10 Careers For Aspiring City Planners

I’m a professional transportation planner, and have been for nearly 15 years, but these generally apply to most planning pathways.1 I’ll note where I don’t know enough and had to reach out to a friend, and if there’s anything particular about the pathway. I’ll also muse on a potential fun pathway from one pathway to another. I think that’s fun. Let me know what you think below.

1. Traditional Public Sector Planner

This one will look familiar to lots of my colleagues. You can start, continue, or end your career in public service. This can manifest in many different roles, both individual contributor and management, and can exist at all levels of government: from hyperlocal (block-level) to Federal. This type of role is ubiquitous and often essential to swan-dive into and/or out of at various points during a life: here, you’re part of the client team and see projects through, unlike some of the other paths below, whose roles often interact tangentially with projects or plans.

A pathway here could include seeking professional certification as a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) or other organization (TDM from the Association of Commuter Transit, Professional Planner for New Jersey planners, etc.).

Potential pathway: School (undergrad or graduate) → “Planner I” → “Planner II” → Consulting → Director / Leadership (either in consulting or public sector work)

2. Civil or Traffic Engineer…or Literally Driving Trains or Buses

Traditionally, a transportation “engineer” was an operator. Think a conductor on an olde-timey train. This job certainly still exists, and it’s a good union job, whether driving a train or a bus, or doing support work for either or both at a transit agency. A word to the wise here: even if you decide to go the other route, designing our systems, it’s good practice to seek out operators and drivers to understand their perspective and to make friends with people from different backgrounds. Don’t ever be a snob. You’re not better than anyone because you make more money or have more time in school. In fact, because these jobs are union, you can make a great living as a skilled and tenured operator.

A pathway here likely includes studying for and passing the Professional Engineer exams that allow you to “stamp” drawings that are used for construction. These take time and require both experience and judgement that only come with time. It’s not a short path.

Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Public Sector Designer / Private Sector Designer → Engineer-in-Training (EIT) → Professional Engineer → Leadership / Contribution Mastery

Potential pathway: School → Good Union Job → Leadership → Good Union Job → Union Leadership?

3. Policy Analyst or Government Affairs

The next pathway is less design or traditional planning, but more helping to write and influence the rules that make planning and engineering work. This pathway often runs parallel to traditional “planning,” with many policy-oriented folks earning public administration degrees instead of, or alongside, urban studies papers. Jobs here are also public or private: many offices inside the Executive Branch of many mayors’ (or equivalent) or governors’ offices hire policy hands to write or edit governing documents. Alternatively, many private firms exist to support this development; these particular shops leverage resources so the private sector can do more. These shops also work, in certain circumstances, to help advocates or think tanks develop solutions to problems they have developed on their own or with partners. Just a word to the wise: know what it is you’re getting yourself into politically.

Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Executive Branch (public sector) OR Policy Shop/Think Tank (prviate/nonprofit) → Elected Official or Staffer (legislative branch) → Leadership (public/private/non-profit)

4. Elected Official or Staffer

This one is narrower by nature. There are fewer elected officials than there are roles supporting them, and running for and holding office is a completely insane skill set that if you’re interested in, you can just…do. We need more “urbanists”2 and planners and engineers in elected office with power to make better decisions about spending and prioritization for built environment solutions. So if this appeals to you, it’s a great opportunity to think about building relationships early and learning as much as you can about your place. This path does require tenure or at least immunity from carpetbagging allegations.

Potential pathway: Literally anything → Get Elected

You can also work with electeds. This is similar to government affairs, but you work for the legislative branch, so your daily tools will be oriented toward lobbyists. The main difference is the essence of the job: working for the executive (DOT, Planning, Environmental, Housing, Finance, etc.) means working to implement or administer, while working for the legislative branch means you’re interested in changing the rules that we all (supposedly play by).

Potential pathway: School → Work a little to get some experience → Volunteer on a campaign (likely door-knocking at first, unless you already have some experience here; it’s relatively easy to move up with some dedication) → If your candidate wins, there may be a job for you at the end of the line.

5. Advocate, Activist, Organizer

Who are these people that attempt to influence lawmakers or lawdoers? Advocates, activists, and organizers. They all do so in slightly different ways:

• Advocates work for organizations that fight for more general theories of change. They gather constituents around specific ideas and prove that there’s power in good ideas and big numbers. They’ll fight for causes like safe streets, affordable housing, better schools, safer environments, and so on. If there’s an injustice somewhere that donor(s) are willing to fund, there’s likely a nonprofit advocacy organization ready to go fight for it. These guys are the white hats and as close to pure good-doing as you can do in our field.3

Potential pathway: School (or not?) → Some level of domain expertise OR Deep nnthusiasm and a track record that demonstrates willingness to learn → Volunteer or Apply for entry-level jobs → Work experience → Public sector planner or policy analyst OR Staffer OR Elected.

• Activists are the strong version of advocates. They’re often more radical and more public-facing and focus more narrowly on a particular project they do or don’t like and are willing to get arrested for the cause. (Sometimes. I do NOT advocate or suggest that you get arrested or do any crimes or crime-adjacent things.) Activists play a particular role in the stakeholder power map, and even if you don’t feel passionately about one particular topic enough to lay your reputation at a minimum out, you should continue to be aware that these people exist and will either be your greatest help or your biggest pain in the ass.

Potential pathway: REDACTED.

• Closely related to the above jobs are organizers. These folks are the people-oriented staff inside organizations. They could work at any of the above jobs. Sometimes these workers are called community engagement specialists and have a particular set of skills geared toward the presentation of information and the receipt of related feedback. This process will make a project better if done right and will make a project worse if done wrong. The best engagement specialists/organizers are people with a deep empathy, domain expertise, and endless patience.

Potential pathway: School → Life → Demonstrating extreme levels of patience → Flowing in and out of different career pathways depending on the need to organize and fix misinformation.

6. Academic / Researcher

The purest career path on this list. You go to school, then you go to school some more, then you keep going to school, then you take a few tests, and then you go to school more, but this time there’s school to take the place of school. The challenge with the academic route is that it’s not easier than a non-academic path. Finding the program that fits your needs and style also has the right staff to support you and funding to help make you not die of scurvy. Then you have to find a job, which is extremely niche and scarce. You have to at least tolerate teaching, and you are often forced to publish to earn tenure. But once you get tenure, you can sort of …do whatever. As long as the program still exists and the world still needs academics to baseline practical application, these jobs will continue to exist. Godspeed.

Potential pathway: School → School → School → School → Advisory? → School → Retirement.

7. Transit / AV Tech Development or Sales

This is a relatively new field: there’s tech in planning, too. These companies often provide support to the public sector or compete directly if the public sector isn’t providing what the market has demanded.4 There’s certainly room for tech in planning. I see it as multiplying the impact of existing resources and keeping people who otherwise would go do tech elsewhere tethered to fighting for accessible streets and Good transit. There are lots of roles within these companies that align with the above career paths, but there’s also something here that’s different: sales. In public sector work, “sales” is just convincing the elected officials to spend OUR money on projects. In the private sector, especially in the tech world, sales is convincing elected officials to spend YOUR money on projects.

Potential pathway: School → Tech → Go work at the public agency you serviced while at tech → Consulting / Back to tech.

8. Traditional / Management Consultant

This is the place where you can make the most money if you want to work a lot of billable hours. I currently do this kind of work, and I enjoy it because I like the creative pursuit of projects and diversity of clients. I enjoy being able to get in and out of teams to work on pieces of a larger development. I like that I can be relatively mode-agnostic and work on pedestrian/bike projects, transit projects, road projects, etc. This works for my entrepreneurial brain and motivations. I like that I can work internationally and domestically and learn every day from people who’ve done this work for decades. I recommend every planner take a stop at a consulting firm at some point, if for nothing else than to earn perspective, which is always helpful.

Potential pathway: School → Grad School → Entry-level public sector or consulting → The other one → Leadership, hopefully.

9. Professional Critic or Content Creator

This is a relatively new role, and it grew with the rise in social media. It’s a new way to communicate and, honestly, doesn’t take any credentials at all, and can bring ideas to new audiences often out of reach from traditional media outlets. These people write for essay outlets and can support themselves through multiple projects, and the most successful ones can fully support themselves through the social media environments. That number is vanishingly small, and often these creators make little to no income from content creation alone, so this path, while requiring the least up-front investment, also has the lowest ceiling for success. If you do decide to create content for a living, you might want to find a secondary or tertiary source while you do this.

Potential pathway: A pen, a pad, a phone, a dream, a secondary job → ??? → Profit

10. Land or Property Developer

This last one is less transportation-related but still tangential: in a sane world, dense transit accompanies dense housing and mixed-use development. So you can become a property or real estate developer to work on TOD (Transit-Oriented Development) or otherwise new housing that we desperately need—everywhere. If you’re just starting your journey and transportation isn’t for you, then I really do suggest you learn Excel and surveying and get to building. You can work in non-profit development or for-profit development (we need all housing) and can work on building affordable housing, missing middle housing, or luxury development (I repeat, we need all housing for reasons you learn in grad school).

Potential profit: School → Grad school → Public sector planner / Development firm / Urban Designer → Developer.

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Earlier this week, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the City will fix and extend the life of the BQE Central spur, perpetuating one of the city’s biggest planning disasters, for additional decades. This idea is both the capstone and the epitome of America’s failure to think beyond the single-occupancy vehicle, and if executed as promised, will mortgage our future and endanger our ability to build anything but roads again, ever.

I hate to be so exasperated about this, but this video and the accompanying comments and commentary have been the exact mix of EI content: jubilant and counter-intuitive.

Bing.

Bong.

Tremendous.

There’s very little here that demonstrates an inkling of a critical understanding from our mainstream outlets and puttering from our urbanism ones. Hell Gate, however, met the moment nicely. I’ll always shout out this publication when possible.

This is the correct take. If we rebuild the Central Spur to last another 50 years, we will have carbrained ourselves into “dreaming small,” and we’ll doom ourselves to repeat Moses’ mistakes forever. I know it seems like Mamdani’s team is positioning itself as if “we can just do stuff” is the answer all the time. We’ll have overplayed our hand and right into Moses’.

But, Sam, You Want The BQE to Collapse?

Certainly not, but if we assume the only solution to “problem” is rebuild and rebolster, then naturally the “preferred” option will emerge. This has historically been one dictated by the trades (roadbuilders, operators’ unions, etc.) or one that min-maxes effort; the path of least resistance.

No, of course I don’t wish for the BQE to collapse. I’m not one of these Emanuelian accelerationists1 heatseeking collapse to raise progress from the ashes. I am well aware of the practical limitations of planning and engineering wisdom versus reality and sentiment. I am trained in normative anchoring techniques and the counter-intuitiveness of most infrastructure development. But perpetuating the property, psychological, physical, environmental, and economic damage the BQE has done to Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in exchange for diminishing thru-mobility and car addiction in the densest city in the US is the planning equivalent of sending an infant to the gallows. The Belt becomes the Noose.

We must make sure the highway does not collapse; it’s been threatening for decades—the 50-year useful life has low-tanked us for the last twenty. Anything more than a bare minimum fix plus a vision that anathematically rejects the Moses vision of New York is, and is quite literally, highway robbery.

Instead, we must imagine a future that dismantles this infected scar and replaces it with a vision for mobility and access that doesn’t burden our children and grandchildren with a 100-year mortgage. There’s a reason banks don’t offer them.

But, Sam, What Can We Do? FAQs to answer all your questions.

I’ve also been taught (and told for Exasperated Infrastructures) that offering a problem without a solution is petulant and makes me a pain in everyone’s ass instead of indefinitely hireable and enjoyable to be around. So I’m going to structure this as FAQs that you’re surely asking yourself about my screed.

What problem are we trying to solve?

This is the quintessential question we must reason before passing qualitative and quantitative judgment on whether any alternative is the best2 path forward. What actual problem are we trying to solve? This question is the entire basis for the thesis of this very newsletter/blog/rantwheel. For example: if the problem we’re trying to solve is, “The cantilever is going to collapse imminently,” that generates one set of potential scenarios at different cost levels and timelines that focuses on repair. There’s another problem that reads closer to, “There is not enough capacity to handle future demand,” wagging the dog. There’s also another problem that defines the problem more broadly, “The BQE is loud, noisy, dangerous, and a parking lot,” so what is to be done?

Nearly endless iterations of problem design that planners and elected officials often skip when they want a politically neutral solution or a PR headline or the path of least resistance, but we can also ask ourselves what else is there if we abandon notions of “too hard” or “we can’t?” But without a problem definition, we’re going to be faffing about for the next 50 years chasing Moses’ ghost. Is that what we want? Really?

What are the alternatives for a “solution?”

It would seem that the problem Mayor Mamdani has landed on is somewhere between “The cantilevered highway is imminently going to collapse” and “we should prepare the city-owned section of the BQE for a much larger rehabilitation project,” which I think is a mistake. But given this problem ID, we can whittle the potential alternatives down. Let’s go through one by one. This section will be more of a comprehensive index than a full alternatives analysis.

• There’s always a zeroth alternative: we could do nothing out of the ordinary. A null hypothesis is an essential part of the scientific method and needs to be included in any alternatives analysis. Note that business as usual is not the same as stopping activity on the BQE. This has been the status quo, and there is still a high likelihood that it continues.

• The basic repair alternative: continue with smaller, but coordinated fixes with no future plan to renovate bigly. This alternative would be cheaper, but likely inefficient. It would keep the promenade open and continue normal operations, but one wrong order of operation and the project could fail. How do you price this risk into a maintenance plan? Costs would creep, and we’d be no better off.

• The basic repair alternative with a plan to rebuild: this seems to be the administration’s preferred alternative. This would give the cantilever a facelift and build a new temporary?3 highway to divert traffic away from the triple cantilever…while it’s rebuilt as is to last indeterminately indefinitely?

• The tunnel option: this would rip out or repurpose the cantilevered elements as a public space and bury the BQE section—meeting the trenched section that runs through the Columbia Waterfront District and Cobble Hill with a descent rather than an ascent. Think about how much the 2nd Ave Subway tunnel is going to end up costing. Do we want to do this for a tunnel that moves even fewer people per $million per hour?

• The blue highway diversion: This involves a shift in supply to coerce the truck traffic off the BQE and onto our waterways for inter- and intracity goods movement. Irrespective of how we feel about the problem definition and how much we’ve moved digitally, we can’t (yet) eat data, so we need to figure out how to move goods differently anyway. Trucks cause a disproportionate amount of wear and tear on the roadbed and supporting infrastructure, so this would dovetail nicely with a basic repair alternative.

• Rip the whole thing out and replace it with a hybrid boulevard and transit concept: If you don’t think the blue highway alternative is radical enough, why not explore the option that sounds nuts when first presented, but makes more and more rational sense the more you think about it. My friends at:

OFF-RAMP

have some more to say about this.

Note that none of the options here (except OFF-RAMP) consider the impact on the entire length of I-278 (BQE’s full Government) or what to do with this stretch of infrastructure that, too, will need major upgrades sooner than officials would like. And since we don’t really have a functioning high-capacity transit system4 that can handle this level of passenger influx5 in the event of minor or major system collapse, I continue to be terrified and hold my breath. At least the Mayor is doing something—but is the wrong something better than nothing?

How much will this cost? Against what benefit?

A lot of money, but money is fake, so who cares.6 That being said, we (New York City)7 will have to find the money to do this work. I saw an Instagram reel8 claiming this project will cost about $1 million per …foot, or around $4 billion all in.9 Add in the risk multiplier (delays are really expensive), and you’re looking closer to $5 or 6 billion. Now that number seems like a lot, and it is a lot, and that’s a totally different problem. But for the sake of argument here, let’s assume these costs to be true and a reasonable estimate. How do we know if this is a good deal? Two ways: measure the numbers against other, similar projects, and then against itself.

The first is benchmarking, which is an extremely important tool in planning, generally. This process is akin to comparison shopping, and it’s limited by market conditions, which may fluctuate, reflect a noncompetitive scheme, or otherwise not be calibrated correctly. But it’s always a worthwhile exercise to ground truth assumptions and, then, importantly, interrogate them to death. For this project, I’ll compare the cantilever renovation to both the Embarcadero Freeway removal in San Francisco in the late 1980s and the Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Project in Seattle. I’ll note a few differences and try to normalize as best as I can: instead of judging the full extent of the project, I’ll seek metrics that judge based on a per mile or per traveler or per-dollar basis. I’ll look to compare percentages—how much of the full extent of the project is this portion? Et cetera.

