The Myth of Transit in California

Many transit systems are reeling financially in the aftermath of the pandemic, and the situation in California is particularly dire. In this episode, Nick Josefowitz of SPUR and Beth Osborne of Transportation for America discuss the urgent need for the state budget to boost transit funding, and the catastrophic implications if it doesn’t.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

The pandemic was devastating to America's transit systems — not only the lockdowns, but the enduring shift to working from home that followed. It has left transit systems everywhere desperate for riders and funding.

Nowhere is that more true than California. The state’s transit systems find themselves at the edge of a fiscal cliff. If they do not receive some new funding from the state in this year's budget — which will be decided and finalized by June 15 — they are going to be forced to implement dramatic cutbacks in service. Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) could eliminate weekend service! It’s grim.

As anyone familiar with municipal transit systems can tell you, once routes and service are cut, it is extremely difficult to bring them back. And without transit, it will be that much more difficult to build infill housing, get people out of cars, or revive flagging downtown districts.

It’s a looming catastrophe — for climate, for social justice, for the state’s reputation. So where is the governor? Where is the urgency in the legislature to prevent this? The deadline is rapidly approaching and the escalating urgency of transit activists has largely been met with silence or indifference.

To discuss the crisis, I contacted Nick Josefowitz. He’s the chief policy officer at SPUR, a California nonprofit focused on sustainable cities that has been one of the most prominent voices raising alarm about the situation. And to avoid total doom and gloom, I also contacted Beth Osborne, the director of DC-based Transportation for America, so she could share some stories about states that aren’t screwing up their transit systems.

With no further ado, Nick Josefowitz and Beth Osborne, thank you so much for coming on Volts.

Nick Josefowitz

Thanks for having us.

Beth Osborne

Glad to be here.

David Roberts

I have wanted to do stuff on transit for a while. It's always been a little difficult to know how to wrap my head around it, how to carve off a distinct issue or what angle to approach it from. But helpfully, reality has served up a horrible crisis. So just a wonderful excuse to jump into this subject. So before we back out to a more general picture, let's start there. Nick, with you. Just tell us, what is the transit funding cliff crisis and how the heck did it come to this?

Nick Josefowitz

Well, the transit fiscal cliff, as we're calling it, is sort of most acute in California, although it's something that's happening elsewhere as well. And as a result of more people working from home, fewer people are commuting every day. Transit agencies rely in part on fare revenue to sustain themselves, and in California, they rely more on fare revenue than in other places. And as a result, we are about to see massive service cuts for California transit agencies with the big transit agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area most impacted. San Francisco Muni is saying that they're going to have to cut one line a month for the next 20 months.

David Roberts

Yikes.

Nick Josefowitz

BART is saying they would have to stop weekend service, potentially stop serving certain stations. It's a real mess. And it's the type of mess that once you're in it, it's very difficult to get out of it.

David Roberts

And this was just the natural upshot or consequence of the pandemic and work from home. There's nothing beyond that that came and took money out of the transit kitty.

Nick Josefowitz

Not really, no. It's really just sort of people commuting less. And so much of our transportation infrastructure and our transit systems were built around the commute, and that's what's sort of driven the crisis. But the fact that we've allowed ourselves to be on the precipice is a decision that we've all collectively made, or that I should say in this case, the state government has made. The federal government stepped up during COVID and provided operating support to transit agencies around the country to help them continue to run buses and trains.

David Roberts

Through the infrastructure bill.

Nick Josefowitz

Right, exactly. Through all the COVID relief bills, there was really meaningful support for transit. But that's run out and there's not any more coming. And now it's really up to the state of California to support transit like other states have done.

David Roberts

And this is really coming down to the wire. So what is the wire exactly? What is the deadline here?

Nick Josefowitz

So the deadline is June 15. That's when California is constitutionally required to adopt a budget. And so it's a good 15 days away. And so we basically have, I think, two weeks here to convince the state, the governor, the legislature that this year would be the year that we need to save transit.

David Roberts

And so what exactly are advocates asking the government to do? Is this taking money from some other bucket? Is this just raising taxes? Is reallocating something, or is there a pool of money that they have their eye on? In particular, what precisely would you like California legislators to do?

Nick Josefowitz

Well, there's really two things. The first one is that in the Federal Infrastructure Act, the IIJA, there was money that was allocated to transportation and it flowed through highway accounts but is eligible to support transit operations. And President Biden, even in his budget memo, said "Hey, states, we gave you this pot of money and you can use it on transit operations if you want." And so we're asking the state to use some of that money that is not allocated yet, over one and a half billion dollars, to support transit operations. And then the second thing is that California has a cap and trade system —

David Roberts

Yes!

