—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

59.1MB ∙ PDF file

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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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By Micah L. Sifry

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.

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Relive Session 2 Below:

Exasperated Infrastructures

The Bruce Springsteen of Transportation

Relive Session 1 Below…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · sam sklar

Law is Law. Policy is Policy. Diamonds are Forever.

What I Expected:

A measured balance between the boosters and the skeptics. This session’s panelists treated AVs as not inevitable but probable and crafted their responses accordingly. Where are the gaps? How do we regulate this tech—is it fundamentally different than other mobility tech, or do our boosters say it is to claim a new vertical? Either way, we’re entering some uncharted territory, but we can certainly apply first principles to AVs to make sure the actors play nice. Safety and security were likely big themes to address here.

What I Learned:

• Moderator Meera Joshi leapt right in: “How do we enforce ‘safety’ in the public-safety-decisions-making environment?”

  • Laura: FDNY operates in conditions where things fail. Public agencies are looking for failure conditions not to criticize but to understand how to respond.

  • Kelsey: What are we doing already? Is the technology safe enough to operate on our streets? That’s step one. Step two: is the worker protection question. We must answer the questions from the 180,000 TLC drivers. Is NYC different? We have the most complex street system in the county/world — it does look different than Phoenix, etc., and we don’t want to be the place where the operators are discovering new problems.

  • Matthew: There is a massive amount of data available via NHTSA’s Standing General Order (SGO) on Crash Reporting mandate. Every crash involving an AV will be on this database. The Trump Administration watered it down (type of injury, vulnerable road user binary, less than $1k property damage). About saving lives? AV crash rates are lower than human-powered. Human crashes are underreported, and at least the data protocol is helping because we know about underreporting.

• Meera with a colorful question: “Is NYC government an ‘octopus?’ We need one voice on this. Who should be the leader, and what takes precedent? Beyond safety, what benefits are we looking for? They say Manhattan streets are paved with gold—there’s constant demand for quick movement of people and goods with very little price sensitivity.”

  • Laura: Someone was told they were it, and they were forced to do it. We need to get everyone to the table and value their opinion (not necessarily equally). Don’t shut down a complaint—run it into the ground. What is the world where we’re saying we can’t? The complaint will move forward without us, and that’s terrifying.

  • Matthew [deep breath]: There’s a red state / blue state divide. With red states, there’s this laissez-faire approach: we can’t regulate it in any way, drivers should just follow existing traffic laws. With blue states, there’s a NIMBY approach: instead of regulating, we hope the tech will…go away. Regulation should focus on curbing externalities, protecting consumers, and changing the built environment with congestion taxes.

  • Privacy is important, and there’s not enough conversation about passive surveillance. So far, there’s little regulation that limits what companies can do with that collected data or work with local law enforcement without a court order. I’m worried about a monopoly when the competition is intermodal. There needs to be competition in the robotaxi market to ensure consumer protection. If none exists, we need regulation to mirror what competition would do. Regarding preparation for emergencies, regulators hadn’t prepared by stress testing Waymo’s response. Really, cities need to get rid of parking on streets and replace it with more room for pedestrians, cyclists, and development, but that can’t happen alone. We need Federal, state, and local policy to align (Ed: who does what?).

• More table setting from Meera: “What do we do when things go wrong? Who is ultimately responsible so our providers don’t play hot potato with blame or hide inside a shell game?”

  • Laura: Establish guidelines now. Make the firms comply with local rules before they come. We shouldn’t have to call them to beg for data. It needs to be more prophylactic and rational.

  • Kelsey: We need a way to ticket a vehicle without a driver. Who’s providing the data? The OEM, the vehicle manufacturer, the fleet manager, the vehicle owner?

  • Matthew [deeeeeeep breath]: Three ways: Liability and private lawsuits (tort law), traffic law (state and local), and regulator responses to safety incidents (Federal). The liability standard for L4 autonomy is clear: if you get into a crash with a Waymo, you can file a lawsuit. Did this car deviate from consumer expectations? This is also very different from Tesla Full Self-Driving [(Supervised)]: Tesla has a driver assistance system, and Tesla has pinned responsibility for crashes on the “driver.” For traffic law, California didn’t have a way to ticket an AV company…did the state assume that AVs would or could never break traffic laws? Last, regulator responses: NHTSA has used the SGO database to track incidents. Trends could be used to require operators to make changes to software to settle a recall or…

  • Laura: In government, we found innovation challenging. I didn’t know who to call to “innovate,” especially with science, since we didn’t have scientists on staff.