The next is benefit-cost analysis, which is itself a normalization tool. Sometimes economists will shorthand this as CBA or BCA, but the gist is twofold: the scale of the project is not relevant here. We seek to do an honest accounting using traditional time-value-of-money rules: a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, and we want to know the cost of a project today.10 We also want to understand the project benefits: why spend at all? What are the quantified benefits of a project—in other words, what is its expected economic return? In infrastructure finance, we often measure success based on an increase in ridership or shipping fees, a decrease in time lost to delay, and, in saner times, the cost of carbon. We sum these two values: discounted costs and benefits, and compare them in a ratio. Any fraction greater than 1 is considered a worthwhile investment; any project less than 1 will have to prove its mettle in other ways (like its status as a collapsing cantilevered section of a major thoroughfare). Where BCAs get super fun is the supernormalization: we can then compare BCAs against one another or against a particular standard for projects, say 2.0, and prioritize them. We can even do a further superdupernormalization and build a full business case to justify a project’s existence.11 QED.

These two metrics together might tell us whether this project is worth its investment and to calm rightly affronted taxpayers’ fear that, yet again, we’ve Dug Big and flushed real dollars in pursuit of mediocrity.

“We finished this project on time,” is not an exclamation to be proud of, unless the project was worthy of our time, values, and money. It’s the standard we’ve set and still manage to come up short. Where is excellence?

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What about the current traffic? Where will the trucks and cars go?

This is the biggest question I’ve gotten in my extensive and contentious text threads this week. Some estimates claim that peak BQE moves 130,000 motor vehicles per hour and about 10% of those are big-wheelbase trucks, you know, tractor-trailers. If we do decide to rip the BQE up and replace it, or even if we do this Moses-esque rebuild, the trips have to be distributed somewhere. We can do a trust me bro intuition test: residents will anchor in this idea that each and every one of these cars will be redistributed across the sleepy neighborhoods the BQE was supposed to bypass. This is rightly worrisome if it were remotely true (and it might be, bear with me).

But we also expect that car and truck drivers (each) behave rationally and that with new mobility and accessibility options, trips re-sort themselves. Traditional traffic planning rationalizes this process into a four-step funnel, which, once I paste it below, should make sense if you haven’t seen it before. From TransitWiki, with my comments in italics:

Trip Generation

Trip generation determines the frequency of origins or destinations of trips in each zone by trip purpose, as a function of land use, household demographics, and other socioeconomic factors.

How do we figure out the trip gen? It’s a relatively straightforward process. There’s a manual or a local guide that will have a bunch of normalized tables classifying detailed land use type12 with some number that can be compounded based on population. Remember, this is all for the sake of a traffic model so planners can understand impact. ALSO remember: this is a major tool for traffic engineers to go/no-go on interventions. When you’re taught to believe your Bible as infallible, it’s hard to un-believe it.13

Fun fact: sometimes we call origins and destinations instead generators and attractors.

Trip Distribution

Trip distribution matches origins with destinations, often using a gravity model: a calculation that takes into account the relative activity at the origin and destination as well as the travel cost to go between them.

Makes sense for Step 2: once we know where trips are coming from and where they’re attracted to, draw lines between them, varying thickness based on volume and discounting them based on “cost,” which in this case is dollars (money), time (distance), and/or impedance (pain in the ass, like transit frequency or roadway construction or how much airports still suck). Most humans make quick decisions on where they’re going based on these factors and have built heuristics for repeat trips. Think how you know how to move from home to work and your intuition tells you that Trip A is quicker but more money and Trip B is more pleasant, but longer and cheaper.

This is the basics of trip distribution. We often describe them in pairs, aka “O-D Pairs,” for short. And can help us make sense of movement patterns.

Mode Choice

Mode choice computes the proportion of trips between each origin and destination that use a particular transportation mode. (This modal model may be of the logit form, developed by Nobel Prize winner Daniel McFadden.)

Mode choice is a fun one. It always takes into account reality: no assigning trips to “transit” if transit doesn’t exist—but we can model a “what-if” there was transit and try to understand a change in patterns based on, you guessed it, trip generation and trip distribution. In here also lie the mathematical modeling parameters for induced demand: “If you build it, they will come,” of sorts.

We often use “logit” regression modeling because mode choice is discrete and not continuous. In English: you can only be on a single mode at a time, and how you consume it changes based on distinct values. You can’t take half a trip the way you might consume half a bagel, and you can’t be on three-quarters of a bus depending on your desire to take a trip. Either/Or.14

It’s called a logit model because it uses binary logarithmic odds—the hypothesis is organized around “yes, I take transit (1)” or “no, I take another mode (0)” and the curve measures the probability that each mode (taking transit, walking, driving, biking) might occur and plots them on a scale between 0% and 100%…and not how much the act of taking a trip at all might change based on a series of other inputs (what you would use ordinary least squares regression for). Statistics lesson inception.

I hope this makes sense. Comment below if it doesn’t.

Route Assignment

Route assignment allocates trips between an origin and destination by a particular mode to a route. Often (for highway route assignment), Wardrop’s principle of user equilibrium is applied (equivalent to a Nash equilibrium15), wherein each driver (or group) chooses the shortest (travel time) path, subject to every other driver doing the same. The difficulty is that travel times are a function of demand, while demand is a function of travel time, the so-called bi-level problem. Another approach is to use the Stackelberg competition model, where users (”followers”) respond to the actions of a “leader”, in this case, for example, a traffic manager. This leader anticipates the response of the followers.

We know where people (or goods) are coming from, we know where they’re going, we know how many are going where, and how they might get there, but how will individuals behave based on this logic? That’s what route assignment is aiming to figure out.

This problem is counterintuitive and ultimately impossible to optimize in practice. Why? Because you can design a network for system optimization OR individual optimism. Think about your journeys. If you’re seeking to travel from point A to point B and the options are a wide (fast) highway or a series of narrower (slower) roads, what will you choose? Most individuals would choose the wide highway, optimizing their own individual utility, and they would be correct to do so if no other individuals also chose this option.

Remember impedance? Traffic is a system cost, and every additional system user adds exponentially to the TOTAL cost, even if each individual’s additional cost grows slowly. At some point the cost outweighs the benefit: the highway becomes a parking lot. The four-step model might suggest expanding capacity to meet the demand, but guess what happens?

Sam, what does this have to do with the BQE?

We’re doing middle-out four-step modeling, and it’s blinding planners to alternatives. Observed demand (~130,000 daily vehicle trips) outstrips planned demand (50,000 vehicle trips) that the BQE was designed to move—Moses cheers—and without knowing modern trip generation and trip distribution patterns, the bi-level problem rears its ugly head. If we start with the assumption that 130,000 trips must continue along this corridor in light of a new BQE vision, we must get the same outcomes. Where will the trips go if we rip out the BQE? They must clog local streets and ruin the idyllic Brooklyn Heights Experience—and everyone else’s, too.

Assumptiones delendae sunt.16

Given the information that the BQE will be torn out and replaced with a rapid transit boulevard, we can rethink trips through the four-step model (see above, which you just finished reading) and imagine a different future.

Trip Generation: This is a systemwide challenge and depends on how we define our system, and without more information about new housing and commercial (I hope) development along the defined corridor, the numbers may vary. We might assume the same scale: somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000 daily trips along the corridor on average. Where they’re coming from will follow similar trip gen patterns, but maybe…more.

Trip Distribution: Where people are going is changing from how the BQE was designed. Home-to-work trips, often shorthanded as HBW, home-to-other trips (HBO), and NHB (not home-based) trips are changing. Plus, with work-from-home options leveling out, we simply can’t assume that the same number of people are moving from the same places at the same rates and going to the same destinations as current models might estimate. NB: The census does a terrible job at reflecting non-work-based trips, household travel surveys are few and far between (they’re expensive), and we’re left with best guesses and perhaps now with powerful AI modeling, more accurate estimates about how people move to flesh out an agent-based model that treats each traveler as an autonomous cog in a system rather than part of a trend. Jury’s still out on this as “better” than traditional planning, but it may help the case here.

Mode Choice: With the addition of new transit options (IBX, Queenslink, BQE-replacement, plus reliability upgrades), a connected Brooklyn Greenway, the Bergen and Dean bike boulevards, and ubiquitous bike and ped infrastructure providing more options than ever—and they’ll keep growing—we’ll see a wider distribution of trips on different modes, further reducing demand for a double BQE (again, do we really think the city is going to tear out the new BQE diversion once it’s gone up? Maybe?) bypass.

Route Assignment: Given a future with a similar demand for travel across the boroughs, a more diffuse trip distribution times a broader mode choice, we have to think the need for a rebuilt 6-lane highway is not worth the investment and will mortgage us for very little benefit.

There will still be demand for a connection by car across Brooklyn and Queens. I am exasperated but not an idiot, and people will still drive on the roads we’ve already built to some extent, but we have the option to think more completely about a multi-modal system that assigns routes based on assumptions we no longer have to live by.

But, Sam, you still didn’t answer the question. Where will the cars and trucks go?

If Robert Moses figured a way to envision the BQE into existence, we, with the experience of hindsight, can figure out how to reroute traffic either out of their cars or out of the system entirely to make New York more resilient and sustainable as a place to want to be and move through and to.

The question above continues to be the question that will plague this post forever. If we can’t figure it out, then we are simply doomed to traffic and delay indefinitely. I know this is a vague answer and doesn’t solve the very real problem of overreliance on car travel and goods delivery. But assuming that they have to go somewhere is not thinking big enough.

Right now, certain trips, like a point-to-point Brooklyn-to-Upstate or even intraborough travel patterns, are easier by car, and the current BQE provides a mobility solution, but that’s a problem we know about and can define: “It is too costly, too inconvenient, and too slow to move around New York.” Adding the problem to the problem will solve this problem? In finance, investing more in a losing venture is often referred to as a moral hazard and is closely related to the sunk-cost fallacy: get out before you go too far deep that there’s no other choice but to keep investing.

That’s what this BQE “fix” is.

What can we expect for the future of American infrastructure planning given this project as a visible bellwether?

New York City has the bi-level problem of being simultaneously too complex to model Good infrastructure investing for other American cities and a necessary example of “If we can do it in New York, it can be done anywhere.” We must take a stand to think differently, to learn from our mistakes and also from proven strategies from Western Europe and Eastern Asia, in countries that still value a car trip, but don’t worship the motor vehicle above all and wouldn’t dream of rebuilding the BQE to its current standard when any other option is available.

1

This is actually a fascinating deep dive into tracking the chain of quotation of who said this, or something like it, first? Some trace it back to…Macchiaveli?

Buy it here!

Our conversation ranged from talking about the book, its origins, and Sam and Cary’s writing process to some truly juicy tidbits about New York City history only Sam could have woven into his answers.

I’ll also link to Streetsblog’s “exclusive excerpt” to whet your reading appetite. The full book is a quick and marvelous read that jolts between bits and pieces of Sam and Cary’s personas and reasonable traffic engineering factoids. Read on.

Really, though, our goal is to make sure we don’t end up like Christine.

BUY IT HERE!

Here’s what I’m asking of you if you’ve made it this far:

Listen or watch the conversation. There are incredible takeaways in there.

BUY THE BOOK!

Hi all — short one today since I’m short on time and relatively exhausted from a long day of existing. But I have one request: I want to hear from more of you about this book and my process. Here’s the hook so you have it in front of you.

What do you think?

Email me

Edit: I know it’s day 7. I told you I’m tired.

But really, how different is a book from a very, extremely long blog post?

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Overview

“Culture eats policy for breakfast” — a reworked Peter Drucker quote from former USDOT Undersecretary and Assistant Secretary and NYCDOT Commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, hits home as we struggle at all levels of government to not only figure out what we should be spending our dollars on, but also to simply spend the money on what we know we should be spending our money on—an aging system and systems for aging.

We simply can’t get this money to where it needs to go, anywhere near fast enough to make a meaningful change. In other words, even though we, as a country, have authorized spending several trillion dollars on building and fixing our dying system, we’re lagging evermore in developing the infrastructure to compete on a global stage in so many metrics. This goes for projects we know how to build, like the Interstate Highway System and all its tributaries and highways, and ones we simply don’t—functional mass transit, safe bike and ped facilities, and the big, glaring asterisk, passenger rail, especially “high-speed” rail. What gives? We can write all the policies we want and organize the dollars in legislation and rulemaking, all we want, but we’re nowhere.

I want to tell this story and track this cultural phenomenon to its origins through interviews, project performance, and data (not boring), where possible. The goal is to geek out on the not-so-obvious and tell a part of this story that might affect some small change in some office in some planning department.

Why me

I’ve written extensively about this issue under the thesis that we don’t know how to spend a trillion dollars, and I’ve been proven mostly correct. The velocity of project approvals and the mismatch between perceived problem and MacGyvered solution mostly tell this for the last 40 years. I don’t think it’s incompetence. I don’t think it’s malice or corruption that’s causing our problems. I think the thesis is actually that we do, in fact, know how to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, but our deeply embedded cultural fixations up and down and side to side and inside federalism preclude the why we should spend any amount of money at all, as a nation, on connecting ourselves to place and person.

Broad strokes

There’s also this nagging question of how much of this problem is inside the agencies or departments themselves. Do we need a huge overhaul, or will a series of small fixes, excruciatingly implemented, do the trick?

My thesis seeks to explore the deep cultural disconnect between culture, policy, and action in the American regime of infrastructure planning. Is this problem just an American phenomenon, or do we share challenges with our friends, partners, and rivals worldwide?

This is new because I don’t think it’s been written about or reported on extensively before, and I think readers are done scratching their heads trying to figure out why we can’t build anything of real substance.

If it sounds like this idea dovetails with the “abundance” movement, it does. It builds upon the movement’s work to move past the big picture ideas and into the interesting weeds. There should be a string for everyone interested in abundance to pull on and unravel toward a body politic around abundance and the culture of infrastructure politics and planning.

Why now?

It is needed because we’re stuck and we really can’t afford to be stuck any longer, and I hope to uncover insights that help people build relationships that influence culture that doesn’t gobble up all the great policy that thousands of people are working on every day. I hope to create a strategic web of ideas that is intriguing and helps readers come to their own conclusions about how to rethink their approach to relationships across their government in their own particular context.

The overall approach will seek to order a disorganized narrative and challenge multiple counterintuitive narratives that have sought to disjointly “explain” our problems. I don’t think I’ll have all the answers, but I just hope to dig deep into the stories that can help readers come up with their own solutions. I’ll be counting on dozens to hundreds of interviews to help discover the signal within the noise.

NB: I hope to shop around an approved book proposal to multiple foundations interested in supporting this work:

• Knight Foundation

• Surdna Foundation

• Ford Foundation

• Solutions Journalism Network

• Journalism Funders Network

• MacArthur Foundation

• Open Society Foundations

Table of Contents

I expect this table of contents to change and expand or contract based on interviews and experience. But generally and specifically

1. Acknowledgements:

2. Introduction / 201: An intro to the thesis and a rundown of the book’s chapters and logic for the argument. There will also be a brief and relevant history of how we got ourselves into this position.

3. “Culture Eats Policy for Breakfast”: The thesis chapter, an explanation of the quote, where it comes from, and how I interpret it.

4. Conflict vs. Mistake: From this blog post, I think this frames one of our many political problems as simply as possible.

5. The Bad State of American Infrastructure Planning: In a few parts, where the real fights are happening. Deep insights into control over spending, federalism, technology, the meaning of access, and mobility.

6. We Don’t Know How to Spend $1 Trillion: A dive into the pitfalls of our federal, state, and local funding processes. What’s the policy doing right? What’s gummed it up after 100 years of successive spending priorities?

7. …or Do We?: Are we simply destined to continue overbuilding our highways and investing in fossil fuel infrastructure?

8. Well, actually… Is the call coming from inside the house? Have the problems ossified inside the agencies? Are staff not allowed to do their best work? Is it a state capacity problem or just a toxic culture reinforced through ineffective leadership?

9. The Myth of the Foreign Example: Should we look to our foreign allies for examples of culture and prioritization? Maybe not so fast. We’ll look here without the rose-colored glasses at examples from Western Europe, East Asia, and Latin America.

10. The Truth of the Foreign Example: Where can we find ground that fits our coming needs? What are some examples of successes that might fit our cultural narrative — or break it?

11. Artificial, Intelligence: How should we proceed when it’s becoming clear that the real future looks harder and harder to distinguish from a simulated one?

12. The Path: My policy prescription without pretense. This is the most important chapter of the book. It will be a carefully vetted set of policies and suggestions for implementation aimed at all levels of government, with the specific intent of moving us forward through a cultural evolution.

