The Government Fix for

Transportation

[00:00:00] Anthony Foxx: Our transportation system is highly balkanized. The transit money sits in the transit pot. The highway money sits in the highway pot. The rail money sits in the rail pot. If you’re running a city, you don’t have the luxury of thinking in silos. You have to un-silo the money. You have to think in terms of how do you make these programs work in a holistic fashion.

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[00:00:29] Amanda Renteria: Lately, I’ve been thinking about small talk. When someone comes to visit, and you ask, “How was the drive or the flight? Did you get out before the rush?” In putting together episodes for this series, transportation seemed like a clear area where we touch government every day. Commuting, visiting our families, making sure the roads are safe for our kids, this is where we see our tax dollars at work. I bet you have imagined how to make a transportation system you use even better.

For this episode, we’re focusing on the government fix for transportation. How do we build transit systems that serve everyone? How do we fund infrastructure without kicking the can down the road, and how do we ensure that transportation policy doesn’t just move people, but it really creates opportunities for communities? Welcome to The Government Fix. I’m your host, Amanda Renteria. I’ve worked on Capitol Hill, in the classroom, on Wall Street, and now I’m the CEO of Code for America, an organization focused on using tech to improve public services and make government work well for everyone.

Today, we’re talking to former U.S. Secretary of Transportation, Anthony Foxx. Foxx served during President Obama’s second term, where he oversaw federal transportation policy during a critical time of aging infrastructure and political gridlock. Before that, he was mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, which gave him a unique view into how transportation decisions play out at both the federal and local levels. Secretary Foxx understands that transportation isn’t just about roads and rails. It’s about connecting people to jobs, housing, and opportunity. It’s about whether a mom in a low-income neighborhood can get her kids to school and herself to work on time. It’s about whether rural communities stay isolated or get connected to economic growth in nearby city centers.

During his tenure, Foxx championed the FAST Act, a bipartisan transportation bill that provided more than $300 billion to transportation systems over five years. This level of investment allowed for a different way of thinking about long-term transportation projects. Now, at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Secretary Foxx is teaching the next generation to think differently about public service and infrastructure. Let’s talk about what it takes to build a government that actually gets us where we need to go.

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[00:03:04] Amanda: As I think back to when you came into the role, I happened to be working in the United States Senate at the time for Senator Stabenow of Michigan, and a lot of conversation around transit. Really, the creative ways that the Obama administration was thinking about how do we connect different states, how are we thinking about transit overall. Really, the vision that you had at that time, where we were, because I think there are some parallels today, but I’d love to get more color on what this looked like as you entered as secretary?

[00:03:36] Anthony: We really had a tale of three countries in 2013. The first country was the Midwest and the Northeast, which had largely built transit systems in the early part of the 20th century, and they were falling into a state of disrepair. I think the amount of disrepair we estimated at the time was about $90 billion. Then you had communities that were trying to build new transit systems. Los Angeles was preparing to put a measure on the ballot to drastically expand their transit system. Seattle, at the time, was considering the same thing. Austin, towards the latter part of our administration, also started thinking about doing big transit projects.

Then you had the rest of the country, many parts of the country that were transit-starved and car-dependent. You had communities that had incumbency in transit, you had communities that were moving towards it, and then you had communities where the conversation really hadn’t been formulated very well.

[00:04:45] Amanda: What challenges did you see across the way as you came in to be secretary that sort of said, “Hey, we might be able to fix this part of it,” or “We need to work on that part of it,” and that will have the biggest impact on this web of different challenges that states, cities, et cetera, had?

[00:05:01] Anthony: Transit has historically grown with a significant local and state investment, with the federal government coming in. It’s kind of a minority partner to build these systems, which means that they get built and sustained one by each. When I was trying to get a transportation bill passed, I met with a variety of people, stakeholders on both sides of the aisle, and I remember having a conversation with Grover Norquist. He said, “It’s very simple. Roads are for Republicans, and transit is for Democrats.” There was a sense that if we made substantial investments in transit in Washington, that most of that money was going to go into blue areas. That has also been, I think, a political aspect of why we haven’t seen deeper investment in transit.