Nick Josefowitz

which I'm sure all your listeners are sort of familiar with. And transit is an essential climate strategy. We're almost certainly not going to be able to meet any of our climate goals without massive increases in transit ridership. And so we're also asking the state to take some of the money that's generated by cap and trade and put it into transit operations.

David Roberts

And I bet I'm not the only person that hears it this way. It just sounds weird to be in a blue state, a liberal state, an allegedly climate forward, climate leading state, you're begging them not to let transit die. Why do you have to beg them? Why isn't Gavin Newsom, the climate governor, et cetera, et cetera, why isn't he first in line pounding the table about this? Our legislators like, why on earth has it come to this? Why does this require advocacy at all?

Nick Josefowitz

There's a lot of reasons, but I think, like with a lot of things, it comes down to political power. And the grandma on Social Security who takes the bus to go grocery shopping doesn't have a lobbyist in Sacramento and is not getting state legislators elected. And the interest groups, like the folks who the contractors who build highways, they do have many lobbyists in Sacramento and they're very powerful and very sophisticated. And I think it really comes down to that power dynamic. And not just the power dynamic in this moment, but as sort of a power dynamic that has built up over many, many years where the people that transit serves most are the least powerful people in society.

David Roberts

Right.

Nick Josefowitz

And so there is especially at the state level, they've really struggled to kind of get the state to pony up the resources that are really necessary.

David Roberts

You just have to wonder how loud the clanging and banging about climate has to get before that changes. And also the other aspect of this is a lot of this is, as you say, people are working from home. They've abandoned downtowns. And so downtowns are hurting in California. Google San Francisco downtown and spend several days reading apocalyptic accounts. But the thing is, those people that used to come into downtown, at least half of them ish came in on transit. So if the state wants to revive these downtowns, as it alleges to, and there are some pretty powerful interests involved in those downtowns, commercial real estate and stuff like that, and lots of retail, what do they think is going to happen to downtowns if the transit gets cut? Why aren't they at the front of the line?

Nick Josefowitz

You're absolutely right. For BART, for instance, 80% of BART trips start or end in downtown San Francisco, downtown Oakland or downtown Berkeley. And the geometry of downtowns in California don't allow them to actually be served by simply cars. So we estimated that if we were to replace just a fraction of the BART riders that come into downtown and they were to drive every day, we would need a new square mile of parking in downtown San Francisco. And downtown San Francisco is not much larger than a square mile. So it's a pretty existential issue for these downtowns. And in downtown San Francisco, you have office buildings that are 30 stories built with six parking spaces.

David Roberts

And the stadiums, too. I forgot about this. Aren't there downtown sports stadiums with very little parking?

Nick Josefowitz

Yes, it's amazing. I think that the Giants stadium in downtown San Francisco has the least parking of any baseball stadium in the country.

David Roberts

Yeah, that blew my mind.

Nick Josefowitz

Something like that. Yeah, at least vying for that title. And so I think what's happened is that this is a crisis that has kind of snuck up on people because, like with so much of the discussion in California around climate, every politician says the right thing. They all say they care about it. They care about climate. It's their top priority. They vote for goals that sort of set the state on a path to zero carbon future. They all support transit deeply, deeply, deeply. And then to a certain extent, everybody was taking their word for it on this one, that they actually did care about transit.

It was only about a week and a half ago when the proposals actually came out, that the legislature passed their budgets, that we realized that there was no money.

Beth Osborne

Nick, I think you might be really hitting on something very important that goes back to something Dave said earlier, which is how loud does the clanging have to get on things like climate and equity before people realize they need to fund transit? And it comes down to the fact that, a, no one thinks about the transportation system and climate. They think they're going to electrify all the vehicles and everything will be fine. Two, they don't think about transportation policy really much at all. It's very much a build stuff and go to the grand opening sort of approach, even in the most thoughtful of states.

And there is this perception, this mythology that Democrats are good on transportation. I don't know where this came from. There is no evidence of this. Some of the greatest updates to the transportation program, which are quite old at this point, having transit added to the federal program, happened in the early 80s, pushed by House members that represented cities. And at the time there were a fair bit of Republicans there. It was not a Democratic thing. It was not a progressive thing. It was an economic thing. And I often find that the best folks to convince to do transportation differently are those that are looking to make their money go further, not the climate and equity folks.

It is the folks that are saying this doesn't seem to be working and it seems to be wasteful. And you can get further with conservatives on that a lot of the time. So laying back and assuming that so called progressives are going to stand up for transit has always been a losing strategy that somehow no one has noticed.