13. Index

14. Epilogue

Audience

I hope this book has a broad, popular appeal, but I will specifically be targeting planners, engineers, architects, designers, policymakers, analysts, and enthusiasts. I hope to involve academics and practitioners, and electeds. It will be important to socialize this book through:

Planning and Design Institutions:

• American Planning Association

• Institute of Traffic Engineers

• Transportation Research Board

• American Society of Civil Engineers

• Others

Think Tanks (right, left, and center):

• Brookings Institution

• Urban Institute

• Manhattan Institute

• Reason Institute

• Others

Advocacy Organizations:

• Transportation for America

• The LOT Coalition (NADO, NACO, AMPO, NLC, etc)

• AASHTO

• Others

Funding networks/foundations:

• Knight Foundation

• Rockefeller Foundation

• Surdna Foundation

• Ford Foundation

• Others

Academic Institutions:

• Planning, Policy, Engineering, and Design University Programs

• American Collegiate Schools of Planning, Inc.

• Others

Author Information

I’m a 15-year veteran of the planning profession, cutting my teeth in government, public, private, and non-profit positions. I am a known quantity in our field and have been writing prolifically about this topic in a less focused way for the last 6 years. I’m a policy expert and skilled with data and information. I also have a real estate finance degree to help me understand the time value of money.

Marketing Platform

The goal is to grow my marketing platform with an established plan to introduce people to the topic while I’m writing the book, including publishing pieces on my own site and extending this thesis to national and local blogs, opinion journals, and essay sites. I’ve got 6+ years of experience interviewing experts and have been the subject of interviews.

I have a growing following on LinkedIn and seek to expand my network across other platforms as I switch to more audio/visual content.

Competing/Comparable Titles

I hope to capture the spirit of some recent titles in the transportation space through the great work done by friends and colleagues:

• Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

• The Unfinished Metropolis by Benjamin Schneider

• City Limits by Megan Kimble

• New York’s Secret Subway by Matthew Algeo

• Sidewalk Nation by Michael Pollack

• Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman

I’ve not yet found a book that considers transportation culture with my brand of incisive commentary and style, which is why I’m ready to write it and the right person to do so.

Production Consideration

I estimate this book to take close to two years to complete to ensure that I’m capturing the stories and angles correctly. I also estimate that this book will require travel to the places I’m reporting on to experience the operations, engineering, and planning ideas, and to add local color and reporting, and on-the-ground analysis, I wouldn’t be able to get over Zoom.

The Backstory

First, some backstory. As some astute readers may know, I’ve had a relationship with Island Press—now part of Princeton University Press—for a few years. In exchange for advance copies of the excellent books they publish, I review, interview, and do my best to contextualize these books and the authors who write them. I always try to find the angle that connects the work to my readers. The media market is simply too saturated for books without massive spend behind them to gain traction on their own. I value myself as a trusted partner to IP/PUP and respect their editors’ ability to shepherd books from idea to publication.

I had no idea how to actually propose a book, how much front-loaded writing there’s going to be, and how much thinking and shaping I’m expected to do without a deal.

The more I think about it, this all makes sense to me. I’m a relatively unknown writer,1 and if we’re thinking about profitability, I can’t really demonstrate any evidence that I’m ROIable. Nevertheless, I’m going to write this damn book.

Next, the proposal.

Proposal Prom

I used Island Press’ guidelines that are open to anyone, and now that I’m writing this,2 I realize that other publishing houses also might have guidelines for pitching a book. Here’s what I found:

• Academic presses: most do, including Harvard University Press, MIT Press3, and Princeton University Press c/o Island Press. These are my most likely route, and I’ll likely try to work with Princeton, but it’s good to do a benchmark to compare and contrast what they’re looking for. I’m seeing now, for the first time, that MIT requires two chapters, while PUP does de facto based on the feedback I’ve received (tomorrow’s post).

• Bigger publishers: there are five—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan—but without agent representation, these houses ninety-nine times out of a hundred do not take unsolicited proposals. These are also ultra competitive and often require a longer publishing history than I have (none?).

• Independent presses: There are a lot of these, and they’re much smaller than even the university presses. These have a lower risk and lower reward, often requiring less upfront effort, but are often limited in their resources and editing capacity, so the proposal should be as strong as one submitted to the larger presses to stand out, I think. I’d go this route if my book had a narrower topic and/or audience, but I’m going broader here, so I don’t think this is the right path.

• Self-publish: there’s always the DIY route, which is almost always bad because it will 1000% land as a manifesto, rather than a measured, edited, and promoted galley. I already have my manifesto space. I could simply publish the book on EI over time, but wow, no thank you.

So I think I’m going to go the academic press route, but my learning today is to do a broader sweep of the available options. I’ve only looked at three of what I’m sure are dozens, so as long as I have a pulse I’m going to get this book off the ground.

You might be asking yourself, “Sam, why aren’t you simply writing the proposal instead of telling us you’re going to write the proposal?” And you would be right. Over and out.

Getting Over My Anxiety

Today’s post is all about level setting where I am, and friends, it’s looking good.

I’m fortunate enough, through my writing, to know a few publishers and editors, which is already a leg up over others in my situation: Has the urge to write a book, doesn’t know where to start. So I’ve spent the first few months of this process organizing my ideas (read: staring at a blank screen), desperate to find the right alchemy among the following:

• How do I write a relevant book that stays relevant, even if all the people who need to do a behavior change do that change and then the book is useless?

• How do I zero in on the simplest version of my thesis? Some books that I’ve loved recently I’ve enjoyed despite the complicated centrality.

• How do I make sure that this book reflects me, or who do I make sure that I pitch this book in such a manner that only I can write it and that people should listen to me?

• How do I source and report on interesting stories that are both delightful and thought-provoking?

• Am I talented enough to pull this book off so that it will have lasting presence and will make my publisher a profit?

• How do I not bore, simply bore, you and me to death talking about the culture of transportation?

If you know me in real life (some of y’all are parasocial, hey), I’m nothing if not overconfident, bordering on arrogant, and ebullient. This combination is the origin of my exasperation and gives me the crazy notion that anyone should listen to what I have to say. That’s a cultural touchpoint in and of itself.

What is “The Culture of Transportation?”

Should I structure this book as a search and solution for meaning and understanding? What is the culture of transportation? Is it a question about the roots of how and why we move? Is it an interrogation of the practice and delivery of infrastructure? Is it cross-cultural, and if so, on what level?1 Is it about how you and I think about transportation? Is it choo-choo good? Bike lanes!

I’m hoping to ground this idea in some deep storytelling and to define “culture” by what it isn’t rather than what it is. Policy, for example, is not culture, and we can’t solve our cultural problems with more policy; we’ll just get more complicated policy and no outcomes. Spending a trillion dollars—$1,000,000,000,000—is a cultural choice as much as it is a policy one; authorizing spend is as much a cultural choice—earmarks anyone—as it is a policy lever. Appropriating it is as much a function of how fu*king tired Senate staffers are as it is how much they’ve been lobbied by boosters and well-meaning (c)(4)s. What we build and where we build—or purposefully don’t—is a decision we make when we cast our votes for people who hold the purse strings. And sew the purse. And source the silk.2

All this to say I want to help our well-meaning thinkers and doers think and do with clearer eyes and fuller hearts.3 To meaningfully distinguish between a policy choice and a cultural phenomenon. That’s the book I want to write. I want to center the humans (and computers?) behind the story, to share that, while we may see the world one day through eyes unclouded by hate,4 the culture that binds us—the definite human quality of connection—can be applied magnanimously. We can move freely.

4

Red elk are inherently single-occupancy vehicles, but can be flexed if there’s a babe or injured person to ridealong.

Well, I’m already 2 days late, which seems apropos of how this book proposal is going.

Once this book proposal is finished and I’ve got a deal with a sympathetic publisher and the real work starts to actually write the book and the writing is going well, and I don’t use run-on sentences to lede a chapter, then we can, together, look back fondly at the deep struggle of workshopping an idea publicly.

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But First: The Egomania of Writing a Book, or Separating Ego from Arrogance

I’ve been writing this blog for a little over 6 years, and it’s time to carry these ideas into a longer form, cohesive narrative. What I can say in 6000 words, I should also be able to say in 75000, right? It’s the great delusion of any writer that they should expect anyone to hold anyone’s attention. So I’m doing it anyway because my absolute need to be read and heard outweighs my deep anxiety about starting this process.

Book proposals, as I’m learning, require an absolute and monumental heck-ton of work beyond “I want to write a book,” compounded by my relative anonymity. While you all know me, at least on the Internet, the audience for who would buy my book must be quite a bit larger and indirectly cosign that, yes, they would spend their hard-earned dollars and time on me. I think I’m worth it—but how do you prove to a whole audience that you’re the first choice to invest in, to spend time and resources on a book—when they don’t know me or if I can deliver?

Through this lens, I’ve understood book publishing as a reflection of business risk, and it’s my job as a writer to convince the publisher that the potential benefits outweigh it.

So, yeah, I see how my half-baked outline was not good enough to convince the editor that her capacity was worth carving out for me. But I’m determined to prove it.

Tomorrow: Where the Proposal Stands

I’m going to open up my Google Doc where I’ve built 12 of what I expect to become 40 pages by the end of the month. You’ll have a chance to weigh in (please) and help point out obvious blind spots in my thinking. This could be a good chance to get the chat function going.

I hope to write some and then come here to talk about it. I’m hopeful to get real honest. Maybe.

Working Title

I’m also going to keep the title WIP here, subject to intense feedback and some combination of words that will summarize the book and sell it.

Currently:

Culture Devours Policy: Infrastructure Development in Crisis1

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AVs are not inevitable, but change is. How do we want it?

Every time I don’t think I need more discussion about AVs, I remember this technology is so nascent and so malleable that the more people connect and engage about reality in reality, the better off we’ll all be in decades’ time. This year alone I’ve been to three different fora in three different formats with three different sets of expectations for and from participants, and each has increased my ability to engage meaningfully with this complicated topic. I wish it were as simple as waving a wand and replacing vehicles at the optimal level with their AV counterparts, but instead the reality is much more complicated, as it always is. AVs may be a special new technology, but remember the mode is not new, and geometry does not change whether the car is driven by a human or by algorithm + radar.

A car is a car is a car after all.

Below is a summary of the above video with all the thoughtful commentary I didn’t feel appropriate to interject as an audience member.

Special thanks to the Parking Reform Network, which relies on donations from people like me (and you) to sustain its fight against minimum parking requirements and to continue to educate anyone it can about a new way to see a less-car future. I sustain my membership as a tax-deductible way to tell PRN that I believe in the work. No amount is too small!

Donate Now!

Current State of Autonomous Vehicles: Hype vs. Reality

Tony Jordan

Thank you, everybody, and thanks, panelists, for being here. We’re trying to find the missing middle of the AV discussion and cut into what’s going on in our streets, leaving everyone with ideas around policies we can promote in our communities. Let’s start with a quick intro from Rachel and Miriam, and then Andrew will kick us off with an overview of where we are right now in the autonomous vehicle world.

Rachel Weinberger

Paula’s introduction was sufficient for the conversation. I’ve participated in a few conversations on autonomous vehicles, and my favorite thing to do is solve problems or at least suggest solutions to them.

Miriam Pinski

I want to quickly highlight a report my co-authors and I came out with through Urbanism Next looking at the landscape of regulations for different new shared mobility types, including AVs, and seeing how those regulatory regimes differ by mode. It’s also been interesting to watch AVs mature in the context of work I’ve done on the history of driver’s license policy and early auto regulations, seeing how that policy trajectory maps or doesn’t map.

Andrew Miller

While I talk a lot about automated driving, my real interest is innovative mobility: how we move people and goods today and how we might do it in the coming decades.

The first thing to understand about automated vehicles is that if you think they’re fake or a con, I wouldn’t blame you, because people talked so much nonsense about this technology from roughly 2005 to 2020 and poisoned the well. Many people think it’s still a dodge or a cheat, but it’s real. You can get a Waymo today—40% of the ride-hail trips being taken in San Francisco are being accommodated by Waymo. It’s across California, the US Sunbelt, and expanding to Japan, London, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal.

The question is not “Is this technology real?”—it is. The question is: can we keep it out of our cities? Maybe in the near term, but not in the long term. As an urban leader, you shouldn’t be thinking about how to get rid of this, but rather: if it’s coming, how do we get the best deal for our cities now? You have the most leverage right now when companies really want to enter. The smart play is to think about how automated driving can make our cities better and proceed on that basis immediately.

Private Ownership vs. Shared Mobility Models

Tony Jordan

There are two main paths we can take as a society on autonomous vehicles: a private ownership model and a shared mobility model. Which is more likely, and what factors lead to one over the other? What does each feature mean for our cities?

Andrew Miller

Driving automation is going to come for the privately owned car, but it’s also going to come for ride-hail. There is no world in which self-driving doesn’t lead to much more congestion—that’s just going to happen.

Everything you don’t like about the personal car, the privately owned AV is that on steroids. It will make everything worse. The externalities of the privately owned self-driving car are immense. The externalities of the robotaxi are much less. If everyone knows they can get a cheap, safe ride-hail ride in three minutes, coupled with good policy, we can encourage people to own fewer cars and rely more on a robotaxi fleet.

We only get that if we make policy improvements to let robotaxis in on our terms. If we do nothing, robotaxis won’t be commercially viable, but privately owned personal AVs will be everywhere. That’s a future to avoid, and we should be proactive to avoid it.

Rachel Weinberger

We’re going to get both. Most people use their automobile as an extension of their closets, and there’s a huge amount of convenience when your car is right there.

In a research project a few years back, Joan Walker [et al.] at UC Berkeley tried to emulate AVs by supplying people with a car and a driver. Because participants had a driver, people vastly increased their VMT.

What cities need to do is the same thing they’ve needed to do for many years around conventional automobiles: minimize the need for them. The more your city is walkable, micromobility-friendly, and transit-accessible, the less you rely on individual vehicles. As cities continue pushing livable street agendas, autonomous vehicles can serve the occasional need for a private automobile.

Miriam Pinski

A free chauffeured trip will be much more enticing than a paid trip, which is why pricing AVs is critical. The externalities that AVs impose are similar to the ones human-driven cars pose. If we’re going to tax these externalities to limit them, we shouldn’t do that solely with AVs. The safety benefits of AVs are huge—as a cyclist, I would much prefer a street lined with AVs in traffic over speeding, reckless human drivers.

Rachel Weinberger

We can put a check on auto highway infrastructure expansion by using the leverage of what’s expected with autonomous vehicles. Because they need less space to drive, you could make narrower lanes or half-size vehicles. Anytime someone wants to widen a highway in your area, the answer should be: in 20 years when everything is autonomous, we won’t need a wider road; we can restripe this one and get additional capacity that way.

Andrew Miller

People are already using that argument to make sure we don’t invest in public transit. If the other side is going to use it that way, then we should use it that way too.

Evaluating VMT Models, Traffic Realities, and Deadheading

Tony Jordan

What do VMT and cruising congestion studies actually say, and what are their assumptions? How do we balance potential additional trips against land-use levers that can reduce overall trips?

Miriam Pinski

Modeling results depend entirely on your assumptions. Different policies build off each other—you can’t isolate the effect of unbundling parking if you’re also pricing driving.

As a transportation enthusiast, my tendency is to want to encourage people to take trips. There seems to be a strain in these discussions around limiting VMT that discounts that a lot of people could probably use more mobility. How do we encourage the most efficient use of roads while still supporting trip-making?

Rachel Weinberger

We need to unpack the mobility question from the accessibility question. Some people could and should have access to more opportunities and activities.

There is no analysis that shows autonomous vehicles lead to reductions in VMT if they are one-for-one replacements for people’s cars. Uber and Lyft added congestion to dense urban centers. Taxis and TNCs tend to be empty 40% of their driving time, which is a lot of waste unless we have much greater efficiency in usage. The simple answer is to reduce our reliance on private auto mobility.

Tony Jordan

When we talk about deadheading, there’s a whole slew of driving that occurs on a daily basis from private human operators. How do we unpack that so people understand where the real current problem lies?

Miriam Pinski

Look at school drop-off or pick-up lines. Rather than a parent dropping off a kid and waiting in line or driving back home, an AV could pick up another child or perform another trip. There’s a benefit there of a more socially beneficial trip being made. Many parents would also feel a lot safer having their kids bike to school if the other cars were Waymos.

Rachel Weinberger

Taking a kid to school and deadheading home is very akin to an airport trip. We’ve developed lifestyles around automobility that we might want to rethink, such as kids not going to neighborhood schools.

Policy Levers: Road Pricing, Shared Compartments, and Local Rules

Andrew Miller

What we need more than anything is road pricing. It’s the only tool we have to fight congestion. With AVs, you can scale the price based on the number of people in the car: as occupancy goes up, the cost goes down. If there’s no one in the car and it’s deadheading, the charge is much higher. That will force robotaxi companies to minimize empty miles driven.