  • Mathew: We need more technocratic expertise in government…former Acting Administrator Ann Carlson opened an Office of Automation Safety until it got DOGEd.

• “What’s the role of a regulator overall? Is it my role to stop ‘progress’ and put a barrier between what people want and a service that can fulfill that need? How do we close the chasm between the need to regulate and what companies will do on their own?” Meera with the mic drop.

  • Laura: Where do you start? You need some version of access to data in an iterative manner so you can adjust your approach based on new or up-to-date information.

  • Kelsey: We don’t currently have a Federal framework for vehicle design and safe testing. We don’t need to issue every Toyota a permit because we have regulations and assurances that its brakes will work.

  • Matthew: There’s the issue of remote “facilitation.” There are centers in Michigan, Arizona, and…the Philippines. Take, for instance, the SF electrical blackout. When one light is out, the car knows it can ping a real person, but the system bricked because of the sheer volume of requests. So if you’re a facilitator in the Philippines…how can we enforce traffic regulations against you? Do we need the San Francisco District Attorney to request the US Department of Justice to reach out to the Philippine government to extradite a particular worker?

  • Laura: “FDNY doesn’t/can’t/won’t understand” is not acceptable. Waymo uses this as an excuse to get around explaining itself.

Odds’n’Ends:

This final panel was the perfect end to a 4-hour lecture series that didn’t quite feel like it. It was packed with learnings and takeaways. None of the 12 presenters was there to pontificate (well, maybe a few), but it did feel like the most candid conversation you could have in a room full of interested advocates, practitioners, academics, and skeptics.

Relive Session 1 Below:

Exasperated Infrastructures

Be Polyamorous, Ride an AV

The Roosevelt House is a fantastic piece of architecture with a supremely interesting history. The auditorium is vaulted and holds about 60 nerds at any given time, mostly people who willingly traveled to Midtown Eastish for a 4-hour, half-day conference where 12-15 experts in various fields came together in panels of four to extol the virtues of autonomous vehicles; or to excoriate the false premises; or to bring reasonable and measured concerns about their futures. I learned almost everything I ever wanted to know, which, as it turns out, was like cracking and then uncracking an egg…

Read more

3 months ago · 5 likes · 5 comments · sam sklar

BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCE: Session 2 below

What I Expected:

Pushback. The title of this session centers on the “hard” problems. Also, knowing the panelists, I was expecting nothing less than a rebuke of the previous session; a “hold on, the sales pitch shouldn’t hoodwink you.” These panelists are well-known deep thinkers, and having them on the same dais was…intentionally hilarious. Having “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz himself moderate added gravitas, levity, and direction that helped guide this discussion to productive and not…a roundabout AV bashing on the AV panel at the AV conference.

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What I Learned:

We got a mini-soliloquy from each of the panelists as they introduced themselves, which set the tone.

• Sam starts the questions: “Is NYC really that different than other places? Did the governor make the right decision” to end the AV trial period?

  • Rachel: Apparently, yes. We have the moment to think about what we want. “How do we make these vehicles work?” Wrong question. “How can we use AVs to do the thing that we want?”

  • David: Hochul’s bill exempted NYC, but the path forward is to improve transit. We don’t need to scale AVs to make NYC a faster and safer space.

  • Peter: There are important similarities between San Fransicso and New York City. SF’s Board of Supervisors said “no” and got overruled by the State Utilities Commission. The difference is not just the city but the responsiveness of the government to the people. I feel helpless to watch history repeat: In 1971, John Lindsay tried to implement a “Red Zone,” there was backlash (shocker), and it was pulled. In 1922, William McAdoo had to remind motorists that streets do not belong to motorists, “No pleasure cars below 14th St,” he said to unsurprising PANIC from motordom.

  • Rachel: The “safety” conversation is a red herring. We have the tech to make cars safer, irrespective of whether they’re autonomous or not. Cars won by conquest, and just because we agree with each other doesn’t mean that we’re wrong and the “industry” is right.

  • David: Oslo and Helsinki reported no crash deaths, and you know what they don’t have? AVs.

• Sam says: “Should we use deaths per VMT or deaths per capita?”

  • David: Because of exposure per capita is better.

  • Rachel: Why are we so overreliant on individualized transportation…the sum of ideas doesn’t equal total system safety. Waymo is “fun,” but crushed by sheer volume.

• Sam says: “What happens in the city in 10 years…or by 2050? While the industry continues to spend millions lobbying.”