We also compound the federal investment in transit with another irony, which is when you decide you’re going to build a new transit system in this country, part of what you have to do is you have to show how you’re going to maintain it. We don’t do that for highways. When we build highways, we build it with an indefinite and an infinite amount of maintenance that’s baked into the project, but it’s never scored at the federal level, whereas you can’t build a transit project with federal money if you don’t do that. I think if we ever did a fully cost-loaded assessment of projects, whether they’re roads or transit, I think transit would fare a lot better in the competition between those two modes.

[00:06:37] Amanda: It’s interesting because something that connects us like roads and just that seems so simple that we should all be around, and how are we going to figure this out together, all of a sudden, I remember those days where it was in the political debate of, well, who’s going to cover it? So much of our work at Code for America is trying to help governments get into that step function of how do we move to a more modernized system, whatever it might be.

It’s easy to do the first one-time investment much harder when all of a sudden you’re crossing administrations, or you’re crossing different leadership to say, “How are you going to maintain this?” Because you’ve done transit both at the federal level and at the local level, and we work at all the different jurisdictions as well. How were the challenges different? Today, do you see it easier to move things at a city level while the federal government is stuck, I guess is the best word to say it?

[00:07:37] Anthony: I’ll put it this way. I think the challenges with getting transit established someplace, getting the tax revenue to build a new transit system, or to build a new line, I think that’s largely unchanged. I think the degree of difficulty is still pretty significant, particularly in places that don’t have it already, because you’re trying to ask people to pay for something they don’t see and can’t touch and feel or experience. I think new systems are always hard to do, and building out existing systems is also equally challenging, but in a different way.

I think what has changed is just the sheer amount of federal money that came through the bipartisan infrastructure law gave a lot of communities a reason to really go hard at trying to expand their systems or to build systems. What happens, though, when you have a change of administrations, is people look for signals. “How is this administration going to score my project versus someone else’s?” In Charlotte, for example, where I was mayor, we expected the federal government to pick up 50% of the share of building a new rail transit line, for example.

I think if you’re watching the tea leaves in Washington right now, it’s so unpredictable that going to voters and asking voters to pony up a new sales tax or some new resource on the bet that the federal government’s going to be there is increasingly challenging because it’s unclear how this administration and future administrations are going to treat it. That uncertainty makes it harder.

[00:09:11] Amanda: Yes. Even when it feels like you have uncertainty, there’s just a lot of backtracking on some of the stuff, too, that we’re seeing. Maybe it holds now, but if it gets in a political debate, it’ll get pulled. We’re seeing that across the country, just states and cities trying to navigate, “How do I prepare for if that happens?” which has been an unusual case because we’ve usually had a lot more stability in some of these relationships, in some of these shared partnerships.

[00:09:39] Anthony: I’m reminded, Amanda, of the Hudson Tunnels. Are you following the Hudson Tunnel work?

[00:09:45] Amanda: Probably not as closely as you are.

[00:09:47] Anthony: This is a more than 100-year-old tunnel that sits between New York and New Jersey. It’s a major thoroughfare. New Jersey Transit used it, Amtrak used it.

[00:09:55] Amanda: Oh, I’ve been in it. I’ve been in it. I think we’ve all been in it before. [laughs]

[00:09:57] Anthony: Yes. Absolutely. It sits on silt and it moves, and it’s old, and it needs to be replaced. My predecessor, Ray LaHood, went and tried to get Governor Christie and Governor Cuomo to agree on getting it rebuilt with some federal help. Governor Cuomo was for it. Governor Christie was not for it at that time, and it never happened. Then I came in, and I was like, “Let me go make a shot. Let me try this,” and so I went and met with both of them. Governor Christie was for it, and Governor Cuomo was against it.

Then the Trump administration comes in, they give it a shot, and then the Biden administration gets the bipartisan infrastructure law with more or less a carve-out for the project. Now everybody is saying, “Oh, okay, this is going to happen.” Now the Trump administration too has come back, and they said, “No, we’re not going to let this happen.” It’s just that project is going like a ping pong ball, but at the end of the day, it is a resource that is incredibly important. If it ever closed down, the traffic in New Jersey would just be terrible.

