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

What do you think?

Email me

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

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

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Overview

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

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

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

Why me

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

Broad strokes

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

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

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

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

Why now?

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

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

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

• Knight Foundation

• Surdna Foundation

• Ford Foundation

• Solutions Journalism Network

• Journalism Funders Network

• MacArthur Foundation

• Open Society Foundations

Table of Contents

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

1. Acknowledgements:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Index

14. Epilogue

Audience

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

Planning and Design Institutions:

• American Planning Association

• Institute of Traffic Engineers

• Transportation Research Board

• American Society of Civil Engineers

• Others

Think Tanks (right, left, and center):

• Brookings Institution

• Urban Institute

• Manhattan Institute

• Reason Institute

• Others

Advocacy Organizations:

• Transportation for America

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

• AASHTO

• Others

Funding networks/foundations:

• Knight Foundation

• Rockefeller Foundation

• Surdna Foundation

• Ford Foundation

• Others

Academic Institutions:

• Planning, Policy, Engineering, and Design University Programs

• American Collegiate Schools of Planning, Inc.

• Others

Author Information

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

Marketing Platform

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

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

Competing/Comparable Titles

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

• Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

• The Unfinished Metropolis by Benjamin Schneider

• City Limits by Megan Kimble

• New York’s Secret Subway by Matthew Algeo

• Sidewalk Nation by Michael Pollack

• Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman

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

Production Consideration

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

The Backstory

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

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

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

Next, the proposal.

Proposal Prom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Over My Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is “The Culture of Transportation?”

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow: Where the Proposal Stands

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

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

Working Title

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

Currently:

Culture Devours Policy: Infrastructure Development in Crisis1