Additionally, Americans loathe shared trips with strangers. You can imagine a shuttle bus with four separate compartments—a shared vehicle where you don’t have to interact with another person. Cities should set conditions for AV deployment:

• Require fleets to serve transit deserts.

• Require a proportion of the fleet to be wheelchair accessible.

• Require a proportion of the fleet to be shared vehicles.

If you do not ask for these conditions, you will not get them.

Miriam Pinski

Instead of government forcing specific features, let the market provide. An impediment is often the restrictions we put onto innovative vehicles.

The promise of AVs is that we can program them never to speed again or to prevent idling at the curb and avoid blocking cyclists. Local governments can think through how to manage curb space with machines that obey programming. Local government makes sense for curb management; federal authorities should handle vehicle safety standards and data reporting, and states should manage liability.

Rachel Weinberger

Policy must flow from identifying what problem we are trying to solve. AV companies are trying to solve how to make the most money.

Congestion pricing works well where there’s a strong center. In places with viable alternatives, space allocation matters just as much. We should privilege emergency vehicles, transit, and delivery, while creating bike networks and frequent transit options.

Andrew Miller

What cities should want out of driving automation is a change in where vehicles are stored. In an automated world, every location no longer needs an adjacent spot to store vehicles. Cities can reduce parking footprints and move storage into tighter, denser, smaller areas.

Miriam Pinski

That’s another way to discourage private AV ownership: if you make it expensive to park downtown because there’s less supply, that encourages more trips through shared AVs rather than private ones.

Advocacy & Actionable Advice

Tony Jordan

What is one actionable piece of advice advocates can use right now to move their communities toward better outcomes?

Miriam Pinski

• Encourage skeptics—especially older adults with mobility limitations—to try a robotaxi ride to experience the accessibility benefits firsthand.

• Once we reclaim a parking spot or street space from private vehicles, immediately fill it with another active use (like outdoor dining or wider sidewalks) rather than letting it become another car lane.

Andrew Miller

Push for road pricing. Gas taxes will not fund roads indefinitely, and road pricing is the single best tool to fight congestion. Because AV telemetry makes dynamic tracking straightforward, start by pricing self-driving cars, establishing the framework that can eventually be expanded to all vehicles.

Rachel Weinberger

Keep changing the conversation around car use. Continue pushing for incremental, structural improvements like protected bike lanes, unbundled parking, and dedicated transit corridors.

How do you feel about AVs? Let us know in the comments below, and again, thanks for reading.

—Sam

New York City lost a neighborhood icon in December 2025.

Frank Arroyo did more than sell and repair bikes at his eponymous bike shop on Grand Street in lower Manhattan. It was a no-frills shop, packed to the rafters with new and used bikes of all sizes and makes. Open every day except Wednesday.

Always dependable, quick, and generous. There were times I’d come by with my old bike in need of a brake adjustment, and he’d wave away the small sum I offered. Dedicated customers drove an hour from New Jersey to have their bikes repaired, or to trade in for a new one. Parents came here for their kid’s first bike and a subsequent trade-in deal years later.

Each year before Christmas, Frank would spend weeks decorating every inch of his shop windows with dioramas of miniature villages with moving trains, bright and sparkling with colorful lights. It was part of the season -even if you didn’t celebrate Christmas, kids and adults stopped by to ooh and ahh.

He was in the shop every day, overseeing his assistant who did quick work on repairs and adjustments, chatting with neighbors and the regular old guys who came by just to sit on the sidewalk with their coffee, watching neighbors pass.

When I noticed the gates shut over the windows and doors when he’d normally be open, a tug pulled at my guts. Not another neighbor out of business! In fact, the gates haven’t opened since December.

A recent report by the Comptroller’s office analyzes storefront vacancies and small business challenges. Their analysis of storefronts from 2020 to 2026 shows that most small businesses that close are actually replaced by new small businesses -not large chains. While shoppers may feel a certain sadness at the loss of large stores such as REI (I was more bereft at the loss of Tent & Trails) or Century21 (that made a recent comeback), it’s the small, independently owned businesses where the owner knows you for real, not through an online algorithm, that we miss the most. These are places that contribute more than money can buy. They add to the neighborhood character with their unique and sometimes quirky flair in the products they sell or how they interact with their customers. Small business owners like Frank have a history or personal passion for what they sell. And as customers, we can tell. Our interactions are more than financial transactions.

I can’t say how much a city should do to spare small businesses. Success or failure depends on so many factors. But when a business has given 50 good years to a neighborhood, taxing it out of existence should not be an option. The City’s Business Improvement Districts offer some help. But if your business, like Frank’s, isn’t located inside a BID’s boundaries, you’re not on their radar. As it stands, the LES BID only covers six blocks of Grand Street, a strip that currently has four vacant storefronts. Besides being outside the BID boundaries, the stretch is about half a mile from the nearest subway station. Larisa Ortiz, an expert on urban retail development, suggests that proximity and accessibility to urban business storefronts for shoppers would improve their survivability.

In August 2025, I stopped by to have my bike checked before bringing it upstate for three weeks. While waiting for Frank to finish with a customer, I overheard him say he didn’t know how much longer he could afford to keep his shop going. He said he was ready to call it quits.

A sudden alarm hit me. The thought of losing a beloved shop that I’ve depended on for 20 years, and its owner, was like breaking a coffee mug gifted by your best friend. Its utility can be replaced but not what it represented. Biking is my transportation, and Frank was always there for us. Turns out, his Commercial Rent Tax (imposed by New York City and not the landlord) cost him $33,000 last year. When he opened the shop in 1976, it was $1,500 (or about $8,800 in today’s dollars). In real terms, the tax he paid to maintain a small storefront had gone up 275%.

Frank was resilient, though. He’d lost his career and economic security years ago through the short-sighted negligence of New York City’s financial stewards. It was 1975 when the City went bankrupt by selling debt it had no means of repaying.

The day before stopping by Frank’s for my bike tune-up that August day, I had been to a screening of Drop Dead City, a documentary that catalogued NYC’s ‘75 egregious fiscal crisis. Scenes from the movie were still coursing in my head; neighborhoods were destroyed, garbage piled up, middle-class workers who the City depended on paid the price: City workers were laid off, overworked firefighters responded to nonstop fires in the Bronx, Harlem and other neighborhoods already on the margins of economic survival. The shock was at how City and State administrators and the banks that enabled it looked away, allowing the disaster to continue unabated for years.

Appalled at the suffocating rise in his rent tax, I had to know more about Frank’s story during this fraught time in the City. So I asked him about the origins of his bike shop in 1976. Turns out, Frank was one of 5,000 police officers who had been laid off by Mayor Ed Beame in 1975 (not a coincidence). He had just completed training with the police academy, followed by three months on the force. Having lost his job, he quickly turned to his personal love: riding and repairing bicycles in the neighborhood where he grew up.

In 1976, the Lower East Side was a lot grittier than it is now, with the highest density of publicly owned or financed housing in New York City. Rent was cheap enough to open the bike shop and acquire a modest inventory. He loved what he did and the neighborhood loved him back. Frank was an honest businessman who genuinely cared about his customers and the neighborhood.

As our city and country make the cost of living a central rallying cry, government leaders must focus on the value that small businesses bring us. Taxing small businesses out of existence or neglecting them when they need help navigating government bureaucracies is short-sighted, considering how much they contribute to community vibrancy and trust. Keeping small businesses alive and thriving, especially those that offer services by trained experts (bike repair) not easily replaced by AI, in a city where there is growth in bike ridership, is good not only for the business owner who knows our name but also for customers in need as well as the overall health of the community.

Not every small business is going to survive the age of online shopping with the convenience of free shipping and low prices made possible by giant retail warehouses.

If we want to keep these small, neighborhood institutions going, there are ways we as consumers and our government policymakers can support them.

Four Ways to Support Small Businesses in 2026

1. The most obvious is to shop from small businesses. If you’d like to but find it inconvenient (the local shop doesn’t carry the bike saddle or basket you’re looking for) ask if they’d order it for you at the standard retail markup. Independent bookstores can be hard to find. Bookshop is a terrific resource that allows you to order the books you want online while supporting Independent bookstores at the same time.

2. Small business owners looking for resources or advice should check with NYC Small Business Services to confirm if they are located in one of the City’s 78 BIDs or visit this map of neighborhood development grants. NYC also has a Hotline (888-SBS-4NYC) for small business questions and has just released a plan to simplify and expedite some of the notorious hurdles that certain storefront businesses face. Let’s hope the recommendations are more than that and real action is taken.

3. Small businesses are often located near other non-competitive businesses that could be looking for creative ways to keep customers coming back within their neighborhood. A deli down the block might be interested in selling coffee or snacks at a slight discount to a bike shop’s customers who are waiting for repairs or returning from an excursion on a rental bike. Shops that offer services (hair and nail salons, bike repairs) might consider teaming with nearby cafes or tea shops to boost each other’s sales and sense of community.

4. Small storefronts may need to consider revamping their business models to incorporate online sales (something Frank didn’t really do) to stay in business. Considering untapped markets, offering new goods or services that can be supported by expected demand, and new marketing strategies require some time to think creatively and honestly about finances and business goals.

Frank passed away in December 2025, close to 80 years old, the cause of death unknown. And although his initial plan to serve this great City was taken away in 1976, he still got to live out his dream of serving our community for 50 good years.

We miss you, Frank.

What makes this chat different from others around this topic is that we didn’t assume any benefits and costs. Neither of us was or is sure that any one P3 structure is better than public delivery for any number of reasons. Instead, we dug into a 400+ page contract (at least the table of contents) and really yapped about the nitty-gritty of the P3 deal structure for the SR400 Express Lanes project in Georgia. And now you, too, can enjoy the conversation in video or audio form above.1

For your edification, Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation and/or launch pad to learn the basics of P3s. My main takeaway is that they are another tool in the toolbox for delivery, and they should be favored when the details make sense, and it’s not just a simple risk dump. Happy listening.

SR400 Express Lanes

Edited Transcript

Sam Sklar: Good afternoon. I’m here with Alexis Rosenberg, partner at Ashurst. Congratulations again on your promotion. I’d love if you could introduce yourself, and tell me a little bit about your role and the firm you work for.

Alexis Rosenberg: Thank you. My name is Alexis, and I am a recently promoted partner at Ashurst Perkins Cole. We’re a global law firm, but one of the things we’re highly recognized for is infrastructure and energy, particularly using P3 and alternative delivery models. I’ve worked in this space for about twelve years in total. I started my career in Australia—which is where the accent is from—and then I was in Asia for about six years, doing a bit of work in the Middle East while I was there. I moved to the US in 2021 and have been working on infrastructure projects here ever since.

Sam Sklar: That’s super interesting. Maybe if we have time at the end, we can get into the differences in how different parts of the world approach building with different models of public and private investment, design, build, and operations. But I’d love if we could start with the basics. Readers and listeners may have some familiarity with what a public-private partnership—or what we’ll call P3—is. Some people call it triple P. There are lots of different ways people go about it, but what we’re talking about here is some combination of public sector and private sector investment, development planning, building, and operations. Is that about right?

Alexis Rosenberg: Yes, I think it is good to step back first and define what a P3 is. It is sometimes helpful to start with traditional infrastructure delivery, which we often describe using the jargon “design-bid-build.” This is where a state agency, owner, or authority utilizes an architectural firm or works in-house to design what they want built. Then, they bid that design out to the market and hire a construction contractor to build it. They may then operate and maintain it themselves, or contract that piece out as well.

Then we have what we call alternative delivery, which is not so alternative these days since it has been around for a couple of decades. Starting with “design-build,” rather than having a separate engineering firm design and then bidding that out, the state entity will combine those components into one package. They ask the market for someone who is going to both design and build the project. What’s beneficial about this model is that it aligns the designer with the builder, which incentivizes a constructible design and prevents the state from sitting in the middle of disputes.

Sam Sklar: Would you say those are the two main delivery vehicles?

Alexis Rosenberg: “Main” is a funny word, but I would say that represents the majority of how we deliver infrastructure, especially here in the US. The P3 model with a private financing element is more popular overseas. It has been used quite a lot here in the US as well, but it remains a bit less popular.

Sam Sklar: Excellent. I know there are other alternatives, such as design-build-operate-maintain, and progressive design-build, which is a more recent and interesting one. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit.

Alexis Rosenberg: A basic P3 is often described as design-build-finance-operate-maintain, or just design-build-finance-maintain, depending on the asset type. You are combining the design and build under the same private sector team, but they are also responsible for securing upfront financing through debt and equity to fund the construction. They are then responsible for ongoing maintenance, operations, and potentially tolling or generating user fees if it is a revenue-generating asset.

Bringing all of that under one private sector team aligns all the elements under one roof. You have a private sector partner who is incentivized to create an efficient, constructible design that will be easily maintained and operated. They are driven to complete the project on time to avoid penalties under their financing structure and to operate it well so they can pay back that financing. That is a traditional P3.

There are many different flavors these days. “Progressive” design-build is where, at the time of the bid, the exact form of the project is looser than a traditional P3. There won’t be a hard bid price when you select that contractor. Instead, you select a construction contractor based on their experience. They will then work hand-in-hand with the state to design and establish the parameters of the project before setting a final price. This can be useful for complex projects where the exact solution is not clear yet. The risk, however, is that you lose competitive tension, which means it may not incentivize the best possible price.

Sam Sklar: That’s so interesting. My understanding of one of the benefits of doing a public-private partnership or bringing in a private partner is that it alleviates or shifts some of the risk parameters from the public sector onto a private actor whose incentives naturally line up, where their benefit will exceed their risk. Everyone can win in that situation.

Alexis Rosenberg: I definitely agree. One of the primary benefits of this model, backed by data, is the alignment of incentives. You have a private sector entity that relies on the asset—either through generated revenue or regular availability payments from the state—to pay back their own debt. They have every incentive to keep the project functioning optimally.

During the design and construction phases, they are incentivized to construct cost-effectively. That doesn’t mean cutting corners if you have the right contract with the right parameters, but rather finding ways to optimize construction costs. They also tend to design in a way that optimizes revenue, which a state agency might not naturally focus on.

Sam Sklar: To summarize, it is about leveraging as much value as possible for the taxpayer to realize projects on a reasonable timeframe, allowing different actors to check each other. One of the main benefits is preventing a runaway state that might lack the capacity, resources, or expertise, especially for highly localized infrastructure. My newsletter mostly covers transportation, but infrastructure also spans water, energy, and electricity.

I’d love to move beyond the basics and talk about an actual public-private partnership that you worked on, the SR 400 express lanes project in Georgia.

Alexis Rosenberg: The entire contract for the SR 400 express lanes project is more than two thousand pages. The “front end” portion alone is about 470 pages. It is publicly available on the website.

Looking at the table of contents, we have the two parties involved: the State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA), which is a sister agency to GDOT, and the private developer, SR Partners LLC. The developer is a special purpose vehicle (SPV)—a new company created solely to execute this project. This structure is very important for lenders. The financing provided to this entity is inoculated from any other corporate risks; lenders are lending strictly to this specific project and expecting to get the revenue of the project back to pay down the debt.

The structure of this agreement is very similar to many other P3 agreements. It covers right-of-way and land acquisition, approvals, oversight, and how to deal with existing utilities or third-party interfaces like local cities or transit authorities. It includes design and construction obligations for the 16 miles of express lanes, moving from a 30 percent design to full construction readiness. It outlines operations, maintenance, and the “hand-back” parameters since this is a 50-year contract. Finally, it details tolling mechanisms, payments, revenue sharing, non-compliance penalties, supervening events, and termination defaults.

Sam Sklar: In your perspective, having done many of these in your career, which sections typically receive the most scrutiny when parties come to the negotiation table?

Alexis Rosenberg: I would divide it into two main parts, starting with construction risks. Many of these are similar to traditional design-build risks, but they are exacerbated in a P3 due to the project size and private financing. This includes site access, land acquisition, utility relocation, and unknown site conditions like hazardous materials. There is a lot of scrutiny on who should bear these risks. The general rule is that the party best suited to control the risk should bear it. In a P3, the private sector can only bear risks that they can reasonably control and price, because they can go bankrupt if costs spiral out of control.

A tangible example from the SR 400 project is existing utilities. How should you split that risk? This contract utilizes a utility verification period. During the procurement phase, the state discloses all the information they have about known utilities, and the private sector must price their work accordingly. After the contract is awarded, during the design phase, the private sector partner has a set number of days to conduct studies and confirm utility locations. If they discover unknown utilities during this verification window, they receive compensation for the increased cost. However, if they fail to do a proper verification job and discover an unknown utility years into construction, they do not get compensated. This incentivizes discovering issues early during the design phase, where they can design around the problem, rather than during construction when shovels are already in the ground and delays are incredibly expensive.