David Roberts

Well, let me ask you about that then, Beth, because you have sort of a national perspective on this. The fact that transit had an anemic, let's say support, grassroots support, and then relatively anemic support, even among Democrats, has been true for a long time. All you have to do is look at where states spend their transportation dollars, like in blue states and red states. It's all going to highway, highway, highways. But it seems like to me, at least in parallel with the rise of the clanging and banging about climate change, there's been the rise of the YIMBY movement and the movement about more housing and the moving about cities and urbanism and transit and bikes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It seems like there is something like a grassroots upswell happening. Do you see that being of sufficient size and scale to change that basic calculus? The calculus being nobody loves transit, nobody will fight for it.

Beth Osborne

Well, I think it's growing and it is moving in that direction. It's really positive to see people pushing back on things that used to be considered too nerdy, too in the weeds to get involved in, like fights about parking minimums and fights about single family housing and things like that. So there is something happening that is positive. We have a lot of ground to make up and we have a very short period of time to do it. But I don't know that it's a lack of love for transit. I think it's a lack of thought about transportation and transportation policy. That people don't feel like they need to go deep on this because transportation is just the bipartisan good news story that doesn't have deep policy connected to it for most elected officials.

That is not always true. There are some excellent examples otherwise, particularly the leaders in Minnesota who really just showed the rest of the country up.

David Roberts

We're going to get to that later so that we're not depressed the whole time we're talking.

Beth Osborne

But I will remind us all that the fight here in DC, to come up with that federal operating support, happened with a Republican Congress under the Trump administration. And a great deal of that money, that original $25 billion that we got in 2020, was to a large extent thanks to Senator Wicker from Mississippi, who really stepped up on behalf of his own transit systems in Mississippi and he knew that they were important.

David Roberts

I don't associate Mississippi with transit.

Beth Osborne

Let me just say that Senator Wicker also, from an economics perspective, is the reason we have a robust rail program in this country. So the champions come from many different places. But I have to say it's rarely amongst the big elected, so called climate champions, it really tends to be people who see some real potential locally. Senator Wicker has been very involved in starting Gulf Coast inner city passenger rail service, and he's very close with his transit agencies and his local governments. So that fight was successful in DC. Because people understood fundamentally that if we didn't have transit for nurses and lab techs and people like that to get to the hospital during the COVID crisis, it didn't matter if you had a car.

And that was so obvious to everybody then that we were actually at my organization, Transportation for America, making the case for more money than even the American Public Transit Association was asking for, and we got it. So it was not a hard fight. People instinctually understood that we needed transit to survive and that the feds, who have never supported operating assistance at that level before and certainly not in cities, stepped up and made it happen. So there is an understanding and a way to make this case, but I think that a lot of us are going to have to learn to be a lot more tough on the progressive, particularly governors who have not been asked to really put their action behind their words.

David Roberts

Nick you're in Sacramento. You're talking about like, there's $1.5 billion of cap and trade money or whatever and you're begging for I mean, this is not like you're asking "Hey, I'd like 50/50 here" you know what I mean, for transit and highways and cars or even close to that, you're really begging for scraps margins. And you would think if you just take a step back from it that in a state like California with its housing problem, with its climate problem, et cetera, that transit would be not the afterthought, not the marginal extra, not the sort of thing that you toss scraps to at the end. Do you see anything like that kind of fundamental shift coming?

Nick Josefowitz

I don't, though I would really like it to come. And I think there is potentially a moment where transit in California suffers so much that people stop taking it for granted and start to really plot a path forward for it to not just survive but thrive in the future. And there's a real risk for doing that because in many parts of the United States, in many parts of California, transit has gone away and transit systems that people never thought that they could live without just went away. They weren't supported by the state, they weren't supported by the local communities, and they just went away.

And then it becomes incredibly difficult to bring them back, incredibly expensive. So there's advocates that are this weekend putting on a series of transit funerals all over the Bay Area to try and try and help make it real for decision makers. And there's going to be a priest that buries the bus and there's going to be a band that plays Taps and the whole thing, right? But I think people struggle to really internalize that these transit systems, this transit service is really at risk in the way that it is.

David Roberts

One more question for you, Nick, before I get back to you, Beth, with some more national stuff. But in terms of California, I mean, obviously this is a crisis and what is most needed in the short term is just money to save these things. But are there other particular reforms that you would like to see in how transit gets funded that might make it, let's say, less crisis prone, more stable in the future or even, god forbid, have enough money to expand and not just limp along, barely surviving?

