De Blasio will be remembered more for his what-ifs than for his what-dids; he’s a good man who did some silly things. No Federal indictments, though some truly incomprehensible runs for higher office.

Zohran will be good to lean on the good parts of de Blasio’s progressivism, which includes a tack toward the political center, where helpful. He could certainly avoid getting into a nasty fight with the Police/Sergeants’ Benevolent Association right away and ride that tide all the way to…

Eric Adams (2022, $105 billion → 2025, $116 billion):

“Getting Stuff Done”: Well, he certainly did. We’ve got “City of Yes” to reform zoning and development, and just simply build more housing, the slow, but effective? start of trash containerization, extension of universal 3K, crime? reduction?. He also got indicted in Federal Court and had a swirl of controversy that followed him and will likely follow him once he leaves office on December 31, 2025—

Verdict: Lots to build on here, including inculcating a City of Yes attitude for the affordability agenda in new City staff and advisors. Overall, Eric Adams was a pretty mediocre Mayor who did a bunch of good things, often outweighed by public missteps for 4 years. He’ll be remembered fondly for his good works and likely derided forever because of the many questionable decisions and missed opportunities.

The $120+ billion NYC Budget

The rubber meets the slow road at spending priorities, which are explored and executed through The Budget.6 Let’s start here:

There is a number—a very large number7—that level-sets where the revenue comes from and where and how the city spends it. Simple? Nope.

Beyond the obvious pitfalls that a budget does not on its face equal a bill of sale and it’s not like the revenue sources are stable and the expenses totally accounted for on July 1, which is why it’s not called The Invoice/Receipt. There are fluctuations, uncollected dollars, and changing needs that don’t follow a Gregorian calendar or fiscal8 year. There’s bloat and waste and there’s a balance among needs with the understanding that all else equal $1 can pay for $1 worth of stuff. It is also essential to understand that the Financial Emergency Act of 1975 legally requires NYC to balance its budget.9

Here are two graphs that explain the current budget:

Spending

A few important points about the above graph from the Comptroller’s office. The reason it took me so long to write this is that this chart sucks.

• These numbers do add to $116 billion—there’s a whole bunch of “other” wrapped up inside these categories that were organized for space. But the office making these choices says something, and be careful about how you read the data. “Parks, Recreation, and Cultural” are spend buckets but not a single department.

• It’s sad how little — less than .5% of the total budget— libararies get each year.

• What are “social services?” What’s “housing?”10

Revenue

A few points about this pie chart of revenue sources.11

• Over 70% of our revenue comes from tax dollars. This feels relatively healthy—not too reliant on the kindness of our federal overlords (both State and Federal)—but it’s also a relatively obvious cause for concern and susceptible to shocks…

• …but not as much as that pesky Federal Categorical Grants categories, which our President12 may withhold, legally or not, should he rub the brain cells together in a certain way on a certain day.

• We should be ready for austerity and a decrease in the amount of money we have to spend starting in July 2026—on operations and maintenance expenses.13

I want to take a look at a few pieces of the expenses portion as examples of what the City prioritizes, knowing that there’s an inherent tradeoff among incompatible policies and that the process of negotiating these tradeoffs reflect our collective values and ability to compromise. There will be winners and losers. I’m hopeful a Mamdanistration is at least transparent about the choices it makes and why it shifts policies and priorities without sacrificing the goal of affordability.

He’s going to piss people off. And that’s okay.

Okay, so real talk here. One of the reasons it is so hard to track $115.91 billion14 is the many ways we can divide spending for analysis.15 It’s easy to look at the spend and the ongoing project’s they’re supposed to pay for—including the ongoing livelihoods of several dozen thousand people who dedicate their lives to the gnawing promise of a better built environment. It’s easy to simplify the revenues to their component cash injections and cash balances, and outstanding debts, and the accompanying debt service.

Mayor Mamdani has to keep the lights on and maybe screw the bulbs in a little tighter, while also figuring out how to wriggle new spending into his policy provisions. Ironically, in order to achieve an affordable New York for everyday New Yorkers, the administration is going to have to spend more. In political parlance, invest. And he wants to do it with rich people’s money, which historically has not been popular with rich people. The rest of us—the everyday New Yorkers looking to make dinner for our families and maybe experience a little joy with the premiums we pay to live here—the rest of us want this type of reshuffle.

I implore the incoming Mayor to do a few things first and foremost:

1. Publicly inventory as best as possible where the money is coming from and where it’s going. Work closely with allies and bring opponents into the fold with smart compromise. Cut out bad actors decisively, starting with loyalist political appointees from previous administrations.

2. Convene ongoing working groups to discuss priorities below the departmental level. Coalesce, as best as possible, around the principles that will drive the FY27 budget. Understand which horses are tradeable and which ones are landmines. The transition committees should be permanent, overly transparent, and revolvable.

3. Use current spending and tax powers to shuffle inputs and outputs—and tell us about it. Do not lose the power of public perception because of any fear of reprisal. Remember that you ran on the party line “Big Mad” and challenge opponents head-on, and that you’re simply a better organizer than naysayers and sycophants, and capitalists. Remember where the landmines are and set your own. We must fight.

4. Do the easy stuff16 slowly and pick up the medium stuff17 all at once. Flood the zone with benevolent action. Finish the promises defined in LL195 from 2019 to build the bus lanes and bike lanes, and do a rethink of what you want the next streets plans should look like. Direct your staff to make it happen, and use the power of the executive to get it done; devolve decision-making to the borough presidents as needed to make sure the shitstool of leadpipe isn’t too clogged.

5. Free buses?

For next time.