Sam Sklar: That makes perfect sense. It sounds like you are trying to turn uncertainty into risk, because uncertainty cannot be priced, but risk can. The more information you have, the more accurately you can price it. Critics of P3s often argue that too much risk ultimately falls back on the public sector when projects stall. How long have these models been around in the US?

Alexis Rosenberg: In the US, they go back to the late 1990s. In the UK and Australia, they started a bit earlier. Regarding the perception of risk, the history of P3s in this country actually saw the pendulum swing the other way initially. Too much construction risk was placed on the private sector, which caused several construction contractors to go bankrupt or drop out of the P3 market entirely because they saw it as too risky. Over the last two decades, there has been a concerted evolution to find a better balance. We have gotten better at identifying what the state can do to mitigate a risk versus what the private sector can do.

Sam Sklar: We are talking about massive infrastructure changes happening in already developed, populated areas. There are endless layers of utility and existing infrastructure interfaces. Often, contracts can be ambiguous or left incomplete, which I understand is what led to the rise of progressive design-build to avoid locking too much up front. Is that accurate?

Alexis Rosenberg: Some blame for contract complexity certainly lies with the legal profession. There is almost a conscious protectionism in making contracts hard to understand so that you have to hire a lawyer. At my firm, we are very focused on a movement called “plain English drafting,” trying to draft contracts more like people actually speak so they are usable by non-lawyers.

Regarding your second point, it’s true that public sector entities that do not execute P3s frequently may lack the internal resources to draft a strong contract. They might be afraid to remove legacy clauses from older templates because they don’t know what they originally did. That can lead to poor contracts.

Is that why progressive contracts are rising? Yes, the fear of being locked into an rigid contract is a major driver. Progressive models can be highly effective when you need to move fast. For example, the Tennessee DOT utilized progressive contracts to respond quickly to the impacts of Hurricane Helene because they didn’t have time to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’. California tried a solution-neutral progressive model for the Sepulveda project to see what different innovations the market could offer.

However, change orders are frustrating for everyone. The private sector fears their legitimate costs won’t be covered, and the public sector feels like unexpected costs are piling up. The problem with progressive models is that if you think negotiating a single change order is tough, imagine negotiating the pricing for the entire contract without competitive tension. It can feel like negotiating the largest change order you’ve ever seen, making it very hard to get a good price.

Sam Sklar: That makes a lot of sense. If you had to estimate, what percentage of major infrastructure projects in this country are delivered via P3? Is it less than five percent?

Alexis Rosenberg: Pulling a number out of the air, less than five percent sounds about right. We use this model very infrequently in the US.

Sam Sklar: I was talking to someone about this, and they noted that in Europe, the private sector has more distinct access to debt, whereas the US has long relied on municipal bonds available to the public sector. Because the public sector’s cost of borrowing is lower due to tax-exempt municipal bonds, there is less financial pressure to seek alternative capital stacks.

Alexis Rosenberg: I would absolutely agree with that. There isn’t that same level of municipal bond availability in other global jurisdictions, which drives their reliance on private capital markets.

However, data shows that P3s generally deliver on time compared to traditional delivery models, and they can be highly cost-effective because the private sector swallows much of the cost overrun risk. P3s can deliver real value for money, which might represent a missed opportunity in the US due to how our debt markets are structured.

Sam Sklar: In places like New York, municipal bonds are often triple tax-exempt, which heavily incentivizes institutional investors and pension funds to buy them up. At the end of the day, whether it’s public debt or private capital, the taxpayers and citizens are paying for it. It’s just a matter of who handles the risk and how we extract the most value. Other countries seem to incentivize value over absolute lowest cost. Madrid built its metro incredibly fast in the early 2000s because their contracts prioritized the highest value per dollar and on-time delivery incentives rather than just the lowest bid.

Going back to the SR 400 project, did it generate a concession fee for the state? What does that mean exactly?

Alexis Rosenberg: When bidding a revenue-generating P3—like a toll road, express lanes, an airport, or a stadium—the private sector expects to make a profit. If their projected revenue significantly outweighs the cost to build, maintain, and pay down their debt with a reasonable return on equity, they may offer to pay the state a “concession fee.” Essentially, they pay the state upfront for the privilege of developing the project because they know they will make that money back over its lifespan.

The SR 400 project generated a very large concession fee—billions of dollars—for the state of Georgia. That revenue can now be redirected by the state to fund non-revenue-generating projects, like fixing a rural bridge, repairing potholes, or completing other necessary but “unsexy” infrastructure.

States can also use procurement metrics to incentivize other values. Instead of just accepting a cash concession fee, a state could give higher technical points to bidders who promise to build extra miles of road, add pedestrian enhancements, protect bike lanes, or invest in community green spaces. P3s are a fascinating way to harness the innovation and competition of the free market and channel it directly into the specific values a community wants, whereas traditional delivery simply dictates a strict layout based purely on the lowest cost.

Sam Sklar: Do you think there is room for P3 models in future mega-projects, like the California High-Speed Rail or New York’s Second Avenue Subway extensions? How different would California’s rail project look if it had been conceptualized as a P3 from the start?

Alexis Rosenberg: Rail is inherently more complex than roads, and there are many layered political and environmental complexities with the California High-Speed Rail project. However, choosing a P3 model doesn’t mean the *entire* project has to be a P3.

For a major rail project, you can break it into distinct packages. You might use a traditional design-build for early works like utility relocation, a P3 contract for the heavy civil engineering or tunneling, and a separate delivery model for the rolling stock, operations, and maintenance. Utilizing a P3 for the core complexities allows you to attract the world’s premier global rail developers from Europe and Asia, bringing world-class innovation to the table. You just have to find the right components of the project to fit the model.

Sam Sklar: There is often a fundamental mismatch because environmental reviews like NEPA require a linear project model, which conflicts with a branching, fast-paced P3 structure where different components move on separate timelines. We need innovative acquisition models that bring the private sector to the table efficiently while protecting public values. I’ll give you the final word.

Alexis Rosenberg: We shouldn’t be afraid of the private sector as a partner in infrastructure. With the right parameters, clear rules, and proper incentives, the private sector can bring immense value to public infrastructure delivery.

Sam Sklar: That is a great note to end on. Thanks again for your time, Alexis.

We are very lucky to live during the denouement of the Internet, where two truths still exist1:

1. We can still learn new things. Global experience still translates into applicable reform.

2. A good portion of the uninformed Internet will knot itself into stitches searching for reasons why that first part can’t be true.

For every record, I don’t particularly care how correct the first point is or how ubiquitous the second point is. We’re all in the throes of the Dead Internet Theory, so that really, we can’t be terribly certain that the folks in Camp 1 and the users in Camp 2 aren’t all bots crabappling each other.

Wriggled in the cracks is a curious compendium, “The Transit Abundance Playbook,” aptly named for its active instructions to fix the broken infrastructure paradigm in America. This book correctly narrows the frame to focus on transit and excludes highways and roads outside support for rubberwheels2, and air and sea. The answer is, in fact, not always more money.3 It is instead filling the gaps between things experts know → things experts think they know → things “experts” think they “know” → and how we source Good projects and pay for them.4

The Playbook is an effective reference tool and a lightning rod to attempt to address the infrastructure game of telephone our professionals play.

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The Eye-Rolling Transit Knowledge Gap

Let’s define more clearly the gaps to prove the point.

Between what the experts know and what they think they know.

This gap is the narrowest and easiest to fill, and the Playbook effectively addresses it in a few ways: Philip Plotch’s “Share the Truth About Transit Project Failures” and “Transit Projects Need A Single Decision-Maker” (written without attribution) describe the need to build flexible State capacity and to then authorize that capacity to act autonomously. This, it would seem, could be a recipe for success. It continues to be essential for USDOT to act as arbiter among the State DOTs, MPOs, and transit agencies/authorities for data collection and administration of an information clearinghouse. This compendium should be a forum for learning, be nominally exempt from litigation, and focus on incremental effectiveness in project inception through delivery.

Make no mistake: technical assistance programs exist, and USDOT has organized institutes of excellence for project development, contracting, and execution. And yet our assets crumble. We need these tools to foment more.

Between what the experts think they know and what “experts” think they “know.”

There’s a breadth of knowledge question that the Playbook tangentially addresses. Essentially, there’s a whirlwind of mis- or half-information that many “experts” have convinced themselves is true and correct even when the opposite might be true. This, of course, is a communications problem first and a media literacy problem also first. We need reliable communicators with relevant expertise conversing with a public that has an interest in and an ability to learn.

Transparency is a broad theme for the Playbook. Alon Levy’s “We Should Know How Much Transit Components Cost” is a good place as any to start. It does exactly what it says on the tin. To deliver these components better: “Focus Capital Investment Grants on Improved Delivery” from the not-at-all incompetent Stephanie Pollack. The potent combo of media literacy and two-way glass will help close the gap between people who think they know what they’re talking about and those who certainly don’t but insist on writing about infrastructure anyway.

Between what “experts” think they “know” and how we source Good projects and pay for them.

Here’s where the Playbook dramatically works: getting to Good projects; projects that meaningfully address problems as identified by the whole cadre of stakeholders who should be involved. Good projects are obviously better than Bad projects, but no projects are also better than Bad projects. The thing is: the United States seemingly only knows how to build Bad projects and doesn’t, yet, want to build Good projects.

That last gap is filled by the Institute for Progress’ Transit Abundance Playbook. I really recommend reading all the essays as a modern primer for the future of mass movements.

Ranking the Essays Based on How Much I Learned

The criticism has manifested and is unhelpful. Regardless of whether you think the essays are good or helpful or counterproductive or irrelevant, there’s something to learn from each essay. I also realize there’s an irony here of me promoting information that may not be totally correct or helpful—but that’s only super relevant if we’re treating the Playbook as gospel, instead of what it really is—level-setting.5

Even when the authors posited something I know to be half-baked, I tried to learn from their intent, which is what I recommend here. The fifteen essays are useful in the following ways:

“I don’t know much about transit planning, but I’m interested”

Great, go forth with gusto, but remain skeptical. For every opinion, another author could write its counterfactual to varying levels of success. When an author claims x, someone else could just as easily claim y, using orthogonal levels of success relevant to their argument. The Playbook isn’t coded partisan, but the existence of transit itself presents as left-coded…but is it?6

“I am an Urbanist”

Ok, buddy.

“I work in the field”

This is an essential read no matter your experience level. Curiosity is a key component to growth in our field—which is as broad as it is deep. Read to challenge your priors and with the reflexive response “if I’m so correct, why are my ideas not already implemented?”7

“Ezra Klein sent me here because I’m an abundancehead”

Ok, my guy.

I’m skeptical as all get out about abundance as a “movement,” but it is a model to get you, who somehow found your way here, interested in reform as praxis. Welcome!

The List

8 On to the list of essays in order of how much I learned from them. Many of these essays fall into one of three categories:

• We can’t adequately price risk, so the premiums we pay to build anything at all skyrocket. We shouldn’t do that.

• We can’t adequately or at all communicate project successes and failures so we can’t scale trust or compound learnings.

• AI? In this economy?

Go read the essays! Some notes:

1. I thought Alex and Rohan’s article said much more than just “bus components”—it’s an allegory for the American infrastructure experience. Not only did I learn the most, but also it has the most application outside “buses.”

2. I’m so curious who the anonymous writer is, but I can’t guess.

3. Brian Potter’s essay about fire safety tunnels (among others) is tremendous and a great preface to the issues that make a huge impact but don’t make planning textbooks.

4. I think Jamey Tesler has an inflated opinion of the Goodness of government officials to not deliberately misuse this power to skirt these very regulations.

5. We’re all necessarily scared to share failures because of our litigious environment that spooks everyone from saying truth at all, let alone out loud. Phil Plotch’s essay helps to plot a course forward, and I was grateful for this insight.

6. Understanding how capital works, what a capital stack is, who provides the capital, what the fiscal and legal requirements associated with each type of funding are, where it comes from, and how it can be used is…exhausting. Jackson’s essay is endemic of this exhaustion, but unfortunately I don’t know how to make it less exhausting. I have a degree and 15 years’ experience in this—both of this—and it still exhausts me.

7. I’d love to see what Hayden and Paul’s essays look like together: Fast-track popular projects and give these projects dedicated staff. See how fast we don’t build both State capacity and goodwill.9

8. Every conversation around AI bores me for the most part, including the conversations around Autonomous Vehicles. They’re coming: capital requires return on its investment, but they’re going to come more slowly than boosters predict, cause more problems than they solve in the short term, and distract us from efficient city building as we look to retrofit rent-seeking instead of building new markets for transit and land use.

9. What are my thoughts on future essays? We need to talk about good intentions, bad execution with all the overregulation and the lack of decision-making, especially around ADA compliance. We need to talk about the role of the private sector outside of consultants. We need to talk about communications and using the tools of organized labor and riders to push our leaders into decisions that help them fulfill their mandate and give them the cover to make hard choices.10

Bonus: A Brief Conversation with Will Poff-Webster

I had the chance to speak to one of the playbook’s editors—Will Poff-Webster—and here are the five takeaways that have become the commonplace

Defensive proceduralism is the throughline, not any single regulation. Transit agencies get measured on whether they followed every rule, not on whether they actually delivered useful transit. That incentive shapes everything downstream — agencies build in contingencies, bulletproof paperwork against lawsuits, and avoid negative press, all of which slows projects further. The goal shifts from maximizing success to minimizing blame, which produces “a whole lot of nothing.”

»See Eric and Stephanie’s essays.

NEPA is procedural, not substantive — and that’s the whole problem. A project can be shown to be terrible for the environment and still pass NEPA review as long as every step was exhaustively documented. The conversation also corrects a common misconception in real time: the fall of Chevron deference didn’t make NEPA unenforceable; it just removed judicial deference to agency expertise, which arguably makes outcomes less predictable rather than more streamlined.

»No real corollary here, but I always love talking to a lawyer who is interested in infrastructure try to explain Federal procedure to me like I’m 5.11

Bus costs are inflated by Federal reimbursement structure, not complexity. Because the federal government covers 80–85% of bus purchase costs, agencies paying only 15–20% out of pocket have little incentive to resist vendor upselling on unnecessary customization — like unique interior floors — driving US bus costs 30–100% above international norms.

»See Rohan and Alex’s essay about bus customization. Also the other essays about purchase and procurement reform.

Italy’s “Conference of Services” model offers a real alternative to endless litigation. Rather than let every stakeholder (utilities, localities, landowners) sue individually over years, Italy convenes everyone up front under a single accountable decision-maker — often proposed as a governor equivalent in the US — who hears all requests, makes binding trade-offs, and sets a hard end date after which the project can’t be re-litigated. Marc Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works is cited as making a parallel argument: America’s dysfunction often comes from an unwillingness to just decide.

»Read Alon’s essay for more on this.

Well-intentioned accessibility rules can end up making buildings less accessible overall. ADA and elevator-code requirements — like mandating that two full-size wheelchairs be able to pass each other on a platform, or that a wheelchair be able to turn around inside an elevator car — sound like pure wins, but they force much larger stations and elevators than other countries build. The unintended result: many small buildings and constrained sites (like on the Long Island Rail Road, where there’s no right-of-way to widen without condemning property) just don’t get elevators built at all, which is worse for accessibility than a more context-sensitive design would be. There’s reportedly a group of wheelchair users themselves now pushing for elevator-code reform for exactly this reason — a case where rigid compliance defeats the goal it was meant to serve.

The platform passing-space detail in this last point is relayed secondhand in the transcript (from a station engineer a source spoke with) and simplifies the actual rule — ADA requires 60”×60” passing spaces at intervals along a route, not continuous two-wheelchair-wide clearance throughout. The elevator turning-space requirement, by contrast, is accurate as stated.

»This came from a part of our conversation talking about future essays. ADA came up as a well-intentioned and helpful organizing tool, but in practice has some unintended consequences. See also: Wednesday’s Headlines: Delay Tactics Edition from Streetsblog for more on this.

Do you all want to see the full conversation with Will? Comment below!

6

It seems this is true when observing transit’s boosters from the expert to “expert” gap, but even when we’ve had left-ish governments, we still fund mostly highways. It’s almost like the Dems and the GOP are simply…two factions of the capital class.

Three takeaways for the lazy. Buy the book.

Click Here!

The sidewalk is the smallest unit of government we never talk about, and that’s exactly the point.