Totally, and I think that that's been a really important part of the discussion because we don't want to just kind of get over this particular crisis, get the money to avoid this particular crisis and then be in the same crisis again in a year or two. Yeah, there's, I think, a lot of really simple stuff that's not that expensive that we could do that would really transform people's experiences of riding public transit and get many more riders on the buses and the trains. And in a place like San Francisco, you'd think that this was already the case, but it's not. Making sure that riders know exactly where their buses are and exactly where their trains are so that they know when they're coming.

Nick Josefowitz

Real-time transit information, making sure that that's universal would make a huge difference. For instance, one of the things that San Francisco has done quite well, but which it could do a lot more of, is put in place bus lanes, prioritize buses on the street. And there's on one of the big sort of thoroughfares in San Francisco, Van Ness Avenue, during the pandemic, there was a major new bus lane that was rolled out and ridership increased by 30% because it was just faster and it was more reliable. And what's not to like about that? That's kind of what everybody wants out of their bus.

And so I think there's some really sort of concrete changes that one can make that would really make a difference and would set transit up to thrive. But I think it's also important to appreciate that transit thriving is not something that transit agencies can do on their own. We have almost a century of car-oriented planning of cities being built around cars. And it's going to take a long time to kind of shift that to stop sort of subsidizing people driving alone in their car and to start sort of creating the urban fabric that is conducive to people walking to a bus stop, taking a bus to where they need to go, and then being able to walk to their destination.

David Roberts

Would you like to see California transit move away from its degree of dependence on fares, or do you think fares are a perfectly good way to fund things?

Nick Josefowitz

I think in the long run, that's really important. And we were saying that transit agencies in California get much less operating support from the state than in other places. BART, for instance, gets 5% of its operating budget from the state of California. SEPTA in Philadelphia gets 50% of its operating budget from the state. And many of California's largest transit operators compared to their peers are dramatically underfunded by the state. And that wasn't really sustainable before COVID and it's hella not sustainable now. And that's something that I think the state really needs to step in on and it has the resources to do it. It just needs to make the right decision.

David Roberts

You also have a bunch of transit agencies. Like isn't it a county by county thing in terms of transit administration?

Nick Josefowitz

You know, there's 29 transit agencies in the Bay Area. There are many more in LA metro area.

David Roberts

That can't be the right way to run things, can it? I mean, when I hear local control like that, I think somebody at some point did that because they wanted to block transit. That's why you bring control to a local area, right, is because you don't want transit, because you don't want the poor people coming. Did I guess right about how it ended up that way?

Nick Josefowitz

Well, that's certainly the case for a lot of it. And then sometimes it's someone really wanted to build some rail extension and it didn't make sense to anybody else and so they decided to create their own transit agency just to build their own rail extension or whatever it is.

David Roberts

Is consolidation in the cards or do you think it would help?

Nick Josefowitz

I think the challenge is that consolidating transit agencies is really hard. And you even see this in the corporate sector where mergers often go bad. And I think in government it's really difficult to ring out efficiencies from merging agencies. And what we do know is that in the short term there will be significant costs as there are with all mergers and the benefits will be felt over time. And so I think it's difficult at this moment when we're really trying to help transit survive to impose another cost on them and say, "Okay, now you also have to merge."

So I think it makes sense to kind of think about it and to sort of put in place a structure where that can happen in the future. But I don't think it's the right thing to do now because I don't think it will actually deliver all that much benefit, even though it'll certainly be nice. It'll feel better.

David Roberts

More conceptually neat and tidy.

Nick Josefowitz

Symmetry to it.

Beth Osborne

I don't know if I think it's that useless. There are ways to make them at least coordinate investment packages, operations planning, and things like that that then make the preservation of their fiefdoms less useful or attractive. So there are ways to go in that direction. There are certainly ways to award those that do that. There's an example of some transit in Maine that's often very tourist-focused. But while they do have different transit agencies behind the scenes, the public-facing profile looks totally unified. So there are things that can be done that make it work better.

There are also things we need to do with transit to make it serve all trips instead of just the commute trip. Remember that transit has always been the secondary concern, or maybe even tertiary, where the reason in our country will fund transit is to benefit the driver by moving people during rush hour to work, which is rush hour. That work commute is 95% of our focus in the transportation program because congestion relief is almost 100% of our focus.

David Roberts

Yes, Seattle just got done after 1000 years of trying, putting light rail in place. We raised billions of dollars to build light rail and we ended up just putting it alongside the interstate where its only use is a commuter substitute. Right. It's just a different commute. And all the other benefits of public transit, which as you both know are manifold, were wasted. It was maddening.

