In 2015, LA Metro’s new CEO, Phil Washington, created the Office of Extraordinary Innovation. To run it, he brought in an outsider from DC: Joshua Schank.
Schank’s office had some notable successes and notable failures: he wrote them all up with two colleagues in New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector, an unusually candid account of what worked and what didn’t.
If you enjoy this episode, you might also like:
How to Save DC’s Metro with Randy Clarke, WMATA’s general manager.
How to Salvage a Transit Project with Stephanie Pollack, former Massachusetts secretary of transportation.
How the Federal Transit Administration Works with Peter Rogoff, former FTA administrator.
How Cheaply Could We Build High-Speed Rail? with Alon Levy.
And IFP colleagues have put together a bunch of great transit ideas in the Transit Abundance Playbook.
Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Shadrach Strehle for their support in producing this episode.
For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:
What the hell is an Office of Extraordinary Innovation?
It sounds like something out of Harry Potter. In 2015, Silicon Valley was in one of its boom cycles, and a lot of new ideas were coming out that were directly affecting transportation. When Phil Washington became the CEO of LA Metro, I think he saw an opportunity to say, “If we’re going to make a difference in transportation in Los Angeles, we need to be thinking about how we’re incorporating a lot of this new technology. We need more research and innovation.” So he created the Office of Extraordinary Innovation. Phil named it that because, being a former sergeant major in the US Army, he likes to set expectations high. That helped us, and also hurt us at some points, but it was certainly designed to capture your attention.
You wrote a book with two co-authors who worked with you in that office, New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies, which I enjoyed quite a bit. I wanted to have you on not just to talk through the object-level work you did on transportation — although our readers are nerds, and they’ll be very interested in it — but also the meta-level lessons in the book on entering a big, thorny bureaucratic system and trying to be effective in it. One of the things I liked is that it’s very candid about where you ran into trouble, were miscalibrated, or picked a fight you shouldn’t have.
I appreciate you saying that the expectations hurt you in some ways. Tell me about that.
When you create an office like that within a public agency and say, “I’m bringing in this guy from DC who’s got a PhD in urban planning and runs a think tank to run it, and I’m going to let him hire the people he wants from the outside,” there’s going to be some mistrust, because now people are looking at this new thing: “Who are these people? What do they know about what we do? Why should I have to listen to them?”
As a think tanker, I can’t imagine anyone doubting a think tank’s qualifications to tell a public agency what to do.
When I was at Eno, I was often quoted in the press about transportation policy issues. Based on our research, we would say X, Y, or Z. People would comment, “What have you ever run?” People were feeling that way when we got there: “Not only are they not from LA, but they don’t know how to run an agency.” They weren’t entirely wrong. There were a lot of things we were naive about, but that naivete was also a positive, because it allowed us to think big.
One of the things someone told me when I first started is that when you create a special office within an agency that’s like, “This is where we’re putting all the smart people to think about good ideas,” people either hate it or they want to be in it. That’s exactly what we found.
Give readers a sense of one or two of the big wins from your time running the office.
The thing I’m most proud of, as a practical matter, is that we helped get automated cameras onto our buses that now enforce bus lanes across Los Angeles.
You mean enforcing that nobody else drives in the bus lane?
Technically, it’s if you’re parked in the bus lane, because that’s what causes the delay. That’s also what’s legal: to ticket parked cars in bus lanes with automated technology, and we got those installed on buses. As a result, the bus lanes in Los Angeles that used to have, every once in a while, a Lexus pulled over to get a cup of coffee, blocking an entire bus of 50 people, have been cleared, because people know they’re going to get ticketed.
Let me give you a slot for one more practical success.
From an on-the-ground standpoint, we launched Metro Micro, the microtransit service in Los Angeles. At the time I was doing this, microtransit was not very popular or well known.
It will not be known to many of our readers. You might have to back up.
Microtransit is the idea that you can use smaller on-demand vehicles with multiple people in them as a way of getting people from point to point within a city. Instead of having to wait for one bus for 20 minutes, then wait for another bus for 20 minutes to get where you’re going, microtransit picks you up close to your origin and drops you off close to your destination, but you might stop along the way to pick up and drop off other people. It’s like Uber or Lyft, except mass transit.
At the time we were looking at this concept, it was something I was very excited about, but no one else had done it at the scale we were trying to do it. There was a lot of opposition from a number of different parties when we started promoting this idea within that bureaucracy. But we got it through, and it’s still the largest microtransit program in the United States.