I don’t see when or how that project is going to get done if all three governments, the state of New York, the state of New Jersey, and the federal government, don’t agree at the same time. We just continue to doddle along.

[00:11:15] Amanda: Yes. 16 years, right?

[00:11:17] Anthony: Yes.

[00:11:20] Amanda: How do you think about that now? Do you wait for the crisis because it’s going to happen? Do you prepare people for when something happens that you have to then step in and be ready? How are you thinking about it at the Kennedy School with these new leaders on these big projects, whether or not they’re possible, or whether you’re waiting in the wings for that moment?

[00:11:43] Anthony: Unfortunately, our history has been it takes an accident or a calamity to mobilize the country to invest. It’s actually no different than Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. That’s what galvanizes people to say, “Hey, we really got to get serious and fix this.” I would make another point, though, which is that what I’ve tried to do with our students here, these young people, they’ve lived through the Great Recession, they lived through COVID, they lived through war, they’ve lived through disease. They’re tuckered out. They’re tired of stuff being ineffective.

What I try to help them think about is that maybe the next phase for government, if it’s going to get any better, is to really be rigorous about effectiveness. That means oftentimes doing stuff that doesn’t get a lot of press or attention. When I was mayor, I used to say, “Look, if the water comes on, you don’t think about me. It’s the day that doesn’t come on, or the day the snow doesn’t get picked up, or the trash doesn’t get picked up, where you think about the government.” If we can just make government boring, that would be a good thing.

[00:12:54] Amanda: We talk a lot about working in systems and the things that aren’t in the headlines, but the things that are affecting people’s lives every day. When I think about this young talent that you’re talking with, I think about how are we really embedding new ways of doing things, new ways of talking about government. The race in New York, for example, where bus fare ended up being really one of those tangible things. From a communication standpoint, it’s interesting to see a new generation reinvigorate the discussions around these public goods and the importance of affordability.

How are you seeing a new generation not just come into leadership to, like you, a mayor, and think through things differently, but also the skill, mobility, tech around what they’re bringing?

[00:13:46] Anthony: They’re digital natives, so they have so much more facility with the technology that’s happening. They can see farther down the road with things like artificial intelligence than I can. Part of what I try to do as a teacher is I try not to get in the way of the innovation they’re capable of, but then I also try to give them a sense of what I have found that it takes to get things done. One of the most important things is that, as sure as I might be of what the answer to a given problem might be, it really doesn’t go very far. I don’t care who I am in politics if I can’t convince enough other people of that solution–

[00:14:27] Amanda: What is the success story you share?

[00:14:30] Anthony: Prior to the FAST Act, which again was passed in 2015, we had another transportation bill. Those bills have typically been six-year bills. By the time the FAST Act was passed, we had been more than 10 years since we’d had a six-year funding bill. The FAST Act, to be clear, was a five-year funding bill. We’d really gotten off of our template. The problem is always not that people don’t appreciate transportation. It actually polls very well across the country. When you ask people how they’d like to pay for it, that polls terribly. Going headfirst into transportation funding is not any administration’s favorite thing to do. There was a lot of reluctance to do it.

The Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee ultimately decided to use what I would loosely call smoke and mirrors to come up with basically a way of taking cuts from future budgets and patching together a funding source to basically use the general fund to fund the infrastructure. I think as cars become more fuel efficient, notwithstanding what this administration’s doing, the gas tax is going to become even more antiquated with time. At some point, we’re going to have to figure out how to rationalize how we pay for transportation.

[00:15:53] Amanda: To update, you were on Biden’s Smart City Task Force. People might not be familiar with what smart mobility actually means.

[00:16:03] Anthony: It’s still, frankly, I think, something that is evolving in its meaning. I think maybe for the way people– to think about it is using the tools available to make your trip from one place to another as seamless as possible. Just as an example, imagine going to visit relatives for the holidays, and you’re at home, and you have to get in some type of vehicle to get to the airport. Then you get to the airport, you get on a plane, you get where you’re going, and you have to get from there to your relative’s home.