  • Rachel: Do we keep kicking the can on major projects like the BQE, the West Side Highway, and the Williamsburg Bridge? We need a radical revision of street use. Do we promote a half-width car? The vision is to have better ways to move around the city.

  • Sam: Elon Musk says all the negative articles dissuading AV use are killing people.

  • David: “You’re killing people by pointing out gaps in our argument!” I wish we were so powerful…Every lobbyist in DC is on retainer with Waymo. Are Waymos safer than drivers? Waymo says…yes! Academics say…we don’t know! There’s lots of money at stake.

• Sam says: “Should an AV company hire you, Peter, what would your advice be?

  • Peter: The shortest answer is that we have to remember the distinction between tool and solution, and tech companies deliberately obfuscate this distinction…The “tool” expands autonomy, and the “solution” replaces the user. What happens when we have systems that do all the things for you? You’re no longer a responsible party. Rachel Carson was right: we misperceived insecticide use and the problems they cause. There’s a real correlation here to AVs: they’re not salvation and not deliverance.

  • David: This is capitalism.

  • Rachel: These companies are doing what they’re designed to do in the system we designed.

  • David: I would give advice to NHTSA, Congress, Governor Hochul, and the FTC that we’ve completely abdicated responsibility on behalf of industry. The real failure is with the regulators.

  • Peter: If your city does not have the capacity to rise to this occasion, then you’re going to end up with rules written for you by the companies you’re supposed to be regulating. A century ago, street capacity was a public resource to be allocated in the public interest; if you got a monopoly on the street (via trams/Subway), you gave the city what it wanted in return. How do we connect to rural communities? Claire Campbell says: initiatives fail because of a lack of narrative…what’s the narrative that engages industry to imagine road space as a public utility?

  • David: The narrative is money. Taxpayers’ dollars seeded DARPA, which did the initial research into AVs. We have rural AV centers that are funded in Wisconsin and Oklahoma to figure out the use cases…is there not enough traffic, is the cell service too spotty, do we then enable the private sector to step in?

Odds’n’Ends:

This panel lived up to my expectations, if for nothing else than Professor Norton’s urban history tales, David’s incredulity that we’re even having this discussion without the boosters there to hear criticisms, and Rachel’s hard-earned skepticism. To have “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz moderating? What a treat. Look into Clarie Campbell if you care about storytelling, and really ignore El*n Mu*k until he does something of value beyond yapping and tricking incels into paying him with attention.

PS: The panel’s introducer called Sam the Bruce Springsteen of transportation, and I can’t remember why. But it’s in the video below. Happy background watching.

Key Takeways

• Driving slower saves fuel as well as lives, with every 5 mph over 50 mph adding meaningfully to fuel costs.

• Speed limits have five dimensions: designed, posted, observed, caught, and fatal. Effective policy must address all of them.

• The 1970s precedent shows that crisis-era speed reductions can prove surprisingly durable, lasting decades beyond the original trigger.

• A crisis can create a rare platform for change, but only if public opinion has reached the threshold where unpopular measures feel necessary. Has this crisis reached that point for lower speeds?

• Local democratic legitimacy matters: speed limit changes imposed from above are less likely to stick than those driven by communities themselves.

• Political capital is finite; governments should weigh whether speed limits are the best use of it compared to higher-impact transport reforms.

• The case for lower speeds is not really in dispute; the debate is about timing, process, and strategy.

Next Steps

Should lower speeds be part of your response to the current oil crisis?

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Introduction

When the oil crisis hit in the 1970s, governments reached for lower speed limits. It worked then, but does that playbook still apply today?

In this week’s blog, we’re back again to go head-to-head on whether reducing speed limits should be part of our response to the current oil crisis. I make the case for slowing down, arguing it saves both lives and fuel. Russell pushes back, questioning whether now is really the right moment to act.

For (Sam)

I’d argue this is relatively non-controversial. Generally, we should seek to lower speeds on neighborhood roads. There is an exponential and inverse elastic relationship between an increase in speed and the likelihood that a crash becomes deadly. I will always be in favor of safety over speed. That said, this argument is meant to argue for lower speeds in response to the ongoing oil crisis (which is still ongoing a month later, and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon). The direct argument here is that encouraging slower driving not only saves lives it also saves gas: the US Department of Energy, to the extent it can be trusted as a truthful institution, says the following.