Why should microtransit be something LA Metro runs?
It’s something that’s really critical for LA Metro and other agencies to test. I don’t know that it’s necessarily going to revolutionize public transit, although I think it has, to some extent, done that in a few places. The main benefit is if you want to provide transit service to an area that’s not well covered, where there’s not a tremendous amount of demand, but you still need to provide coverage for the people who need it. It’s better from a customer perspective, because you’re able to get on-demand service, so greater frequency of service than a bus would provide, and it allows you to cover areas of sprawling regions like LA that might otherwise be really tough to cover.
Who’s taking microtransit in LA today?
It’s largely low-income people who can’t afford Uber or Lyft, probably don’t have access to a private vehicle, and used to have to take a bus that ran infrequently. They’ve got a much faster travel time for around the same price.
Now give me a failure.
The biggest failure is the public-private partnership (P3) we were trying to put together for what was then known as the West Santa Ana Branch, a rail line that’s intended to be built from downtown LA southeast toward Orange County. It’s now called the Southeast Gateway Line. I don’t know that there’s that much we could have done about it. I talk about it in the book: we were trying to penetrate an impenetrable fiefdom. That project met a lot of criteria that would have made it a really good public-private partnership. I still think it should be delivered as a public-private partnership.
As opposed to a purely public project?
In Canada, the UK, Australia, and a lot of places, they consistently use private financing to deliver projects. This is not the typical way projects are delivered within most agencies in the United States. Traditionally the public agency procures the project through a contractor to design and build it, then the public agency provides all the financing, operates, and maintains it. Under a public-private partnership, you hire one contractor to design, build, finance, operate, and maintain the project for 30 years. This is a model that has a lot of potential benefits. It doesn’t work on every project, but this was a good one to build that way.
We were pushing that boulder up the hill almost the entire time I was at LA Metro, and we did not succeed. I think it’s because we were working with people within the agency who were plainly opposed to it and had no interest in helping us get to that goal. We weren’t finding common ground, and we kept pushing forward despite that. I wish we could have abandoned that effort earlier, because I don’t think we had any chance of success.
I’m interested in transit, but I’m also interested in this meta problem of starting a new agency that’s positioned as a disruptor to an existing fiefdom. At IFP, for instance, we have worked with folks from the CHIPS Program Office — and had them on Statecraft — who came in and delivered on a lot of these promises, but also came away thinking, “There are things we wish we’d been better set up for as a new institution coming up against a bunch of existing players.”
You’re saying there was no finding common ground with the fiefdoms. Looking back, why were you never going to get them to support a public-private partnership?
Some people in public agencies are much more focused on retaining their power than on a common outcome you might agree on. We might all have agreed that the goal was to deliver this project as quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible. But if those outcomes involved them relinquishing their control over the project, they were not willing to do that. So it wasn’t possible to find common ground. To do that, both parties have to put the outcomes above their own personal desires to retain power.
What were the fiefdoms that didn’t want to relinquish power?
Typically, the people who control the money are the ones most likely to try to protect that control, because controlling the money is very powerful. LA Metro is a hybrid of two other agencies: the operating agency that used to be known as the Rapid Transit District, combined with the planning agency. Those two were meshed together in the ’90s, and as a result, there’s still multiple departments that do the same thing. In LA Metro’s case, there’s two finance departments: the financial planning folks and the finance department. They don’t really like to talk to each other.
What’s the difference between the financial planning folks and the finance department?
Finance & Budget does annual budgets. They’re looking at which department gets how much money, and where we’re spending everything every year. Financial Planning is only looking at the capital planning side: “We’ve got new projects in the works, so where is that money coming from, so we can plan out how we’re going to spend it over a longer period of time?” Those are the folks who control how these projects are delivered. For them, it’s very important to be able to say, “We know where all the money is, and we can control where that money’s going to go for these projects over the long term.”
Over five or ten years.
This is like a 50-year plan, really, because these projects take a long time, and it takes time for the sales tax revenue to come in. A lot of the projects in the plan are planned 20, 30, 40 years out. So they’re thinking, “How do I make sure we preserve the money for all these projects over the long term?” They’re not thinking, “How do I deliver each project faster using innovative mechanisms?” Because if they do that, that messes up their whole plan about how they’re going to deliver the projects.
In worlds I’ve been in, the finance folks are like, “We’d love you to bring the cost down. That’s all we care about, actually.” What am I missing?