What if you had one device that could navigate that for you? In the future, perhaps you call a car that’s an autonomous car. It picks you up. It takes you where you’re going. You get through the airport security using the same device. You get on the plane using the same device, and you do the same thing when you get on the other end of it. That’s the idea that we can create an efficient trip that gets paid for once, and it’s not a hassle the way it is today. I think a lot of what smart mobility is is taking the temporal world, which is the world of cars, trains, automobiles, and using digital tools to make the transactions that are necessary as seamless as possible, but to also make the experience as seamless as possible.

[00:17:32] Amanda: I look forward to that world. My son who’s about to get his driver’s license makes me even more– It’s interesting because they have really a different view of this, that it should be seamless and easy, and you should be able to navigate your life in one seamless way. Taking a step back and looking at transportation around the world, and I remember going on the Maglev. I remember seeing some of these just amazing feats around the world, trying to figure this out as well. What’s your perspective on who is doing this right or what lessons we should take from other countries that you’ve seen?

[00:18:11] Anthony: I don’t think anyone’s getting everything right. I do think you can take lessons from different places about certain types of things. For instance, you look at national rail systems like the ones you see in parts of Europe, in China, in Japan, and these systems were designed at a national level, and the technology that is used is unitary. It’s all the same technology. We’re not doing that in the US. We have a different set of train sets that are anticipated in California, and those are going to be different than the ones that are being contemplated in Texas. Those are going to be different yet again from those that are being built in Florida.

If we ever create a system that connects, we’re going to have technology challenges making those systems work well together. That’s because we’re not building it as a national system. It’s got some national money in it, but it’s largely coming from state and local, and in some cases, private sources. I’d say that you look at places like London, at transit systems, privatization of airports, which you’ve seen in lots of parts of the country. That’s a trend that we’re seeing internationally. It has taken on some shape in the US, but nowhere near the degree that we see in places like Europe and in Asia.

[00:19:36] Amanda: Do you think that’s a good thing?

[00:19:37] Anthony: I think it can be. Our airports in the country are largely locally owned and controlled. For the most part, I think most of our airports are pretty well run, and some aspects of the airports are privatized. A lot of the concessions are privatized.

[00:19:52] Amanda: I’m curious what you see in your world if governments played a different role here, or what role they should play, whether that’s at the state level or the federal level. I think the federal level right now, given all the reductions, is really tough. At the state level, how they should be thinking about their role, not just for, “How do you make this more effective?” but how do we drive innovation in this space as well?

[00:20:18] Anthony: I have two thoughts on it. One of them is that we do have projects. The Hudson Tunnels is just one example, but there are many examples of projects that are needed in the country, but that cross state lines, and where the convergence of political agreement required to get those projects done has alluded us. That, to me, signals a need for something like a set of national projects that become national priorities, and the federal government substantially underwrites beyond what it normally does for the average highway or what have you, in order to jumpstart those projects and to eliminate some of the political disagreements that slow those projects down.

Abraham Lincoln did that with the Transcontinental Railroad, and we’ve seen it happen with the highway system in the 20th century. I think it doesn’t need to necessarily be modal specific. Sometimes it may be a rail project. Sometimes it may be a transit project. Sometimes it might be a highway project, but I think we need to have that in our quiver.

Then the second thing I would say is that I would actually really take a hard look at the formula that’s used to distribute federal aid highway dollars because I have a strong feeling that if we really looked at where population growth is concentrating and where our transportation dollars are being utilized, they’re likely not going to where we are growing population. That means that the areas that are highly populated and densely populated are going to be transportation-constrained. It also means that we’re going to maybe be putting some of our effort in places that don’t need as much of the resources.

I would also say that if we did that, I would probably push more money to the local governments because I think they know better what they need, and I would also loosen up the federal aid highway dollars to make them less specific to highways and more specific to reducing congestion and moving people. Sometimes an investment in transit or rail or commuter rail will have as much, if not greater, impact on congestion reduction as a new lane of highway.

[00:22:34] Amanda: How do we, when we put these systems in place, ensure that we’re actually equalizing areas that get left out?

[00:22:44] Anthony: It’s a deep question. Wow, we could spend a lot of time talking about that one. Look, I think a couple of things to say about it. We devastated the core of many of our communities, urban and rural, in the 1950s, with the fast break strategy that was adopted at that time to get highways built. It really bifurcated a lot of communities. We’ve done studies that show that more than two-thirds of those displaced by those projects were communities of color or low-income communities across the country.