Michael’s whole career circles around understudied legal spaces, and the sidewalk might be the most understudied one of all. It’s this small thing with an absolutely outsized impact on our lives, and once you start looking at it, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere. That’s basically how this book happened: a law review article wasn’t enough room to fit everything he found once he actually went out and traveled to look at how different states and municipalities handle the sidewalk.

Sidewalks don’t fail in isolation; they fail because of everything around them.

The Houston chapter is the one that really got me. Houston has decent, patchwork sidewalks, no real Euclidean zoning code, and almost nobody walks on them. Why? Zoning, parking minimums, and decades of underfunding and regulatory fights over the right of way matter just as much as the concrete itself. Whether you’ve got too much regulation or basically none, you can still end up with a place that isn’t walkable. It’s a bell curve, there’s a sweet spot, and most places aren’t anywhere near it.

There’s another crazy Houston land use fact that shouldn’t surprise you or me, hidden in the book (and in the interview). You’ll be gobsmacked.

Right now, we {often] hand sidewalk responsibility to private property owners, and that’s a historical accident, not a real policy choice.

We don’t ask people to plow their stretch of the car-oriented street, but we do ask them to shovel and fix their stretch of sidewalk. That’s one reason why wealthier neighborhoods have decent sidewalks nobody uses, and undernourished neighborhoods have a patchwork of bad sidewalks everyone depends on.

A Department of Sidewalks idea isn’t about more bureaucracy; it’s about consolidating the mess of agencies that already touch the sidewalk into one accountable one. All roads lead to the sidewalk; whatever your built-environment policy obsession is, there’s a sidewalk angle to it.

You Made It Here! Buy It!

Warning: Learning Ahead!

I’ve gotten some feedback on early drafts of this essay and want to say a few things up front. There are two learning goals for the following:

1. Policy development can get unruly, generally, and shrinking the Overton window is a lot easier than widening it ex post facto.

2. Doing a simple thing, like requiring the intallation of Intelligent Speed Assistance is more complicated than “Thing A happens, Then Thing B.”1

I’m using road safety a a liberal blanket for the way I think about policy. If your response to reading any of the following is: “Nope, you didn’t consider this,” or, “That’s not how this works,” I will have done my job.

The Problem: 40,000 Road Deaths A Year

I’ve known since my first full-time planning job that “planning” on its own is mostly a useless pursuit. The arrogance that humans think they can truly terraform is second only to the lamentation that we think we can optimize it. There’s got to be something else to this because the alternative is chaos. Maybe that’s what humans are predisposed to.

I’ve also known that humans are mostly selfish or self-serving creatures, who, when sat behind a steering wheel, turn into insufferable jerks. So we design our roads, shockingly, to allow arrogant meatbags to drive as fast as they want, and, too often, dozens of thousands of times per year, into each other. And, since we’re also too arrogant to meaningfully redesign the roads we drive on, we spin our national safety wheels round and round.

Road and street redesign should be a national, state, regional, and local investment priority.2 Theoretically, by limiting how, where, and how fast motorists can putt-putt around, we can limit the exposure and potential for traffic violence. Practically, we don’t want to.3 So that’s the end of that, probably.

Even if we could diet every road and GLP-1 every street, no matter what, as long as humans control their vehicles, they’ll drive as fast as possible.4 So what do we do? It’s time to meet the problem at its source: the vehicles themselves. If we have the technology to build these cars, buses, and trucks to drive very fast, then we have the technology to retrofit them with limiters.

The Solution: Speed Limiters / Speed Governors

But here’s the question that’s going to drive the rest of this post: how? How do we retrofit millions of vehicles, let alone hundreds of superspeeders—repeat offenders who continuously get caught, charged, and convicted of speeding and or crashing? Who says who a superspeeder is? What does the full chain of enforcement look like?

CLICK ME FOR THE FULL MAP

I’ve non-exhaustively categorized 85 different groups of different stakeholders into 19 sectors, and then additionally into 16 different categories for AVs. Then there are the conflict nodes: the open questions and stakeholders who are naturally and artificially at odds with one another. There’s no way to reconcile them within the structures of government and partnership we currently have. So, there’s really only one way to stop the superspeeders: install an intelligent speeding assistance device. But there arise challenges—solvable—but ones that need thinking through nonetheless.

How To Make Sense of This Ridiculous Chart.

This is a lesson in planning policy and general deep thinking, but more than any other interpretation, this chart is an exercise in accountability. Not every stakeholder will interact with every part of the policy, but since we’re doing…policy planning, let’s, uh, plan for different scenarios, considering the edge cases as completely as possible. We won’t get them all, but that’s where safety cases come in, generally.

• For example, just how important is USDOT in setting state speeding policy, which is already, famously managed at the state level? Less than is immediately obvious, but there might be opportunity to organize and reconcile state policies for dissemination and recontextualization.5

• Who sets motor vehicle manufacturing standards? NHTSA—an office under USDOT’s purview—is responsible for establishing and maintaining Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. It is their jurisdiction to incorporate a national standard for how ISAs should interact with increasingly technological motor vehicles, and should this standard only apply to newly manufactured motor vehicles? How do we ensure (and insure, I guess) that each driver is subject to the same rules regardless of the car they drive?6

• Couldn’t the state just revoke a habitual driver’s license to operate a motor vehicle? I mean, yes. Suspending or revoking the legal right to drive is an option, but:

  • It does not stop the problem at its source. You can still drive a car without a license. Illegal ≠ impossible.

  • It deprives a person of the potential to earn a living. Yes, there are other issues here.7

  • Is there a right to cure? Is it permanent? What’s the punishment besides a speed limiter? Should there be …prison?89

And so on and so forth. I’m giving away the store here. Let’s break it down in steps.

Steps!

Step 1: Understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Don’t assume any salient facts or details. Ask why a lot. Ask who is in the room—and who isn’t.

This is the sandbox you’re going to play in. The power mapping above could be shaped to answer almost any question that you might tease out of it. The list is never fully exhaustive and might misshape who interacts with whom. Chase down hunches here. The more complete your thought process is up front, the easier it is for you to throw up your hands in complete disgust by Step 5.

Step 2: Ask questions (out loud, to your team, a brainstorming board, to God(s)) until you’ve reached the essence of an argument. This step is a lot easier from first principles. Reinterpret the question as a problem statement.

The Question I want to ask here reinterpreted as a Problem:

• How do we reduce vehicular speeding? Nope. That’s too broad and too vague.

• Where are the conflict points/nodes in a power map for the installation of speed limiters? Closer, but it’s too narrow, and you’ll box yourself in too quickly.

• What are speed limiters, and how can they be deployed? I don’t like this one. It’s begging the question. It’s also more definitional and less argumentative—the argument is the thesis behind the why.

• Where are there openings to develop policy to reduce average vehicle speeds on our municipal roads and streets within five years? This is better. It asks for specificity and develops a thesis. It also limits spatial and temporal analysis.

Given we like the last question, what does it look like rewritten as a problem statement?

Is this bad? Yes. It’s too wordy and confusing. I like the first sentence, though. How about:

Better. But still wrong.

I like this one. It establishes precedent and the challenge as an argument, it connects to and expands upon a deep understanding of how roadway investment works, and it suggests a potential solution. Is it perfect? No. If we were actually writing this white paper (which we might!!!) we’d rework this thesis statement until we hit submit to publish.

Step 3: Power map. Adding stakeholders shapes the box and adds edges. This happens before or concurrently to quantitative (observation, modeling) or qualitative (survey, anecdotal) analysis.

That’s what I’ve done with the linked power map. There are so, so many more stakeholders there than when I first started brainstorming. Mapping often unfolds in a similar pattern, no matter the policy initiative at hand. If you start with a basic wire: public, private, non-profit, or advocate, user, interested bystander, inevitably you’ll find yourself asking (out loud, to God(s), etc.) who else should be here? Who interacts with whom, or, more interestingly, who hasn’t interacted before and how has that manifested elsewhere?

This is where experience plays a role. There are only so many conversations you can have when you’re not invited into a room, and you can’t know what you don’t know. But that’s what I’m here for. Talk to me. Hi. I will be your policy comms guru. It me.

Step 4: Start asking the questions behind the question to tie everyone together. This is where the edge cases come up and completely screw you.

This initiative is not new, but it was new to me when I sat in on a session at a civic tech day sponsored by BetaNYC. It seems like an easy and obvious fix at first: we mostly know who’s caught for speeding the most → speeding is an outsized factor in traffic deaths → children and older adults are more vulnerable to traffic violence → if we can’t redesign our roads and streets to slow everyone down → install speed limiters in the cars themselves to remove the possibility to do violence.

Conceptually sound. Practically impossible. Here are many of the questions that popped up.

This is the most challenging technical question that seems like it could be easily solved if we (read: vertical and horizontal Federalism) could get it together and standardize data sharing and enforce it. The practical stakeholders in this data chain are the following:

• The court system: jurisdiction matters here. Where the infraction occurs matters; if you’re caught speeding (habitually) in Upstate New York or in Manhattan or elsewhere, you’ll be summonsed to that court to be due processed in front of a judge in that courtroom. Each jurisdiction may have its own record-keeping standards. It may store its data as a GeoJSON, or it might literally scan handwritten records into a document. As far as I’m aware, there’s no standard across municipal court systems, as there’s no standard across state lines, or at the Federal level.

• Knowing this: The DMV (or RMV) or other licensing body must use or be able to convert court records to licensure language. There must be some way to understand the record of a court decision and how it affects your ability to drive with permission from the state. This is relatively easier than the court data procedure because each state or territory has a single licensing body.

• Knowing this: The police or traffic officers must first know what to look for: a conspicuous mark that signifies the licensee as a habitual speeder or a flag for further review. This one isn’t so hard. It requires training and reinforcement—something traffic officers should be engaging in habitually. They must issue a ticket or summons that bumps back to the DMV, the local court system, and the collection agency.

• Knowing this: The department of finance in the municipality where the ticket was issued must have a similar protocol to collect the fine. This is not always the case, and there must be a way to cure.10 This, too, shouldn’t be so hard.

• Knowing this: if these agencies, authorities, and courts can coordinate, that closes the loop. Speeders get ticketed appropriately, and the municipalities collect fines accordingly. The big problem is the next step toward street safety: installation of a speed limiter.11

Whereas there’s a system in place to ticket speeders, it would seem that a good precedent for understanding who is going to speed in the future is…who has been caught speeding in the past. Turns out there’s also a bill that’s crawling through the New York State legislature that will mandate the installation of an Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) device in a vehicle registered to a driver who’s been caught speeding SIXTEEN times for a minimum of 12 months following the determination in New York City.12 The bridge policy—how these two points are connected—is to ensure that the state can actually track and confirm 16 infractions before the mandate.13

I have some additional thoughts here, mostly related to interstate commerce and who gets jurisdiction14:

\ practical concerns:

I’ve covered this a little, but there are jurisdictional challenges that are not necessarily relevant until they are. There’s also the ability to install the limiter: the technology has to exist (it does), it needs to be mandated (it can be), and it needs to be actually installed (how?). There’s also the “What happens if you need to override the limiter?” question that mimics the interstate commerce/cross-jurisdictional issue: “How often does this matter enough to have to legislate/mandate an escape from norm?” and the answer is, “Sometimes.”15

Also: what if the person simply uses a different car? What then, smart guy? Sure, they might get caught and punished, but…the point is to stop them.

\ safety, security, privacy concerns

Less important than you might think, but it can and will effectively kill any Good policy. I would argue that the ACLU would have privacy concerns with this insofar as how location data would be handled for monitoring purposes. That’s a lawsuit, or at least a very public complaint whose bona fides would spread virally: this installation is an invasion of one’s privacy, all else equal.

If we would hold privacy concerns equal, there are other concerns about general safety, even though the speed limiter would increase system safety. How could anyone tamper with the device that might actually make a motor vehicle more dangerous to drive? Security, different than safety, as I will endlessly distinguish, is mostly around feeling and being personally safe. Does this limiter make you a target for car theft (no)? Not a concern, really. But important to think through and run the idea into the ground.

\ equity concerns

This is a double-edged sword, as it often is. On one end, overpolicing and deconflicting super speeding from general surveillance. The number of installed limiters should roughly estimate the proportions of the population within a place. COUNTERPOINT: on the other end, what if the most speed-related crashes cluster in communities whose roads/streets have been systemically disinvested or underinvested or Interstated? Don’t crash victims deserve justice? COUNTERPOINT: Lots of crashes don’t occur near where people live or work or travel to, but on the way. Place-based concerns here are mostly moot? But also not? Is this an equity issue?

Blanket device installation would be a desirable outcome to hopefully slow these maniacs down. But then what if people don’t drive their own cars all the time in the future….problem solved?

If there’s no driver, who is responsible for a crash in an autonomous future? There’s no chance there will be no crashes when the world moves without human operators, but the responsibility and burden/duty of care shift dramatically. What happens when the logic of an external limiter conflicts with the AV’s own internal logic?

You might ask yourself here, why would any government mandate an external limiter for a car whose “speeding” is algorithmic? The answer is they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, there might be an instance at some point where this is a pressing challenge, and having the option to mandate a third-party (government) intervention is a desirable outcome. We just don’t know.16

We do know that there’s more to the bumpy transition to an autonomous or robotic future. I’m most interested in the developing body of tort law that distinguishes between driver liability and product liability. The stakeholder map elucidates who could be influential in writing future legislation or who might be friend/enemy to the court in litigation.

Step 5: Exasperation Ensues

I sat down with Cara Eckholm, a multi-hyphenate founder and civic tech/engagement specialist, to talk about Pitchfest—a project of PilotCity and the third iteration of a matching program between NYC city agencies and interested university researchers, supported by foundations and non-profit funders. It’s not complicated, but it is essential given how challenging it is to administer the needs of a $120 billion+ budget each year.

I attended the afternoon sessions related to the built environment, where the packed house listened to dozens of one-minute pitches. Principal Investigators, university professors who are allowed to fundraise, sat with me and listened to research proposals they’d like to work on, supported by philanthropy.

I’ve linked to the full deck below (Substack doesn’t allow me to embed a PDF!)

The ones you care about start on Slide 86, but I really recommend skimming through the whole deck to learn about agencies and city-led initiatives doing the public’s work that you definitely haven’t ever heard of.

Pitchfest Project Pitches

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Peck, Michigan is easy to miss. It’s a village of about 570 people in the thumb of the state — blink and you’ll drive right through. But over the last few years, Peck has quietly become a model for how small rural communities can punch well above their weight when it comes to securing and deploying public infrastructure money. They’ve secured roughly four million dollars in grants, completed a solar project that cut their electric bill by $140 a month, replaced aging water mains, and are now looking at extending their water system to support new housing. I sat down with Tim Heiden, Peck’s Village Manager, to talk through how they did it — and what other communities can learn from the approach.

The conversation was brought together with the help of Danielle Capers, who connected me with the project. Partners for Public Good — led on this work by Dr. Karl Hoesch — has been working with Peck on structuring and communicating their procurement process, and that partnership is a big part of what makes this story worth telling. Together, they were able to successfully apply for, win, secure Federal funding, and procure a qualified contractor to carry out the work. This is how change starts.

Right now, Peck, MI, is the gold standard for procurement reform across the entire United States.

The Project

Sam Sklar: Can you give a quick overview of what the project is and where it came from?

Tim Heiden: In 2023, I applied for a Congressional Spending Program grant through Rep. Lisa McClain’s office (MI-09). The original grant amount was $762,000, with a total project cost of just about a million — we had to come up with a $176,000 match. We’d already secured a couple of other grants, but we were finding it tough to get bids. We’d only get one or two, so the pricing wasn’t great. The project involves replacing some older, smaller water mains for about two and a half blocks in the village and then extending our water system another two and a half blocks so we can support some new housing development and run water services out to one of our parks.

SS: And so what I’m hearing is this was an EPA grant, used to replace and extend water mains — but that the really interesting part of the story is how you rethought procurement. Where did that start?

TH: When I got the EPA grant, I got a cold email from somebody at Partners for Public Good. It piqued my interest, so I reached out, and we sat down and talked. It made me realize that we’d been relying on the old way of doing things — we had an engineering firm post bids on BidNet and the statewide procurement sites. Some local contractors didn’t even look at those unless I called them directly. And honestly, I didn’t have a lot of contact information, because the village hadn’t had a manager before 2022, when they hired me. For years, things were run by a council that met once a month. There hadn’t been any major infrastructure projects done in probably fifteen years or more.

How Tim Got Here

SS: Was the hesitancy in the past because the town felt like it didn’t have the internal capacity to manage a grant this large? Why 2022?