Remember, there’s two departments. Finance & Budget, yes, they love cost-cutting. However, they are also in charge of Treasury. Treasury is in charge of financing. Maintaining a triple-A bond rating for the agency is its top priority. That’s how they see their role in cost-cutting. So when you come to them and say, “We want to borrow money using private sector dollars,” which means borrowing at a higher rate, they’re like, “Why would we borrow money at a higher rate from the private sector?” They’re not seeing the efficiency, because they have no confidence that it’s going to result in a more efficient project delivery mechanism.
Then there’s the financial planning people, who might understand why you would borrow at a private sector rate, although not necessarily. But if you borrow at private sector rates and accelerate funding that’s coming in from a sales tax measure to be spent at different times, it messes up their whole spreadsheet about how they were planning to spend that money. Now they have to recalibrate everything, and now you’re in charge of how that project is being financed. They don’t like that.
In a classical model of big-bureaucracy decision-making, you have an irreconcilable conflict with somebody, and it goes up the chain to somebody who has authority and can decide yes or no. One of the things that’s really interesting about LA Metro, which I didn’t realize until reading your book, is the incredible number of overlapping jurisdictions and different people who have a say in these decisions.
You have 13 voting members, five of whom are county supervisors. The LA mayor gets one vote and three appointees. You get four other members from somewhere, and there’s a nonvoting state seat, so California gets to observe. Everybody gets a say, was my impression.
Way more people than that get a say. Remember, there’s 88 cities in LA County.
Say that again. There’s 88 cities in the county of LA?
There’s 88 cities in LA County. Then there’s the county government itself, which is different than LA Metro. LA Metro is not a county agency. It is actually a state agency that is set up with the jurisdictional boundaries of the county.
It’s nuts. If we’re going to talk about California policy and transportation, this is not just an LA issue. The Bay Area has 27 transit agencies. They all suffer from this multiplicity of governments and municipalities that makes any kind of decision-making very challenging. Then within Metro, there’s all these overlapping jurisdictions that have a say about what’s going to happen with any given outcome.
Take this example: the finance departments don’t see the vision for a public-private partnership. How does this decision eventually get made?
The CEO cannot come in on every single decision and force his way to the outcome, because if he does that, he’ll lose the faith of people within the agency. He also doesn’t have the capacity to do that.
There were several points in this process where we had battles come to a head with the finance department and the financial planning folks about whether we should have a P3 on this project. The CEO had to weigh in and say, “I do want to see a P3 on this project.” But they managed to make it so difficult. They avoided sharing data, argued with every decision that was made, forced another round of research — whatever they could do to delay until finally the CEO left. By the time his tenure was over, they’d delayed it enough. That can be a strategy for people who are embedded in the agency and know they’ll be there long after the CEO is gone. They can say, “I’m just going to make this as difficult as possible until they leave.”
That can also be overridden. There were a lot of attempts to delay this proposed gondola from Dodger Stadium to Union Station. But a phone call from the mayor, who was very much in favor of the project, to the CEO made that delay go away in two seconds. The CEO was like, “Why is this project not moving forward? I want to see it now.” All of a sudden, people snapped to. You just can’t do that on every project. You have to be careful about how much you use that power.
When you describe this LA Metro deep state — I’m putting words in your mouth here — it maps to a lot of other conversations about federal bureaucracies. But you point to board staff as “the most egregious example” of outsized influence. What does that mean?
First let’s explain what board staff is. The Brown Act in California makes it so that the board of an agency cannot get together and talk to each other unless it’s in a public setting. They can’t strategize in secret.
It’s a law in the interest of transparency, so the public can see what’s going on.
The board members are all elected officials, with one exception. Elected officials generally don’t want to be in a situation where anything can happen and they have to respond impromptu. They want a little preparation to know what’s going to happen. The way LA Metro chooses to have that preparation is that the staff for each of the board members gets together with the Metro staff before every board meeting to go over the agenda, and to essentially have a pre-meeting where you explain, “Here’s what’s in the meeting,” and they tell you how their boss would likely react to what you’re saying.
There are reasons why that makes some sense, but there are also reasons why it’s completely crazy: you’ve got people who are purporting to represent elected officials making a lot of decisions about what should be on the agenda for the board, how it should be presented, and what should be changed about those policies before the board member even gets a chance to look at them. That results in people who don’t necessarily have a lot of transportation expertise, but do have political expertise, making changes to policy in the absence of any public discussion, and in many cases in the absence of the board member even knowing about it.