It had a devastating effect over generations because the amount of money families received for their property was, in many cases, much lower than what the value was, because it was valued after the decision had been made to condemn property. In some ways, the highway system was built on the backs of many people who could least afford it. I think we need to remember that as we think about projects happening even today.

I think maybe to answer this point, being somebody from local government, I have a point of view on this. The point of view is that we need to start with our plans from the perspective of what’s going to create the most economic growth for our communities. That doesn’t just mean the urban core. It means the suburban rings. It means the rural areas that surround those suburban rings. We have something in the government called Metropolitan Planning Organizations and Rural Planning Organizations. These are units of government that go back to the 1970s. The idea is that these regions can and should plan their transportation futures together.

We’ve never resourced those MPOs and RPOs to the degree that they should. That’s what I was referring to when I said we should push more of the federal aid dollars to local communities. It’s actually my experience that the states more or less tell these MPOs and RPOs what their priorities should be. They’ll tell them, “If you put this project up first, we’ll fund it. If you don’t, we probably are going to fund it anyway.” You don’t really have much of a say. The states really drive how the federal aid highway dollars are spent. Now, my friends in the governor’s mansions and their state transportation secretaries will disagree with me, but I have practical experience that tells me otherwise.

We need to fix that. I think fixing that will mean that rural communities, as well as urban communities, will have a much better shot at thinking through how their job creation will be affected by various transportation inputs and, frankly, how their quality of life will be improved. The side benefit of that is that I think it will tamp down our politics quite a bit. Urban communities’ problems, in some ways, are not categorically different than rural communities. It’s just that the manifestation may be slightly different. When you have those communities talking to each other and working across the table to problem-solve, I think it fixes a lot of other things that are wrong in our country right now.

[00:26:00] Amanda: You’re so right. I grew up in rural America. I just think about just the connection itself, people coming– I’m in California, people coming from the Bay Area to rural America to hike Yosemite, just that back and forth, making that easier for folks, where you interact with the local community as you come into the train station. Those things matter, and even more so, I think, post-COVID, where more folks are in their homes and not really out there, the idea of giving them incentives or making it easy, just making it easier to go to places.

I know you’ve seen this, and you’re alluding to this, of how much transportation isn’t just going from point A to point B, but seeing how it connects jobs, housing, employment, how those connections get enriched when we can more easily move from one place to the other. As we think about good transportation policy, what would you be telling a mayor today? What would you be telling a governor today? We have a lot of them new coming into town, right? New Jersey or state of New Jersey, state of Virginia, how should they be thinking about this?

[00:27:11] Anthony: First of all, I would always urge the linkage of housing and transportation policy. Those two things always go together. Back to the Romans, back to ancient times, those two areas have always been super connected. What does that mean? It means, again, I look at this a little from my vantage point as having been a mayor, I think about lower-income communities need connections. You just talked about your experience growing up in rural America, and I think that is so important.

What you’re often trying to do in lower-income areas is you’re trying to create points of access, but you’re also trying to bring new services and opportunities into those areas. What is your zoning like as you’re building new assets? What’s your economic development policy around those areas? Are you creating incentives for businesses to locate closer to where people who most need work are?

Our transportation system is highly balkanized. The transit money sits in the transit pot. The highway money sits in the highway pot. The rail money sits in the rail pot. If you’re running a city, you don’t have the luxury of thinking in silos. You have to un-silo the money. You have to think in terms of how do you make these programs work in a holistic fashion? I’d be using local money, for example, to build trail systems that connect people so they can bike into work unobstructed by vehicle traffic. I would match that with transit investments that maybe get you an express bus or some type of modality that gets you into where the work opportunities are.

I’d be matching that with other transportation dollars to make sure that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts, because if you’re not careful, the sum can be greater than the whole.