“It can be assumed that each 5 mph driven over 50 mph is like paying an additional $0.27 per gallon for gas.” Why? Reduction in aerodynamic drag (the faster you drive, the harder it is to overcome pesky air resistance). Smoother, gradual acceleration and deceleration often save more gas than driving faster in the long run. It is more energy-consuming to rev an engine up to higher RPMs and sustain this level of acceleration as conditions change. Hitting the brakes has a similar, if not inverse, effect. Of course, this oversimplified analysis depends on road conditions, the age, make, and model of the vehicle, its weight, and its fuel-injection type. Generally speaking, encouraging slower speeds can help conserve petrol. This is true during “normal” times, too.

The next thought here is, how do we encourage drivers to slow down? In my practice, I preach the five different types of speed limits: design, posted, observed, caught, and dead. If the road is designed—and traffic engineers know how to design a road to encourage slower or faster driving—for a certain speed limit, a posted speed limit will have an effect insofar as people willingly follow a posted speed limit. The delta there is the observed speed limit: how fast are people actually driving, regardless of what speed the road was designed for or what the law says.

The next two are more social and less technical: the speed at which you get caught and the speed at which you die. Planners love to talk about the three Es: engineering, education, and enforcement; all three have different standards depending on cultural norms and the fairness of policing in certain communities. I don’t think I really have to spell this out, but we don’t necessarily have a perfectly optimal or responsive system to perpetual speeders who live in one neighborhood over another. Lastly, the speed at which you die is tied to the relationship between speed, safe braking distance, and the age/ability of the persons affected. This is a land use question and one worth answering—should we change the geometry of the built environment to encourage slow speeds? Land use is often tied directly to the designed speed limit. Wider lanes and wider roads naturally take up more land that could be dedicated to development or open space. So, slower speeds solve many problems at once and should be a central policy and design focus to manage the ongoing oil crisis.

Against (Russell)

Read Russell's Rebuttal Here

Conclusion

We agree on more than it might first appear. Slower speeds are safer, better for the environment, and, as the current crisis makes plain, better for fuel efficiency too. The real disagreement is one of timing, democratic process, and political strategy.

My case is grounded in the evidence: the relationship between speed and safety is well established, and an oil crisis provides a rare moment of public receptiveness to change. Russell’s counterpoint is a pragmatic one, that poorly timed or top-down interventions risk backlash, eroding the very public support that lasting reform requires.

Perhaps the most honest conclusion is that both can be right. The case for lower speeds is strong; the question of when and how to implement them is where good policymakers must exercise judgment. If the current crisis deepens, the window for bolder action may open. Until then, the debate Russell and I have laid out here is exactly the kind of thinking our cities and communities need more of.

The Roosevelt House is a fantastic piece of architecture with a supremely interesting history. The auditorium is vaulted and holds about 60 nerds at any given time, mostly people who willingly traveled to Midtown Eastish for a 4-hour, half-day conference where 12-15 experts in various fields came together in panels of four to extol the virtues of autonomous vehicles; or to excoriate the false premises; or to bring reasonable and measured concerns about their futures. I learned almost everything I ever wanted to know, which, as it turns out, was like cracking and then uncracking an egg.

First, the crack: the drop from 30,000 feet. “Session 1: The State of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry — Promise, Reality, and Readiness,” hosted four storytellers from the public and private sectors. Next, the gather: the reality check from the skeptics who have been shouting into the vacuum. “Session 2: Autonomous Vehicles and the Hard Problems — Safety, Streets, and Tradeoffs,” wrestled with tough questions without a response. I’ll get into what I found out here. Last, the ikigai: soldering the pieces back together with a reality check. “Session 3: Panel 3: Moving Forward — Governing Autonomous Vehicles in New York City” dug into the thorny, less obvious challenges facing those seeking to regulate AVs as they roll around city streets. All three together and, well, that’s all you need to know for now. Seriously.

What I Expected: I’m going to reflect on what I expected before the session, knowing full well that this is a silly task given that I’ve already seen the session and all the subsequent ones. Think of this more like discussion questions.

What I Learned: What are my takeaways from this session? What confounded my expectations? What’s a nugget or tidbit that will help you do better in thinking about AVs holistically?

Sam’s Note: My reactions to what I learned, interspersed where appropriate.

Odds’n’Ends: Funny or poignant comments made that don’t really fit into other categories.

Session 1: The State of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry — Promise, Reality, and Readiness

What I Expected:

Some industry shilling and salesmanship from project/agency representation—not that this is a bad thing necessarily. I think the public sector should be trying to sell us their ideas as often as possible, and the purpose of the private sector is to sell its wares, goods, and services. I expected all parties to show & tell their bona fides and for this discussion to be less critical and more spin than deep learning.