I think you can see parallels at the federal level. It’s unpopular to say that things like the Freedom of Information Act have negative side effects. You never want to be in the position of saying transparency law has gone too far. But this is an interesting case where plausibly it just totally has. How much do you blame the Brown Act?
I would not blame this on the Brown Act. I would blame it on a lack of accountability for the agency from the localities and from journalism in the region. There’s just not a lot of transparency into what’s going on at this agency in general. You see this with a lot of things in Los Angeles. The airport people mover has been delayed over and over again. I don’t know that the solution to that is to reduce transparency.
The solution is strong leadership that comes in and says, “We’re not going to let a bunch of 25-year-olds who are right out of grad school and don’t understand what’s going on make policy decisions at this agency.” That should come from the elected leaders, the CEO, and people within the region who say, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”
When we were there, I came up with a set of rules about how we might interact with board staff that would bring some discipline into the process. I think that would have helped a lot, but we never got to move forward with it.
To push back — it seems like the transparency requirements haven’t made the big decisions more transparent. They’ve just shifted them one layer out: the big decisions are now made at these shadow board meetings. So maybe I’m going to stand up in defense of secret board meetings here. The decision still seems to get made in the shadows.
Why not just say that if you want strong leadership, you need to let leaders get in the room and make the decisions?
I don’t necessarily disagree with that. I just think that having a lack of transparency at the board level is problematic, because you could have a situation where board members are getting together in closed-door sessions and making decisions with even less accountability than they have today.
I used to work in Congress, for Senator Clinton, and believe me, a lot of decisions on policy were made behind closed doors, for reasons that no one knew about. The difference was that the people making them were actually well equipped to make them, because they hire experts to work on the Senate and congressional staff who know what they’re doing. [Statecraft has looked at how a congressional office actually works.]
That will be news to many of our readers in Washington. But keep going.
This was many years ago. Maybe that’s no longer true, but I have some faith that people get involved in policy at the federal level because they really are experts, and they’re trying to do good stuff on the policy level. I’m not as convinced that’s the case here in Los Angeles, where you might have purely political people involved in these roles.
Talk a little more about the cross-cutting jurisdictions of LA Metro. Unless I’m sitting down with a pencil and paper going through the book, it’s almost impossible to understand the warren of cross-cutting incentives here — my DC friends would say the number of equities involved — of stakeholders who get some say in how the process shakes out. It seems like everything is the product of a massive number of cycles to get consensus.
Beyond the actual board members, who gets a say?
If you’re talking about a capital project, the way I think about it is that LA Metro is trying to build a project and everyone else is trying to get something out of that process. There’s no one besides LA Metro who cares about moving the process forward. Even the board members are not all fully committed to that outcome. It’s really only the staff at LA Metro who are saying, “We want this project built as fast as possible and as well as possible.” Everyone else is like, “What’s in it for me?” Every city is saying, “You’re coming to our city, you want permits for construction. What am I getting?” And they’re going to be backed up by the board member at LA Metro who wants their city to get something too.
Then there are the public meetings for these projects. Who shows up? Typically, people who are opposed to the change, who are likely to have more resources to be able to spend the time to go to public meetings and argue against it, and probably people who aren’t riding public transportation. [When she spoke to us, Stephanie Pollack, former Massachusetts secretary of transportation, described public engagement as one of the four Ps of project delay.]
So you’ve got a lot of things stacked against you when you’re trying to move a project forward in Los Angeles, not just because there are so many players, but because of the incentives of each of those players.
If you talk to folks thinking about abundance policy at the national level, one answer to this would be: for any project you build, the opponents already exist, and the people who would get the benefits of this thing, by definition, don’t know it yet. Those basic incentives are just a fact of trying to build anything new, and the problem is the number of veto points, or opportunities you have in the process to extract your pound of flesh.
If you were trying to rationalize the LA Metro process — assuming you have the same incentives at play, and people always want their pound of flesh — what would be the most obvious ways to reduce the number of veto points?
The state and the feds have to play a role in saying, “If you want the money for this project, here are the time limits, and here’s the gate you have to get through, or the money’s not coming.” Right now, the state and the feds are both very relaxed: “You won the grant for this project, now go out and build it.” Meanwhile, they haven’t foreseen that there’s going to be a tremendous amount of delay and obstacles that pop up. If the local electeds could turn to the people who are opposing these things and say, “Look, if we don’t do this by this date, the state money’s getting cut…”
And nobody gets anything.