[00:29:08] Amanda: I think as we’re thinking about folks coming in and thinking holistically, we have a real opportunity there with new governors and new mayors and new ways of thinking to say, “How do you put it together? What does that map and vision look like?” I think I also– just what I’d love to see more of is as you go from one administration to the other at a state level or wherever, that there’s a better handoff policy to some of these implementation, these really grand visionary implementation ideas that the next one will get done too. We’ve seen the Big Dig in Boston. How many different administrations it had to go through.

The place where I am from, we’re still in high-speed rail, but I imagine as we go from one to the next, this stuff changes over time. How does the next leader pick it up and take it to that next level, or get it done in some cases? Just stepping back now, in your cabinet, when you came in, you were one of the youngest cabinet secretaries at that time. How do you see the broad politics in the United States?

I know it’s a big question, but from a cabinet level, and as you’re teaching young folks about these cabinet-level roles and how you have a vision for the future of the country, what’s the advice that is especially poignant right now, where it feels chaotic and where people feel like maybe government isn’t the place for me? What’s your message?

[00:30:32] Anthony: My message would be, look, the American people want to be unified. There’s a hunger, I think, people feel, not to be at war with each other, a war of words, a war of political parties, a war of whatever. I think the natural instinct of Americans is to try to problem-solve and figure out how to make things better. There are a lot of antibodies to that right now. Our political system has gotten very good at channeling our reptilian instincts and giving us a reason to dislike someone or dislike what someone says or does, and it’s gotten very reductionist. It doesn’t fundamentally change, I think, the goodness of the people of this country.

I think that means that leadership has to tap into that somehow. I tell a lot of my students that my assessment of our current situation is that it actually is less political and more cultural. It’s cultural in the sense that we’ve convinced ourselves that we belong to a certain tribe and someone else belongs to a different tribe that is against us. As long as we convince ourselves of that, we can’t find that political unity that we need. Frankly, no leader can appeal to it successfully.

I think that the average person has a lot more responsibility to tap into themselves and their everyday reality. I see people at football games, at soccer games, in basketball arenas that are cheering for the same team and can’t agree on what the next tax rate ought to be. I think we need to remember that we go to work, we sit across the water cooler, we know each other’s kids. There’s a unity somewhere underneath all of this division that we need to find, and we need to find it as individuals.

[00:32:34] Amanda: I appreciate that. I appreciate that because I was just at the basketball game with my kid the other day.

[00:32:39] Anthony: There you go. There you go.

[00:32:42] Amanda: You know what I mean?

[00:32:43] Anthony: Yes.

[00:32:43] Amanda: It was funny because there were some folks where you’re like, “Oh, we’re totally against each other,” but then you walk out, and you laugh about the game.

[00:32:48] Anthony: Exactly.

[00:32:48] Amanda: We’re all supporting the game and these kids out there. Man, I want to get to that world. We always end our podcast with this question, which is, if you had a magic wand to change one thing about how government works, not policy, but how it actually functions and serves people, what would you fix first?

[00:33:09] Anthony: Public input. I would make public input real. A lot of times, it’s a performance activity. I don’t think we listen to the public nearly enough, and we don’t take into account what the public actually says nearly enough. I think that’s particularly true historically in transportation, but it’s generally true. Unless you’re a professional citizen and you go to this stuff all the time, and you know the rules, and you know the language and stuff, it’s hard to be effective as a regular person making points about things that are very real and that you’re experiencing.

I think the more our government becomes capable, adapted at listening to the public on an ongoing basis and not just when election season is happening or whatever, I think our government will be better.

[00:34:00] Amanda: I couldn’t agree more, the idea that people feel seen and heard, and that actually government is better for it when they see and hear people is the magic that we need.

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[00:34:14] Amanda: After talking to Anthony Foxx, what resonated with me is that transportation is really about how we work together. It’s about who gets access to opportunities, whose voice is at the table. If we can have those important conversations that allow us to overcome our disagreements, transportation can be more than just moving cars around. It can be about moving people’s lives forward. His explanation of why working across the aisle is so important in getting things moving also really resonates with me. Whether Republicans or Democrats, drivers or public transit users, urbanites or rural folks, nothing gets done without a little bit of unity. We might be in different lanes, but at the end of the day, we’re all driving down the same highway.

That’s all for today on The Government Fix. Thanks for listening. 

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