TH: In 2018, a council member approached me about filling a vacant seat. I was hesitant — I was busy doing other things — but they pestered me for about two months, and I finally said yes. Once I got talking with our DPW supervisor, we realized there was a lot of deferred infrastructure work. I started looking into grants, and the village sent me to a two-day online grant writing course. We wrote a few smaller grants, got those, and figured: why not go after some bigger ones?

At the time, I was a corrections officer working a swing shift, so I was in the village office fairly often. After a couple of years, council decided they needed a full-time manager. I was going through some medical issues that were going to force me to retire from the sheriff’s department, so I threw my hat in the ring. Since then, we just keep a list of projects and go after grants as they come up. We’ve secured about four million dollars so far.

SS: Four million dollars for a population of 570! That’s punching way above your weight. And I think it’s genuinely inspiring for other communities around the country that might feel hesitant to approach state or federal grant programs with that level of enthusiasm. Too often, what we see is a game of telephone — the local community has a problem, doesn’t know who to talk to, the state doesn’t know how to talk to the federal government about what the program should look like to fund communities, and nothing gets built. What Peck has done breaks that cycle.

Rethinking Procurement

SS: Walk me through how the bid was structured differently this time. What changed?

TH: One of the biggest things we did, working with Karl and his team at Partners for Public Good, was build out a contractor list from scratch — water, sewer, roads, sidewalk, all of it — with actual contact information. We sent a survey out to close to fifty contractors. That alone gave us useful feedback on why some of them hadn’t been bidding on Peck projects. A lot of it came down to timeline. In the past, you’d post a bid and they’d want it done in three months. That turned people off.

The other thing was, instead of just posting the bid and hoping somebody saw it on BidNet, I was able to email the bid packet directly to contractors with a note explaining the project — where the funding was coming from, that the money was already secured, and how to reach the engineering firm for the drawings. That last part matters more than people think. Contractors want to know that the grant is locked in before they spend time putting a bid together. Sending a personal email that says, “I have an EPA grant, here’s the amount, here’s our plan,” is a completely different experience than a posting on a procurement board.

It was more personalization than the standard ‘here it is, hope somebody saw it.’

SS: This is what I’d call stakeholder mapping — actually understanding the environment you’re working in, rather than hoping the right people happen to be watching the right procurement websites. The two big takeaways I’m hearing: one, be proactive and do targeted outreach to firms. These grants still have to be competitive — you can’t sole-source this kind of work — but as long as your outreach is broad enough to capture the firms that can realistically do the work, you’re already doing it better than most. And it’s not an expensive process. A week or so to compile names and contact information and do the outreach. The payoff is a more competitive bid, better pricing, and you start building actual relationships with contractors in your region.

The second takeaway is cost savings that get passed directly to residents. What’s your perspective on that side of it?

TH: Absolutely. I live in the village I manage. When we raise utility rates, it affects me too. I tell our residents all the time — it affects the council. I don’t take raising rates lightly. The problem is that Peck, like a lot of Michigan municipalities, went years without raising rates on a consistent basis, and now the newer generation is paying for that. Michigan Rural Water came out last year and recommended roughly a $45 increase between water and sewer. I sat down with council and said, “If you want to not get reelected, that’s one way to do it.” We compromised at $20 last year, with the plan to do the other $20 this year. But with the economy being what it is, we were able to complete this project without touching any of the funds we’d put away — so we could go another year without that increase and then reassess.

SS: That’s the point I keep coming back to with this project. What the government can do here is unleash other operations. Every dollar spent well today is another dollar that can go toward a more expensive project later — and the cost of doing nothing compounds too, because inflation affects what your savings can actually buy. Residents care about this even if they’re not in the weeds on water main replacement. What they can grasp is that they’re saving several hundred dollars a year because of a government investment. That’s money being reinvested in the community. The circular economy argument. And I think where a lot of projects miss the mark is they don’t communicate these benefits clearly. Peck, with the help of Partners for Public Good, is doing exactly that. That’s what got me interested in the first place — good spending, good communications, and the people it’s actually affecting.

Lessons Learned and What Surprised Them

SS: What surprised you during the process? What came up unexpectedly that changed how you engaged with partners and stakeholders?

TH: A lot of it was just making contact with contractors. Peck hadn’t done any major utility work in a long time, so we’re not on anyone’s radar. Some of the local managers around me and some of our commissioners used to say, for years, Peck did nothing. And now we’ve completed a solar panel project at the community center that reduced our electric bill by about $140 a month. We’re looking at CDBG funds through the Michigan Housing Development Authority to extend sewer to eight new housing units — units the developer doesn’t have to pay to connect. If we get another eight units on the same system after that, we spread the cost of the infrastructure across that many more customers without raising rates.

The biggest thing was the feedback from contractors who said they’d seen Peck bids before but figured they never got selected, so they stopped looking. By reaching out personally and walking them through what we’d actually built over the last few years, I think that changed their calculus.

SS: Peck is one of hundreds of towns in Michigan and thousands of towns around the country where people genuinely care about their community. You’re underselling it a little — it’s a beautiful part of the thumb, and I’m sure it’s a great place to raise a family. I think there are a lot of places like this that feel either locked into bad process, bad procedure, or just not as proactive as you and your team have been.

If you had to give the first piece of advice to a town manager anywhere in the country, what’s the first thing they should do?

TH: Pick up the phone. When you’re in a small town run by a council, you don’t always know who the right contacts are. I just started calling local managers and picking their brains. My council has been supportive of me going to conferences — I just spent two days at a housing conference in Lansing. I always bring back information, and we sit down and figure out what’s relevant for Peck.

We are the model for Sanilac County right now — I won’t pretend otherwise. The larger communities around me have been watching to see how things pan out in Peck. When they do, they call me and ask for the documents. I have no problem sharing. If the community ten miles away thrives, mine will too, one way or another.

But really — make those contacts first. Reach out to your state rep and your state senator. That was the very first thing I did. I called and asked to sit down and talk. One of those conversations led to a $200,000 grant for playground equipment. Just by having a conversation with my local economic development director.

SS: It sounds so easy. And I think it is something that almost anyone in a community can do — even if you’re not the village supervisor. You could volunteer your time, approach your local leadership, and say: here’s what I can do to help. The Peck model isn’t a complicated formula. It’s great leadership, a good opportunity, and clear communication working together. And of course, there’s some alchemy here — Tim, you’re a genuine champion for this place, and every project needs one. But there’s no reason every community can’t find its own champion.

On the Broken System — and What Michigan Is Trying to Fix

TH: The first conversation I had with my state rep and state senator, I told them: the system is broken. When it comes to grants, it’s the same communities getting them over and over. Larger communities can afford to pay a grant writer. Smaller ones can’t. There wasn’t even a single place to find grants until recently. The state of Michigan now has something called MI Funding Hub, which consolidates all the state grants in one place by department. You type in your project type, and it pulls up relevant grants. They’re following what the federal government has been trying to do with grants.gov. But they still have to do a better job getting that information out — because smaller communities don’t always send someone to a conference to hear about it.

I’m arguing right now with MSHDA about the way they’re handling a grant I applied for. They changed the rules between rounds — they used to allow both the municipality and the developer to apply for the same project together. In my town, I don’t have multi-million dollar developers. I’ve got a local businessman who sees that we need housing and is willing to help build it. We wrote the grant together, and then they changed the rules. I’m pushing the director to change it back because the way it’s written right now hurts small rural communities.

SS: That’s the game of telephone in reverse — the state making rules that make sense in the abstract and then creating real friction for the communities they’re supposed to be helping. The fact that you’re the one pushing back on that, on the record, is part of what makes this story valuable.

On the Future of Water in Peck

SS: Last question. Water in Michigan has been a topic of interest for decades. How is Peck’s system currently run, and what does the future look like?

TH: It’s run by the village. We have a resident who holds his water and sewer license — he’s our water and sewer operator and our DPW superintendent. We have three wells and a 180,000-gallon water tower. I’ve looked at what’s happened when other communities hand their water or sewer operations over to an outside operator, and I’d rather keep it local. My guy cares about this system more than someone who lives two towns over and shows up when something breaks. We like to keep it local.

SS: There’s a lot of attention on privatization right now, and I’m always curious when I talk to people running smaller systems what their actual take is. It depends on finances, it depends on the ecosystem, it depends on who you’ve got. I’m glad Peck has their answer. I’m really grateful for your time today, Tim. My goal with this conversation is to give you a mouthpiece to reach communities across the country and share what Peck has built. There are a lot of great takeaways here.

TH: Awesome. I appreciate the invite.

Three Takeaways

1. Stakeholder mapping is the cheapest infrastructure investment you can make

Peck didn’t just post their bid and hope. They built a contractor list from scratch, sent a survey to close to fifty firms, gathered feedback on why contractors had stopped bidding, and followed up with a personal email that explained the project and confirmed the funding was already secured. The whole process probably took a week or two. The payoff was a more competitive bid, better pricing, and the beginning of real relationships with contractors who now know Peck is a serious client. There are hundreds of communities around the country that could do this tomorrow. Most aren’t.

2. Smart grant spending is rate relief — and it compounds

Peck completed a major water main project without drawing down their reserves. That means they could hold off on a planned utility rate increase for another year. For residents in a small rural village, that’s several hundred dollars back in their pockets. The circular economy logic here is straightforward: every federal or state dollar that gets spent well locally is a dollar that doesn’t have to come from ratepayers, and the savings create room to fund the next project. The problem — and Peck is doing something about this — is that most communities never communicate this clearly to the people it affects. Partners for Public Good is part of the reason Peck can tell this story.

3. Pick up the phone

Tim Heiden’s first move, every time, is a phone call. He called his state rep and state senator. He called local managers to pick their brains. He called contractors who hadn’t bid on Peck projects in years. One conversation with an economic development director turned into a $200,000 playground grant. This sounds almost too simple — but the thing that holds most small communities back isn’t a lack of money or a lack of eligible projects. It’s not having a champion who treats outreach as part of the job. Peck has that champion. Other towns need to find theirs.

Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works is a heavy-on-theory, evergreen addition to the growing library of books dedicated to practical government reform. The Professor sat down with me to talk about his thesis and core distinctions between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions of democracy, both of which have been warped and maligned through the speed and veracity of information.

Below are my key takeaways from the conversation, but the whole conversation is worth a listen/watch and the book certainly worth a read.

Buy Why Nothing Works

1. Progressivism has been fighting itself since the beginning

The core tension Dunkelman identifies isn’t between left and right—it’s internal to progressivism itself. From the very start, the movement has contained two completely opposing impulses: a Hamiltonian one that wants to concentrate power in expert hands to get big things done, and a Jeffersonian one that wants to break up concentrated power and return authority to ordinary people. The problem isn’t that either impulse is wrong. It’s that progressives tend to think of themselves as purely Hamiltonian—the party that wants government to do more—while simultaneously spending fifty years building guardrails, checks, and veto points that make government less capable of doing anything. You can’t sell government as the solution to people’s problems and then spend decades making government structurally unable to solve them.

2. The vetocracy problem isn’t that too many people can say no—it’s that nobody can say yes

The word vetocracy gets thrown around a lot, but Dunkelman flips the framing in a way that stuck with me. It’s less that the system has too many blockers and more that it has no authoritative yes. Congestion pricing is the perfect local example: Bloomberg floated it in the aughts, the state spent a billion dollars building out the infrastructure, and then a governor killed it on a whim—and got sued either way. Trump thinks he has jurisdiction. The MTA chair thinks he has jurisdiction. The mayor thinks he has a say. Nobody actually has the power to ratify the decision and move forward. That vacuum—the absence of a singular accountable figure who can weigh all the tradeoffs and say this is what we’re doing—is what makes big projects so expensive, so slow, and so politically radioactive. The fix isn’t just deregulation. It’s re-concentrating the authority to decide.

3. Progressives handed Trump the keys by breaking the product they were selling

This is the most uncomfortable argument in the book, and the most important one. Dunkelman is not letting conservatives off the hook—but he’s also not letting the left pretend it’s purely a victim of right-wing demagoguery. The progressive movement spent decades making government less functional in the name of accountability. And then they turned around and asked voters to trust government more, give it more money, expand its authority. That’s a lousy bargain when the refrigerator doesn’t keep the food cold. People don’t vote for abstraction—they vote based on whether the world around them feels like it’s working. When it doesn’t, they vote for whoever promises to burn it down. We laid out the red carpet. Recognizing that isn’t defeatist—it’s the only way to actually plot a path back.

4. Government has to show its work—and make it personal

The RhodeWorks story is the practical takeaway I keep coming back to. Every project financed by the truck tolling program got a roadside sign showing whether it was on time and on budget—green, yellow, or red. Her staff hated it because it created accountability. That was the point. FDR didn’t put up canvas banners—he put up chrome plaques buried in the ground, built to last. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funded a sign inside Borough Hall that got taken down almost immediately. That gap between how past leaders communicated investment and how we do it now tells you everything about why people don’t feel like government is working for them, even when it is. The MTA‘s congestion pricing messaging hits the Hamiltonian notes fine—travel times are down, air quality is up—but it’s missing the Jeffersonian ask: what does this do for me, specifically, today? Tell the story of the plumber in Rego Park who can now fit in three more jobs a day. Make the deal personal. Make it visible. Make it last.

This is the first time I’ve pivoted to video and I think Matthew for looking extra spiffy. I’ve also summarized our conversation into 4 main takeaways, below. Comments always welcome, and shares appreciated. If you’re not already subscribed, you know what to do.

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1. Small stories can illuminate big history

Alfred Beach’s 300-foot pneumatic subway tunnel under Broadway is, on its own, a footnote. But Algeo uses it as a lens to examine an entire era—Gilded Age corruption, post-Civil War industrialization, the birth of mass transit, and the role of the press in shaping public works. The lesson for writers and planners alike: find the kernel that attracts the right characters, and the bigger story writes itself. You don’t need to contrive connections if you pick the right entry point.

2. Boss Tweed set the template for the modern power-hungry politician

What surprised Matthew most in his research wasn’t the scale of Tweed’s corruption—it was how openly it was conducted and how readily people accepted it. Tweed kept literal ledgers of his kickbacks, lived in a mansion on a city commissioner’s salary, and was beloved by working-class Irish immigrants despite being neither Irish nor Catholic. The parallels to contemporary politics are hard to ignore: a figure who engenders fierce loyalty among followers by being brazenly wealthy, skilled at manipulating elections, and immune to the normal rules of accountability.

3. Beach was a media-savvy city builder, not just an inventor

Alfred Beach understood something many engineers and planners still don’t: a good idea isn’t enough. He came from a media family, ran Scientific American for fifty years, and was the first person he invited to the tunnel’s grand opening were reporters from the Times, the Sun, and the Post. He built public support deliberately and understood that how a project gets written about is almost as important as whether it works. His real legacy isn’t the pneumatic tunnel—it’s that he helped legitimize underground construction entirely, proving you could dig under Broadway without the city collapsing.

4. Transit battles then look a lot like transit battles now

To build anything in New York in 1869, you needed a charter from Albany—and convincing upstate lawmakers to fund a city project they’d never benefit from was nearly impossible. Beach won the votes but couldn’t overcome the governor’s veto. That dynamic maps almost perfectly onto how SEPTA fights Pennsylvania’s legislature today, or how the MTA navigates Albany. The broader takeaway Algeo draws: American cities once had the best urban transit systems in the world and lost them partly because the cost of transit was never spread wide enough. Other countries still fund it that way. We don’t.

Share Exasperated Infrastructures

Sam Sklar

We’re recording now. I’d love for you to start by introducing yourself and your background—just so my readers can get an understanding of who you are and why we’re talking today. You’re not my typical interview partner in a lot of ways. I mostly talk to transportation planning folks, but my blog is called Exasperated Infrastructures, and I think that’s a lot longer and broader a topic than simply transportation.

Andrew Rasiej

My name is Andrew Rasiej, and I’ve been at the intersection of technology and the public good for thirty-some years. My first foray into this arena was an organization I started back in 1995 called MOUSE.org, which wired public schools to the internet. At the time, almost all schools in New York City had no internet connection and very few computers. That program still exists.

From that experience, I spent a lot of time talking to elected officials about the need to wire public schools and got deeply interested in what I’d call civic tech—the idea that technology could be used to solve problems, create more transparency in government, and help deliver services.

In 2003, I started a conference at the intersection of technology and politics called the Personal Democracy Forum. I worked as a senior advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, which built an API allowing people to track where money in politics was going.

In 2015, I co-founded Civic Hall with Micah Sifry—a collaborative workspace on Fifth Avenue and 20th Street in New York that brought together people from the technology community with policymakers, nonprofits, government officials, foundations, philanthropy, and corporations. Within a year, we had over a thousand members. Within two years, we had done over two thousand events—brown bag lunches, book talks, panel discussions, demo nights, hackathons. We launched something like fifty or sixty new nonprofit initiatives out of that experience.