Exactly. There’s got to be some incentive. Congestion pricing is the same: it is a policy that has shown benefit every place it’s been implemented. Localities cannot bring congestion pricing to bear by themselves. They need the state or the feds to say, “I want congestion pricing, or else you don’t get X dollars.” The same thing is true of these projects. You need a bad guy you can point to if you want to do a politically unpopular thing. [Statecraft has discussed how federal transit grants work with Peter Rogoff.]
Why doesn’t the Department of Transportation or the state of California throw its weight around here? After all, they hold the purse strings for a big chunk of these projects.
We have to think about what their incentives are to throw their weight around. If Gavin Newsom started talking tomorrow about how much he wanted to accelerate projects, and said he was going to cut funding if they weren’t delivered by a certain time, he would certainly get pushback from the localities themselves. There would be a lot of legislators saying, “Wait a minute. Why are we cutting off this funding?” So it would be difficult.
I do think this is a moment where that is more plausible than it has been in the past, in part because the state of California has already started to say, “If we don’t see housing accelerated, you’re not going to get funding. We’re not going to allow you to delay things and not implement your plans.” They’re able to do that because everyone recognizes that there’s a housing crisis in California.
Not everyone necessarily recognizes the transportation crisis, because they’ve gotten so used to the idea that we’re all going to sit in traffic, and that people who are poor have to take public transit that’s not at the standard it should be. Until someone makes people aware that it doesn’t have to be like this, it’s probably going to stay that way.
This is the tailor-made opportunity for me to plug the Transit Abundance Playbook my colleagues at IFP have been working on, which has a bunch of ideas on this front.
Do you chalk part of that discrepancy between housing and transportation up to good political activism and policy development in housing? If that’s the case, why aren’t the wonky urban types organized around transportation?
Housing and homelessness are very visible problems that people encounter on a regular basis. It’s hurtful for people to see the devastation on the streets, and they’re like, “Somebody needs to do something.” Everyone can understand and identify with it. Transportation is a lot less tangible, because people don’t necessarily know that it can be solved. There was no time they can remember when it was working really well.
Then there’s also the organizational issue: what’s the constituency? That’s one of the reasons New York has been more successful in getting transit money, congestion pricing, and investment: there’s an existing constituency for public transportation that’s not just low-income people.
They’ve got advocacy that’s very well organized around public transit. In LA, you’re lucky to get 10% of people riding public transit, so it’s much harder to mobilize for the idea that we should charge drivers more money to drive, take that money, and invest it in public transit, or even the idea that we should take away a lane of traffic and use it for a bus lane. Those are very difficult things to mobilize around, compared to housing.
Say you were doing this political advocacy and organizing directly in LA, what are the smart ways to route around that? Are there other ideas you can tackle that don’t get that kind of pushback, but are still good for urban transit?
That’s why LA Metro has successfully passed a ballot measure that’s funding all these major transit projects: people will still, in the abstract, say, “Yes, we should build more public transit. That’ll take people off the road so I can drive faster.” They’ll vote for that, and they have, in record numbers. That’s the path of less resistance. Unfortunately, even that path results in projects that take a really long time to build, because people might support it in the abstract, but when it comes to their neighborhood, or it affects them personally, there’s going to be a little more pushback.
It’s not that you can’t mobilize support around public transit; it’s that it’s much harder to mobilize support around the things that would actually fix the problem you’re trying to solve. That said, I’m a believer that congestion pricing could be put in by a strong leader who said, “We’re going to try this for a year in this particular place, and if you hate it, I’m taking it out.” If you just had someone who was willing to do that and say, “We’ve got to try something, because the 405 is ridiculous,” I think they would get a lot of support. Same thing with LAX. No one thinks LAX is working well from a ground-transportation standpoint. Just come in and say, “We’re going to try it here, and if you don’t like it, we’ll take it out,” and give it a shot.
People generally like congestion pricing more once they see it than they did ex ante.
I think they generally like bus lanes too. People oppose taking a lane of traffic away for a bus lane because they think it’s going to damage local business, take away parking, and make traffic worse. Time and time again, that has proven not to be the case. In fact, when you put in a new bus lane, it revitalizes the neighborhood. It brings more people there, you have more businesses thriving, it’s more walkable, it’s a better place. That’s the facts. So getting the bus lane in is the key. Once it’s in, people love it.