Beth Osborne

But I think it is important to point out that there is an opportunity now to revisit some of those assumptions. And while the highway building complex is going to justify massive highway expansions, even if the commute never returns to where it was and will probably get the money they want, in spite of the fact that the car trips will not necessarily show up, transit has to justify itself. And so we can use this as an opportunity to think about serving those short trips, those neighborhood-focused trips, going to the grocery, going to school, going to the doctor, all those sorts of things. There's a lot that we can do and Nick hit on some of it just with things like painting bus lanes and giving buses the ability to get through lights faster and things like that.

I myself can tell you that my commute has benefited immensely from the fact that some bus-only lanes were painted on 16th street in Washington DC. Even with less frequency than before COVID it is a better trip because they don't have to be in the main travel lanes. So there's a lot that can be done.

David Roberts

So Beth, let's pull back a little. I assume that the catastrophe that struck California transit during the Pandemic struck all transit everywhere across the country. Is there a national transit crisis to echo this one in California? In other words, are there lots of transit services that are on the verge of serious service cuts or have other states figured out how to get through this?

Beth Osborne

Oh yeah, this did not sneak up on everybody. This has been something people have been worried about. I do worry that other activists are taking their elected officials' words and not really holding them to account. And so this could happen in other places. But yeah, this is an issue here in the Washington DC area. It's definitely something that SEPTA in Philly is seeing. The MTA in New York. I mean this is everywhere. As we are adjusting back to post-COVID times and especially in big cities, a lot of employers are offering people more flexibility, and you can't choose a mode of transportation to go to work if you don't travel to work.

The bus does not serve my trip to my basement office. So it's something that is hitting a bunch of folks. Look, several states are stepping up and making sure that transit gets through this. Most are just trying to help it eke its way through rather than thinking big about how to make transit really robust.

David Roberts

Do you think it's inevitable that basically transit, nationally speaking, is going to come out of this worse than it came in? Is it inevitable that there's going to be sort of a national reduction in service and frequency. You don't think so?

Beth Osborne

No, I think it will come out worse in some places and better in other places. There are places that are really rethinking the way they provide transit to their constituents as a result of this crisis. And that is a wonderful updating, and it's thinking creatively and grabbing the opportunity, taking the challenge and turning it into opportunity.

David Roberts

Don't let a crisis go to waste. Like whoever said that.

That's exactly right. And I think some transit leaders are stepping up and offering some visionary approaches, and some elected leaders are also stepping up. And so, yeah, I think we will see some areas come out of this stronger than ever, and others not.

Tell us what the 80/20 rule is and what it governs and what its effects are and whether that is. Because that seems to me the core of it. Basically, it comes down to money. What is it, and is there any hope of getting around that or changing that very fundamental misallocation, in my opinion.

Beth Osborne

So that's at the federal level. And it goes back to something I mentioned earlier, that back in the early 80s, when the Reagan administration was pushing a gas tax increase, a bunch of House members from urban areas stepped up and said, I'm not going to support pouring a bunch of new money into a highway program that's going to be spent outside of my jurisdiction. I want to see some of this money dedicated to transit. And so they raised the gas tax by five cents, and one penny was reserved for transit, and the other four were for highways.

80/20 split 1982, 41 years ago. I have to say that's the last time urban members really stood up and demanded and got something big in transportation, they've really rested on their laurel.

David Roberts

Since it's wild, there are more of them now. I mean, you'd think urbanity in general would play a bigger part in our politics these days because the world is urbanizing, US is urbanizing. That's where our economic growth comes from. And yet we still have this weirdly rural-focused —

Beth Osborne

Well, that's partly because of the Senate. And every member of the Senate thinks they represent a rural state. They'll all tell you that. I remember Barbara Boxer saying that all the time when she was representing California. But the other thing is, in the interim, the transportation program was trust funded, which means the gas taxes that came in were protected from the annual spending debate. And I think that cut off knowledge, creativity, innovation, and debate. I think that this is a very Beth Osborne thing. Very few people will agree with me on this, but I really think that protecting the gas tax has been terrible for transportation policy and accountability.

So at the federal level, we did start pushing in this last reauthorization to go from an 80/20 split to a 50/50 split. And there was some beginning interest in the House. The Senate was not open and President Biden, who is a statewide elected Democrat, who, as I pointed out before, is not normally at the vanguard of transportation thinking, but also a creature of the Senate, also was not a participant in that conversation.

David Roberts

But come on, Joe, he's a train guy.

Beth Osborne

He's a train guy, not a transit guy. Trains and transit are different. And I doubt he does spend a lot of time riding the transit in Wilmington.

David Roberts

I doubt a lot of senators spend a lot of time on transit.

