California's coming transit apocalypse

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


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