You mentioned that everybody knows ground transportation at LAX is failing. I’m an East Coast boy. I don’t know that. Walk me through the problem from a transit-professional perspective.
LAX is one of the largest airports in the world, and it has no real mass-transit connection. If you want to take mass transit to or from LAX, your choices are to take a shuttle bus to a Metro line that doesn’t go much of anywhere, or to take one of the FlyAway buses, which go to a couple of different points in the city and are very slow.
Because there’s no real mass-transit connection, everyone is going by Uber, Lyft, or personal vehicles. More people are flying, so more ground transportation and personal vehicles come in. It is gridlock at the peak times, to the point where it’s very difficult to get around the terminal. Getting to and from that airport is one of the things people cite that they hate about Los Angeles and about LAX.
It is not that difficult to solve this problem. LAX is planning a people mover that has been delayed for seven years, which would potentially connect more effectively to the Metro station. But that won’t make much of a difference in ground access, because that Metro line does not go that many places. You could solve this problem very quickly if you had frequent bus connections with exclusive lanes going to and from a number of useful nodes, but no one’s investing in it.
Instead, people are afraid to say, “Let’s set aside more money for mass-transit options,” or, “Let’s use congestion pricing to get into LAX,” which is something that would make a lot of sense and would reduce the traffic considerably. People just let it go and say, “The people mover’s coming, and that’ll fix it.”
I hear you saying a lot of the problem is political will from elected leaders. Is that half the pie? What’s missing?
Why is there a lack of political will? In part because who’s publishing pieces pointing out the problems and the fact that there’s not that much being done? I’m a former New Yorker. If the mayor did something related to transportation, the New York Post would have a headline about it on the front page. Here, the LA Times has one transportation reporter, and maybe they’ll do a story, but they don’t necessarily get all the facts in depth. They’re not necessarily plugged into exactly what’s happening. It’s a different world.
Another part is that the way this place is set up is completely chaotic. The city of LA runs LAX, but LAX serves the entire region. The city, which is 4.5 million people, is part of this LA Metro organization that’s 10 million people and serves the entire county, with 88 cities. Then you’ve got a whole other set of transit agencies at the local level that are operating their own bus services. So the governance structure does not lend itself to any kind of thoughtful, coherent regional planning.
A third thing is this notion that public agencies in California are not really held to account for what they’re spending and what the results are. Metro has a $9.5 billion annual budget. What are taxpayers getting?
I read that line twice in your book. I was like, “Wait, what?”
I think that’s partly because of the influence of labor unions in the structure. You can’t ignore the fact that a lot of the employees at Metro are labor union employees, and they have tremendous political support. There’s no opposition party in California, much less Los Angeles. This is partly what happens when you have no reasonable opposition to come in and say, “What’s going on with the labor unions? Are they serving the public effectively? What’s going on with the budget at Metro?” Somebody has to say that, but there’s no Republicans here to do that.
High-speed rail in California has been a massive national story for years now. Both liberal and Republican critics have focused their attention on this high-speed train to nowhere. How much has that extended firestorm changed the conversation about transit?
Surprisingly, I have not seen that happen yet. It goes back to the lack of an opposition party. People draw attention to high-speed rail as this big waste — so much money, and what are we getting out of it? But no one really draws that same attention to public transit at the urban level. The reason, I think, is that high-speed rail is not in most everyone’s area. It’s a lot harder to have a punching bag in your own area.
Other electeds from around the state aren’t going to criticize what’s happening in LA or the Bay Area because they want to have their own programs locally, and they don’t want theirs to be criticized either. So it’s not a political system that lends itself to that kind of scrutiny. There’s just a lack of any political gain anyone’s been able to see from being the one saying, “Why are we spending all this money on these projects, and what are we getting out of it?”
Let’s imagine there are 100 readers in the LA metro area who are deeply passionate about civic engagement. What would you have them do?
The book is about the fact that change is possible within bureaucracies. It’s harder than I would’ve liked. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it’s very stressful, but it is possible. Under the right circumstances, with the right leadership, you can push forward innovative ideas, and they do happen. A lot of things people were opposing us on at LA Metro eventually came to pass, with or without us, because they were things that had to happen, and we were a little ahead of the curve, or they didn’t want to work with us. So I wouldn’t despair about the ability to make change. I’d just say we could be doing it so much better and faster, and that will take leadership at the state, regional, and local levels.