Beth Osborne

Now, I do want to point out that at the state level, this is very different. States handle things totally differently and they're not wrapped up in the 80/20 split. But more than half of the states have constitutional prohibitions against spending their gas taxes and highway user fees on transit.

Nick Josefowitz

Oh, yeah, California has that too.

David Roberts

Specifically, you can't spend it on transit or just specifically, you can't spend it not on anything but highways.

Beth Osborne

You have to spend it on highways. Now, I would argue that a lot of those constitutional prohibitions could be gotten around because they aren't phrased very well. They weren't drafted very well. So a highway expenditure could certainly include a bus-only lane. That bus-only lane is on the highway. The sidewalk can be part of the highway. And Colorado back about 20 years ago, just legislatively defined the word highway to mean highways, transit, walking, and biking.

David Roberts

Oh, hilarious. Well, that's one way to do it, I guess.

Nick Josefowitz

So California has this same constitutional prohibition, and I think actually one of the big opportunities to get rid of this kind of 80/20 rule and the equivalent of it in states is when we transition away from gas taxes.

David Roberts

Right. Which has to happen anyway, right. I mean, that's got to — the gas tax supporting everything is not sustainable as gas.

Beth Osborne

Correct.

Nick Josefowitz

Exactly.

David Roberts

Cars decline.

Nick Josefowitz

As cars get more efficient. As more and more cars are electrified, we're just going to be using less gas, hopefully. And so I think with a new revenue source, there's a moment to decide "Okay, how do we want to actually allocate that new revenue source?" And we don't have to do the thing that we decided we want to do in the 1970s or the 1980s, which we haven't really been able to revisit since then.

David Roberts

But what about culturally, Beth, there's the money formula and the history of the money sources and then there's just kind of the culture at State Departments of Transportation. I know Washington best, and I have been listening to transit advocates rail against the State Department of Transportation, which has basically occasionally fought the Seattle Department of Transportation, forcing highways, forcing this sort of focus on the commuters that want to come into Seattle from the outside. Is that problem as bad as I have it in my head? Like, are State Departments of Transportation sort of uniquely reactionary corners of the state government, or is that overstating it?

Beth Osborne

Well, I think again, a lot of them have funding that's trust funded. And as trust fund brats, they don't have to answer to a lot of people and they're often not held to account for their products. And that's a fault, again of citizens and the advocates and elected representatives. But the trust fund makes it easy to just kind of move along and do the same things you've always done. But I think it's really important to think about what is expected of the state DOTs. They didn't make this up because they have deeply held hatred for transit.

They were created to build a highway system. That was why they were brought into being. And as they built a highway system, a lot of them had more piled on top of that original purpose. But it wasn't necessarily piled on top with new priorities and robust funding. It was more like while you're doing your main thing, which is that highway building, you should worry about things like transit and pedestrian safety. And like anybody who is charged with a big task and then told to just do extra stuff on the side, you're not going to do that as well as you could.

And again, state legislatures are a big part of this. A lot of times it is the legislature that is demanding this kind of funding and approach. And if the DOTs do anything but focus on vehicle movement, vehicle speed and congestion reduction, they get torn apart by their state legislatures and frankly, by a lot of the press, because across the country, most of the press that covers transportation really only covers the traffic report, not really transportation policy. We are starting to see a change in that. There's been some extraordinary leadership from the L.A. Times that looked at highways and the harm they do to black and brown communities from taking property next to highways.

And here in the Washington Post and the New York Times have written really outstanding articles on what highway building and expansion really does for congestion reduction. But this is super new.

Nick Josefowitz

I think one can overstate the power of the bureaucracy as an immovable object and every time we talk about it, it feels a little deep statey when we go there.

David Roberts

Talking about state DOTs makes me feel very deep statey Nick.

Nick Josefowitz

Nick yeah, well, we all need to somehow indulge that. But what we've seen is that the leadership is appointed by the governor and sometimes there's commissions that are appointed by the governor in the state legislature and who is in those leadership positions makes a huge difference. And with a sort of — if you put people in leadership positions and you keep them there and you put people with similar values in those positions for a number of years, you can really change cultures of agencies. I don't think one can just kind of wave one's hands and say, we're never going to shift these bureaucracies.

I think there are really powerful tools that the governors and the state legislature can wield. And you've seen that in California. California has been setting climate targets since before I was born, I think. But it was only a few years ago with a really great DOT head that we managed to actually put in place climate targets for our transportation system that weren't just focused on electrification, they were actually focused on reducing how much people drive in a meaningful way.