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In 2017, I responded to a city RFP to build an office building in Union Square, and I proposed a new and larger Civic Hall. Seven years later, Civic Hall at Union Square opened—90,000 square feet. It’s the largest digital skills training center of its kind in the country. I’m a big follower of Eric Klinenberg, who wrote Palaces for the People about the need for civic infrastructure, and I’m very happy that Civic Hall got built—thirty-five million dollars of fundraising later, which was really hard to do during Covid.

Along the way, I’ve spent a lot of time advocating for New York City to catch up with the private sector in how it thinks about technology—how it could save money, deliver services better, create more equity and accountability. I was shocked from the beginning at how disconnected not just the school system, but the political and governmental systems were from the internet.

A quick side story: I ran for Public Advocate in 2005 on a platform to make New York City a wireless city, arguing that broadband was a public utility. When I went to the New York Times editorial board for my endorsement interview, they asked me what Wi-Fi was. This was 2005. People just didn’t understand.

During the twelve years of the Bloomberg administration, even though they created the office of data analytics, very little was done to renovate government digitally. The de Blasio administration appointed a CTO for the city, but with a very small budget and little opportunity to lead digital transformation. The Adams administration also did almost nothing. And now we have a new mayor who, even though he’s digitally native, has not shown real interest in this topic. With AI marching through our society largely unfettered, I’m very worried about the future of the city and, to some degree, the future of the country.

MOUSE, the Digital Divide, and AI

Sam Sklar

That’s a fascinating story. I think a lot of my readers are going to be very interested in MOUSE, particularly because you identified a very obvious challenge. I’m curious—how long do you think it would have taken for the city to wire all the schools without your vision?

Andrew Rasiej

Public schools are wired now, but they’re only open about fifteen percent of the time in the year. And now we have a cell phone ban, which I don’t completely disagree with, per se. But to me, the failure to make the internet available in public schools twenty-five years ago, and now the banning of cell phones, both reflect a failure of public policy—a failure to understand these technologies. Technology is a tool. It can be used for good, and it can be used for bad. If policymakers don’t understand it, they can’t develop policies to take advantage of it.

The same goes for AI. In my opinion, the only way to fight bad AI is to build lots of good AI. And the only way to build good AI is to empower the people responsible for good in the world with the same tools and skills that the bad actors have.

Unfortunately, most foundations are still just developing strategies around AI. Most nonprofits don’t understand how to leverage it—they’re still debating governance and ethics, which are important, but they’re even afraid of using ChatGPT to write grant proposals. There’s a real digital divide. The original divide was getting schools connected to the internet. The second was getting people to understand how to use it for education. And now the divide is understanding how to leverage AI.

The policymakers are either oblivious to how the technology works, or they’re reacting by sticking their heads in the sand and abdicating their responsibilities. It’s a very precarious time.

Reactive vs. Proactive Government

Sam Sklar

Governments—especially local governments—seem set up to be reactive. In my career, I’m trying to figure out the best use of the public sector versus the private sector in building physical, digital, and social infrastructure. You’ve said ‘reactive’ twice now. How do we make our policymakers less reactive to what practitioners can see coming and more proactive in building the groundwork so new technology has a place rather than a wall?

Andrew Rasiej

I want to start by defining what I believe civic tech is: any technology for the public good, full stop. Some people refer to GovTech as any technology the government uses to deliver services—but depending on who’s in power, that may or may not be civic. For example, if Palantir builds a massive database for ICE to track undocumented people, I wouldn’t call that civic tech, even if they have a government contract. The real question is: do these technologies shift power from the few to the many, or from the many to the few?

If government doesn’t understand how a technology works, it’s very hard for them to leverage it. City agencies often have data scientists on staff, but most government agencies don’t have a deep bench of technologically capable people. Digitally native young people coming into government are often shocked by what they find—I use the analogy of getting into a 1998 Pontiac with bald tires, a leaky gas tank, bad brakes, and a steering wheel that comes off the column. It would be great to get them to maybe a 2015 Toyota Prius. But they have a long way to go.

And the reasons for that gap aren’t really technological—they’re structural. Things like procurement rules, civil service regulations, hiring practices, and data silos. You can’t directly hire a state-of-the-art data scientist because civil service rules get in the way. So agencies do workarounds—they hire consultants like Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, or IBM, who charge a fortune. And even when those consultants deliver, they don’t change the culture inside the agencies. They’re like band-aids.

So the big question is: how do you create a culture of innovation inside city government that recognizes that the technologies everywhere in our private lives could be put to use solving problems inside government?

I’ll give you a really great example of civic tech that saved lives, saved money, and transformed the way we deal with mental health. It’s called Crisis Text Line. It was started about ten years ago by a social entrepreneur named Nancy Lublin, who received a text message while president of Do Something from a sixteen-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father. Nancy realized that teenagers don’t call 800 numbers—they text. Using a platform called Twilio, she created Crisis Text Line with three major innovations.

First: all the guidance counselors receiving and responding to texts worked distributed, from their homes or offices. No call center needed. Second: when a text came in, the counselor could see the full history of that person’s previous texts in real time, so they could understand the full picture. Third—and most amazingly—after receiving millions of texts, they analyzed the data and could tell policymakers things that were never visible before. For example, eating disorder problems spike for kids returning to school on Mondays after dysfunctional weekends at home. Or that the second-largest cohort of people claiming suicidal ideation is not teenagers, but unemployed white men in the Rust Belt. Or that there’s more sex trafficking of teenagers in Montana per capita than in Florida.

That kind of information was never visible because every city and state had its own isolated outreach system, and they weren’t talking to each other. Crisis Text Line is now a global platform, and cities, states, and countries have shut down their own systems and use it instead. That wasn’t a government service—it came from outside.

New York City, in particular, has a very empathetic muscle of technologists ready, willing, and able to help build solutions to long-standing problems. What has to happen is that the people responsible for those problems have to recognize they have an asset right under their noses. Engaging the civic tech community in government is a really smart thing to do.

I wrote an op-ed back in October, in advance of the mayoral election, advising all the candidates to pay attention to this topic and pointing out that the issues are not really technological—they’re cultural and structural, related to the way the city approaches innovation. The success of any future administration now relies on that perspective.

Autonomous Vehicles and Regulatory Readiness

Sam Sklar

Let’s talk a bit about autonomous vehicles and the future of movement and infrastructure in cities. I went to a great conference at Hunter College last week about the future of AVs. There was a fascinating panel about the regulatory environment around autonomous vehicle introduction—including a former FDNY commissioner who said exactly what you were saying: she doesn’t have technologists on staff who can analyze new technology that intersects with public safety and fire life safety operations. It’s not about the technology itself—it’s about the apparatus that allows smart public servants who want to do good to actually do their jobs, rather than being held back by ossified rules.

So my question is: what are two or three things that, say, a Mike Flynn at the Department of Transportation could do right now to help enable digital transformation at DOT?

Andrew Rasiej

I’m not a transportation expert, and I’d actually recommend you talk to Cordell Schachter, who was CIO of the Department of Transportation under Polly Trottenberg during the de Blasio administration and then went with her to the US Department of Transportation when she became Deputy Secretary. He may have a better specific answer.

But from my perspective: first, collect, understand, and index all of the data at your disposal—what you already collect, what publicly available data could be useful, and how they intersect. Develop a roadmap for how to leverage that data, particularly around AI, to surface solutions that are right in front of you or identify efficiencies you wouldn’t otherwise see.

Second, I would immediately—and I mean immediately—start an upskilling program for everyone who works at the agency, to understand how AI works, how it can be used effectively and safely inside government, and how it applies to their own lives and jobs.

Third, be the poster child for procurement reform in New York City. Procurement is a massively challenging topic—it’s very hard to address holistically. But one agency with a digital vision could build a new model that makes it easier for small and innovative companies to actually sell their solutions to the city. Right now, many don’t even try because the process is so convoluted. Or they have to wait until their third round of funding to hire lobbyists just to get into a meeting. That’s a broken system.

One example of technology the city could be using very effectively right now: LIDAR. It’s not surveillance like cameras—it’s situational awareness technology that tracks movement without identifying individuals. That’s just one example of many that are sitting right there, waiting.

Culture, Communication, and the Story We’re Not Telling

Sam Sklar

One of the big challenges, in my mind, is communication around civic technology. We have a cultural problem in this country—we don’t tell the right stories about the benefits and costs of including technology in civic life, what the private sector does versus what the public sector does. There’s a lot of nuance, a lot of finger-pointing, and nobody wants to be holding the football when things eventually go wrong.

Andrew Rasiej

Government is risk-averse—and that’s to be expected. Government is ultimately a byproduct of a political process, which is highly competitive, driven by money, and as you push further, our democracy has real structural problems. We don’t actually elect our elected officials in a meaningful sense. We vote on Tuesdays, but there’s far too much money in politics, and so on.

The United States was a successful industrial-age organization. We leveraged the industrial age in ways other countries couldn’t. The digital revolution was born here—out of Bell Labs, early IBM, then Silicon Valley. But when you think about something like Eisenhower’s interstate highway system, the political will to build infrastructure was all oriented around an industrial model. We’ve lived off that legacy without reinvesting in maintaining or modernizing it.

It’s infuriating to drive down the highway in New York or New Jersey and see debris at the side of the road—often pebbles and broken cement coming off crumbling bridges and highway dividers—because it’s not being replaced. It’s almost a picture of our broken government: not investing in industrial-age infrastructure. So how do you expect us to invest in digital infrastructure when most people in government don’t understand it, or don’t understand how it can be used to make the world work better?

On autonomous vehicles: even though it’s proven that autonomous cars are safer and kill fewer people than human-driven cars—and if you look at recent estimates, something like 5,000 people a year are killed by truck drivers alone—it would be a safer world if fewer humans were driving vehicles at sixty or seventy miles an hour. But those people have jobs, and we don’t have solutions yet for how to make those people feel useful in society and able to make a living.

The basic contract with the American worker—arrived at in the early 1950s after World War II—was that for forty hours a week of work, you could get a house, a college education for your kids, and a pension. That contract has been broken. And as automation and AI arrive, there’s a real reaction that these technologies are going to take away jobs and leave people with even less than they currently have. I don’t completely disagree with them, because we don’t have the economic, political, social, cultural, or educational institutions capable of dealing with this rate of change.

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Where to Start: Public Education and AI Literacy

Sam Sklar

You’ve seen the growth of technology and the civic ability—or inability—to maintain and regulate it. We have private business as essential to economic growth, government with no technological runway to keep up, and a public that doesn’t have the foundation to engage with these questions. What’s step one?

Andrew Rasiej

The United States is an industrial success story, but not necessarily a digital one. There are other countries way ahead of us—I would postulate that China is one of them, with all its complexities and human rights issues acknowledged.

You recently wrote about the Center for Urban Mechanics in Boston, which I think is the best-in-class for thinking about how to apply technology in an urban setting. There are a lot of people talking about smart cities—or as I like to say, “less dumb” cities.

But to answer your question about step one, I’m going to raise the bar. I believe there needs to be a public education campaign about AI. In 2017–2018, the government of Finland, working with the University of Helsinki, published a program called The Elements of AI, with the goal of educating one percent of the Finnish population in the basics of AI. It was so successful that they re-released it in thirty-five languages, and it’s now been distributed to over one hundred and seventy countries.

Research shows that sixty percent of the public is fearful that AI is going to take away their jobs or further erode democracy. AI is viewed very negatively by the majority of the public—and I think rightfully so, because government has largely failed them on this. A handful of states have passed laws to regulate AI. The federal government, particularly under Trump, has abdicated all responsibility. And the public is fearful. But fear is not a substitute for comprehension.

You’re never going to create public policy to leverage technology for the public good, or to limit its damage, unless you engage the public in understanding it. Think of it this way: if there were another pandemic like COVID, the government would issue public education around masking, social distancing, and vaccination. Well, I would say unfettered AI is a digital pandemic. It’s a public safety issue. The government needs to step in and educate the public—not just about data centers eating up electricity or AI taking jobs, but about things like: that TikTok video you’re watching of someone saying Donald Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread? That was an AI-generated bot, not a human being.

Sam Sklar

Do you think the City could actually do this?

Andrew Rasiej

I do. Besides the op-ed I wrote about the city’s infrastructure last October, I recently penned a piece in the New York Daily News—unfortunately behind a paywall, but I’m happy to send a Google Doc version—basically asking the governor and the mayor to launch a public education campaign around AI. The mayor announced the Office of Mass Engagement. I would say one of their responsibilities should be to educate the public about these technologies. Think of LinkNYC kiosks, buses, and subways with QR codes delivering AI education at a ninth-grade reading level.

In fact, I took The Elements of AI—the open-source curriculum from the Finnish government—and put it into Claude. I asked it to update the content for a US context at a ninth-grade reading level, then fed it a dozen research papers, pro-AI and anti-AI, and asked it to update the curriculum further. It built a seven-chapter course in about ten minutes. Pretty simple language—just enough to help people understand what an LLM is, what an agent does, and why it matters.

By the way, New York City right now does not have a Chief Cybersecurity Officer.

Empathy, Media Literacy, and Listening

Sam Sklar

Before any public education campaign about AI, I think we need an immediate media literacy campaign first. People can’t tell the difference between propaganda, editorial, and reporting. This goes down to eighth-grade civics.

Andrew Rasiej

I couldn’t agree more. Media literacy is job one. But I would argue that before you even get to media literacy, we don’t teach empathy in public schools.

Sam Sklar

You’re in my brain. If I ever have kids, the only thing I care about them learning in the first eight years of their life is how to be empathetic, how to ask a question, how to be in a room with people who are different from them, and how to listen and learn from different viewpoints. The learning follows. There are studies showing that you can learn math a year later and catch up just fine—as long as you have an inquisitive mind shaped by empathy and openness to difference.

But this raises a deeper problem: the “who” matters. The mouthpiece matters. If the messenger is the New York City government, will anyone believe it? What’s the angle?

Andrew Rasiej

When I ran for public advocate, nobody knew what I was talking about with broadband. Now there are people like Alex Borras running for Congress who actually get this stuff. Over time, a younger generation will be in positions of power and may be able to change the dynamics.

But it’s going to take a lot of pain and suffering to get there, because we’ve underinvested in public education for decades—and on purpose. Think about the industrial model: you can have a school on one side of the street and an old-age home on the other side of the street, and the human beings in those two buildings never interact. Because we’ve siloed and factory-modeled every activity of our lives based on a hundred years of industrialization—not just of infrastructure, but of thinking.

Sam Sklar

The young person in me wants to blame whatever zombified version of capitalism we’re in right now. But I think that’s only part of the problem. Markets could work for some of this. But I’m not sure anyone believes the capitalist model being sold to them is working anymore.

Andrew Rasiej

Correct. And the oligarchs building bunkers in Montana know the pitchforks are coming. Here’s what I’d love for people to take away from this conversation: this is a battle between good and evil. The question is whether these technologies shift power from the few to the many, or the many to the few. Right now, what we’re watching happen in real time is the latter.

I don’t believe you can stop this technology. But I do think you can mitigate it or match it—and the only way to do that is to arm the people responsible for good in the world with the same skills and tools that the bad actors have. I still believe that’s possible. I’m still an optimist that we can reboot our society around a more data-driven, responsive government and democracy.

It may not look like the democracy we’ve had for the last hundred years. Maybe it involves new decision-making platforms like Polis or participatory budgeting as a different way of deciding where community resources go. But civic engagement isn’t just about voting or jury duty or joining a community board. What civic engagement should really mean is being present in your community, taking responsibility for yourself and your neighbors. If everyone had that mindset, we wouldn’t have the polarization or the problems we have today.

And the last thing I’ll say: we don’t spend enough time actually listening to each other. I believe that people’s desire to be heard is greater than their desire to be right. If we spend time actually listening—even when we don’t agree, even validating another person’s perspective as crazy as it may be—we create the conditions for finding shared values, shared decisions, shared solutions. But we can’t get there unless we at least acknowledge the other party’s point of view.

Closing: Tech Needs to Be More Civic

Sam Sklar

And that’s the basis for civic tech, right? Listening to our neighbors, understanding what problems actually exist, and building toward solutions together.

Andrew Rasiej

You know, the term ‘tech’ is maybe a little bit of a misnomer. We don’t actually need more civic tech. What we need is for tech to be more civic. That’s not even my quote—it comes from an old friend, Nick Grossman, who used to work for Union Square Ventures and came to my conference many years ago. It’s a great line.