What I Learned:

Less than I should have, but more than I thought I was going to. Here’s what I mean: these panelists were cagey and very much on party lines. I’m not saying this was necessarily a net negative—it’s to be expected, and it was great to have these different perspectives on stage together. I’m going to paraphrase, mostly below, except where I’ve surrounded the text in quotation marks.

• When asked, “What are AVs doing successfully today that they weren’t doing 5 years ago?” is an interesting question from Veronica.

  • Seth: They can detect crash markers much quicker—something traditional transit can’t necessarily do.

  • Joe: Many automated public transit vehicles are purpose-built for the use case and not retrofitted with existing equipment.

  • Anthony: Waymo operates in different cities with different challenges, but the vehicles themselves are equipped with LIDAR detectors that … self-clean.

• When asked, “What does policy look like?”

  • Joe: Focus on outreach around a pilot project. What does a project’s particulars actually look like? If it is determined that the demand might work differently in a retail environment, why not shift the operating hours to a noon-to-night schedule from bankers’ hours? Nothing is set in stone.

  • Seth: How do you translate the “cool factor” to public transit to get buy-in to move people in big numbers in big cities?

  • Anthony: Car readiness is more important. It’s up to Waymo to work with the conditions offered and design a solution. Once launched, the next phase is how to make the rollout better.

• A great question from Veronica: “What guardrails are needed to improve access rather than to simply reinforce gaps” in the ecosystem?

  • Joe: Services offered should mimic public transit’s offerings: affordable, equitable, sustainable.

  • Anthony: Waymo’s role is filling gaps like first and last mile access to transit.

  • Seth: Make the tech ubiquitous. Why do customers reach for U*er? AV transit needs to be like that.

• Veronica asked: “What lessons have we learned from early pilots, from risk management, to procurements and partnerships?”

  • Seth: We have to isolate one question at a time [semi-humorously]: what impossible thing do you want to do? Then go do it. Then repeat.

  • Anthony: We want to be boring, and we want people to feel like taking an AV is a normal activity.

  • Joe: Every service must meet the customer’s expectations. But so far, there’s lots of tailwind to push the projects forward.

• “What advice do you have for cities to be ‘AV-ready’ within 2 years?”

  • Seth: Decide what you want to do and then do that thing.

  • Anthony: We’re advocating in Albany to help create a scheme for the introduction of AVs, and…cities shouldn’t put their heads in the sand.

  • Joe: Make sure you’re opening a big tent. “It has a thousand parents…be polyamorous.”

Odds’n’Ends: I’m left feeling hopeful for this technology’s use cases in cities, as part of certain solutions, and that the private sector might be the best provider generally, with strong regulatory frameworks from the public sector, which has the interests of the public front and center. I don’t know, though, at this point, whether I’m being sold a bill of goods or not. I’m naturally skeptical.

Also, Joe mentioned an organization called the “ACES Coalition”: Automatic, Connected, Electric, Shared. You can learn more about this organization here. I liked what I read from them. Educational and clear legislative priorities. Pro-tip (usually): you can find an index of organizations that are involved in this type of work and…reach out to people if you’re more interested. It’s a mercury vapor lamp for networking. (See more here.)

Key Takeaways

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

• In favour of free fares:

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

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

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

• Against free fares:

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

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

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

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

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

• In favour of car pooling:

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

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

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

• Against car pooling:

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

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

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

    ---

    Introduction

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

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

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

Part 1 - Fares

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

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

The Case for Cheap or Free Fares (Sam)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Case Against (Russell)

Read Russell's Response HERE

Part 2 - Car Pooling

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

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

The Case for Encouraging Car Pooling (Russell)

Read Russell's Arugment HERE

The Case Against Car Pooling (Sam)

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

It Diverts Attention from Building Robust Transit

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

Logistics, Logistics, Logistics

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

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

It Induces Car Trips

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAP-21:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the Most of Map-21

Catch up on older posts in this series below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAFETEA-LU (2005):

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

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

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

Continuing the series:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. 80% of the battle is showing up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways

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

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

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

• We start with bus services. Opportunities include:

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

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

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

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

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

What Next?

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

Introduction

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

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

That’s the premise of what follows.

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

The six areas we’ll cover are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving Bus Services

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

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

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

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

The Arguments Against (Sam)

Overview:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arguments In Favour (Russell)

Russell's Argument is HERE

Conclusion

Should we be improving bus services during an oil crisis?

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

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

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

We’d love to know what you think.