David Roberts

It's only the recent round of sort of state level energy and climate policy where transportation is being treated as part of it, as part of the whole complex, and state DOTs are getting drawn in. So Beth, before we run out of time, though, California seems to be butching this, but let's talk about Minnesota. I had a pod a few weeks ago about Minnesota's amazing climate and energy bills. It's passed. If anybody is out there who has not been paying attention, go look at what the Minnesota legislature has done in the last two years. It will blow your hair back.

It's amazing. It's climate stuff, it's like justice stuff, the abortion stuff just down the line. Amazing. And transportation. So Beth, tell us, what did Minnesota do that you would like to see other states learn from?

Beth Osborne

Yeah, and there actually is some real good news across the country as well. And we can copy off of states that have done great things. So in Minnesota, they've got some truly extraordinary transportation leaders, including Senator Scott Dibble and Representative Frank Hornstein, who are both just deep transportation nerds and wonderful for it. And so they both have some transportation policy and funding that will be real game changers. They raised the gas tax and they came up with other funds that will put a great deal of new money in passenger rail and transit. They've filled the funding gap, the operating funding gap for the Twin Cities transit system.

And they have put a large amount of money into big efforts to expand service, the Bus Rapid Transit system, and passenger rail between the Twin Cities and Duluth. There's also funding for tax credits for people to get electric assist bicycles and funding for better transportation connections for people experiencing homelessness or mental health and just really outstanding thought there. And then there's also a requirement in their new law that Minnesota DOT has to project how much carbon emissions will come out of their projects. And if a project is going to increase greenhouse gas emissions, they either can't move it forward or they have to move it forward with a bundle of transportation projects that will offset that increase.

David Roberts

Interesting. That would be so fundamentally transformative for so many state DOTs.

David Roberts

It would.

Beth Osborne

And Colorado has done something interesting and similar as well. They set up a regulation that requires the same thing, a projection of greenhouse gas emissions from their projects and the requirement that if there's an increase, it's offset by other investments. And that was led by their transportation secretary. Going back to what Nick said about leadership really matters, Shoshana Lou, who I got to work with at USDOT, and really just very thoughtful engagement to get to that role and real buy-in across the state.

Nick Josefowitz

Shoshana is amazing. She is a real leader.

Beth Osborne

Yes.

David Roberts

Yeah.

David Roberts

I feel like Minnesota and Colorado are sort of like the two liberal kind of superstars of the last few years that don't really get as much hype and praise as the coastal states. But in terms of accomplishments, they both have been just crazy productive. Are there other leading lights that we might not know about?

Beth Osborne

Yeah, something else that snuck by a lot of people was the leadership of Virginia DOT over the last eight years or so. They put in place back in 2014, legislation that was approved unanimously by a Republican legislature and signed into law by a Democratic governor, a scoring procedure to prioritize new capacity transportation projects across all modes. That includes measurements that are not typical to transportation. So instead of just looking at congestion relief, they looked at the amount of access to jobs by all modes of travel. And after they passed that into law, they had to figure out how to do it.

And not only did they figure it out, their partners, actually at the University of Wisconsin, the State Smart Transportation Initiative produced a manual so anyone can do what they have done.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Beth Osborne

And they particularly look at access to jobs for people who are in the 20th percentile economically. And then there's another prong where they have to look at coordination between transportation and land use, which they have translated is access to everything other than jobs. So banks and schools and groceries and retail and parks and all those sorts of things. And it turns out that measure is very tightly connected to how many cars one has to own, how much you spend on transportation, how much you emit.

There's so much connected to that one measure that wraps up a lot of the climate and equity concerns people have, and again, points out why I don't understand what Governor Newsom is doing because he is already dealing with an affordability crisis and transit and walkability is the key to affordability for household expenses. But Virginia really hit it out of the park on that and created a great system. I'll also point to Washington state that now requires a redesign of roadways to safely move everybody, whether they're in or out of a vehicle, on any project that costs more than $500,000. So that's basically every project.

And a state like Florida, which has really spent the last five to ten years updating all of their rules, procedures, and design guides to think about how to design roadways for all people and have some extraordinary guidance out there for folks to look at, they could apply it a little more consistently.

David Roberts

Yeah. Isn't Florida rock bottom on pedestrian fatalities? Or am I making that up?

Beth Osborne

Well, according to our report, Dangerous by Design, they were recently leapfrogged by the state of New Mexico.

David Roberts

Oh. Congrats, New Mexico.

Beth Osborne

Not because Florida got safer, but because New Mexico got so much less safe, they jumped over Florida.

David Roberts

Oh, great.

Nick Josefowitz

As an American, this is inspiring all the amazing things that are happening. And as a Californian, it's rather depressing that we can't be emulating them.