What I would suggest is to get involved with the project that seems like it needs advocacy because it isn’t as politically popular or salient. To give an example: in LA, and in many cities, there’s been some mobilization — although it’s dissipated now — around the idea of free transit as something advocates can get behind. That, to me, is a waste of effort. It’s not a well-thought-out policy. It’s just something that grabs headlines, people can run for elections on it, and you’re buying into the political system when you advocate for that. A much more thoughtful policy would be to say, “Why don’t we take money from wealthy drivers and give it to low-income people to spend on transportation?” Wouldn’t that be a much better and more effective thing to advocate around?
If I were advising people who want to get civically engaged: figure out how to get engaged with policies that are well thought out and backed up by research. That’s the role of think tanks and good advocacy groups: they’re not just advocating for the hot thing of the week. They’re advocating for a really sensible policy that makes real change.
Transit took a massive blow during COVID. In most cities ridership numbers and budgets have not recovered. A year and a half ago, we had Randy Clarke on from Washington Metro. He talked very frankly about this budgetary challenge: the sell is harder, and the money’s lower.
How do you see urban transit today? Some folks would say, “Look, it’s in structural decline. You should put away some of the grand visions for urban transit. Wait for self-driving cars.”
I certainly wouldn’t say that. Here’s the way I think about it. The pandemic accelerated a trend that was already happening. On a per capita basis, transit ridership has been declining essentially since World War II in this country. There’s been a lot of effort to try to reverse that through major capital investments, and it largely has not worked.
Is that a story of the success of the car?
The car is a competitor that is generally going to win despite a higher price tag, because it is subsidized at every turn. We built our entire policy around accommodating cars in almost every city in America as much as we possibly can. So it’s going to beat transit, except for people who have no other choice, or in very specific places where operating a vehicle is very expensive and challenging, like New York, or sometimes Chicago, or Philly.
The other issue that’s important is that the commute from suburb to center city, which is what transit is designed to accommodate, is not the majority commute and has not been for some time. Suburb-to-suburb has been the number-one commute for 30 years, and it’s been going in that direction even more. So you have transit trying to compete against a highly subsidized mode, for a dwindling number of people. The pandemic just accelerated that trend and said, “There’s people who used to commute five days a week and use transit. Now maybe it’s two days a week, if that, and a lot of them are just going to drive those two days anyway.”
If that’s the case, you have two choices. You can say, “Transit is a social service for people who have no other option. We’re not going to bother to try to attract new riders.”
It’s just a forever subsidy that we do for the poor among us, and you accept that.
That means it will lose constituency. It will continue to be hard to fund, because people don’t generally like to fund things for poor people, and they come under attack all the time if you try to do that. It would be a challenge.
The other option is to get serious about moving toward a society that is more dependent on public transit, and recognize that means using public transit for things besides the commute, and making it more of a product of daily life, where the densities can support it. You’re going to lose the suburban constituencies, and you’re going to lose some of the places where transit doesn’t make as much sense, but you’re going to gain a lot of people if you run faster, more frequent services within cities that have their own lanes. That takes a lot of political will. Doing it with congestion pricing is the most effective way. But even without congestion pricing, you could increase ridership a lot if you shifted from trying to be a commute vehicle toward much more of a “How do I get around town as quickly and cheaply as possible?” strategy.
Let’s say you’re giving advice to the next CEO of LA Metro. With the Olympics as a backdrop in 2028, what fights would you have this person pick and not pick?
The most critical fights to pick are over street space. In LA, as in most American cities, we devote an inordinate amount of public space to cars, not just for moving, but for parking. The Olympic Games represent an opportunity to take back some of that space for people, to take it away from cars and say, “People are what matter. We’re going to move people faster, and we have to move people faster for the Games, so we’re going to set up ways to do that. We’re going to have more sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus lanes. We’re going to put them all over LA so we can run this Olympic transportation system that gets people where they need to go, and then they’re going to stay there. After the Games are over, we’re still going to have that street space devoted to that type of travel. It’s going to get a lot more people through, and it’s going to be a lot more efficient. But you’re not going to be able to drive absolutely everywhere all the time as easily as you could before.”
Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.
It’s a tremendous opportunity. We snuck in during the pandemic and put bus lanes downtown in Los Angeles. No one noticed, and they’re still there. That was a great time to get away with that. The same thing is true for the Games. This is the time to put in the stuff and show how it works, so that when the Games are over, you can keep using it.