David Roberts

It's striking that California is not in the lead in so many other areas, so many other climate-related and progressive-related areas.

Beth Osborne

Well, let me give California one shout out along with some other states that I'm excited about. The new leader of the DOT in Connecticut is outstanding. And we've been working with Connecticut, California, Tennessee, and Alaska to do quick build pilot demonstration projects to improve safety for people walking.

David Roberts

Interesting.

Beth Osborne

And basically, it's almost like tactical urbanism on state highways. And the states are figuring out what procedures they need to put in place to make these things happen. And a lot of these projects are going live as we speak. And California Caltrans is right in there trying to figure out how to adjust their procedures to allow this to happen, to be more innovative and test things out and try new things on their roads to better accommodate people walking and keep them safe. So there is some really exciting things happening, even at the lower bureaucratic level, to make their products better.

David Roberts

Yeah, I've always thought I feel like narratively ordinary people hear talk about transit and walkability and all this kind of stuff, and they hear it as sort of like a liberal do-goodery, just sort of liberals' aesthetic preferences. They want people to live close together and all this stuff. The whole 15-minute city backlash is hilariously depressing. But I feel like it would be great for transit advocates if we could help spread the narrative, which Strong Towns has done such a good job on, which is that car culture and car-focused culture and car-focused building is bad for state budgets.

Like dense cities produce GDP. And the less dense they are, the more cars they have to accommodate, the more that goes down. So you get upkeep of highways and upkeep of roads, all the upkeep of sprawly development and all the health drawbacks of particulates and all that, and it's just a net like, car culture is a net negative for state budgets, regardless of your feelings.

Nick Josefowitz

You're absolutely right. And it's not just the state budgets. As part of the kind of the effort to try and help the state of California realize they should save transit, TransForm, an advocacy group that we work with closely published a report that showed that for every dollar of state underinvestment in transit, that costs low-income people $2 in additional costs of having to buy and maintain cars and buy gas and all that stuff. It's also this fundamental drain on people's wallets as well as on state government.

David Roberts

Yeah.

Beth Osborne

And I will say the governor that has done the best job, in my opinion, of making this argument is Governor Burgum of North Dakota.

David Roberts

You're bringing out some obscure states here.

Beth Osborne

I got to tell you again, I don't know where this mythology came from that progressives get transportation. Do not get it. Some of the most exciting changes are coming out of much more conservative thinkers who recognize we're just wasting money.

David Roberts

So what's happening in North Dakota?

Beth Osborne

Well, Governor Bergam, I believe, he was involved in developing before he became governor. I remember his Main Street page when he first became governor, talking about how a city the size of Fargo or a lot of those upper Midwest cities because they're so big, they have to spend so much more on operating their roadway system per capita. So just snow removal and things like that become extraordinarily expensive versus something that's more compact and has more traditional mixed-use development. He just fundamentally gets that. One of the top mayors that I enjoyed working with is the former mayor of Indianapolis, who was a Republican and former Marine who just recognized it was good for attracting talent in business to build bike lanes and to put showers and bike parking downtown, because that's what people who had options wanted.

They weren't going to move to a city —

That's what the youngs want.

— where they had to drive everywhere. And so he came into some of those one-way, five-lane roadways and took space away from cars and expanded the highways and created a massive bike ped network. And when people complained to him about him slowing down traffic, he said "Absolutely, I did, and you're welcome. I have made things so much safer."

David Roberts

His lips to God's ears. That's amazing. Well, we're out of time. This is super interesting, super educational. But Nick, I wanted to end with you since we began with the crisis. Let's end with this crisis. Namely, if you are a Californian who's concerned about this upcoming fiscal cliff, that transit is about to go off and these huge cuts in service that are looming, what should you do? Is there a clear mechanism of feedback? Or is there a bill to push or what's the mechanism to make your voice heard on this?

Nick Josefowitz

Savecaliforniatransit.org is where you can go, and it will give you the tools and the information you need to contact the governor, contact legislative leaders, and say that you don't want California without transit. You don't want a Bay Area without BART. You want to be able to still get on the bus, come next year.

David Roberts

Yes. And I think nationally, we should be able to agree. We're to the end of the period where you're allowed to call yourself a climate champion if you're not on the case, on land use and transit and density, et cetera.

Beth Osborne

100%.

Nick Josefowitz

That ended on this podcast right here, right now. You are no longer allowed to do it. It's over. It's cold.

David Roberts

All right, Nick, Beth, thank you all so much for coming on.

Beth Osborne

Thanks for having us.

David Roberts

Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe