President Biden is nearing a potentially significant bipartisan win on federal infrastructure spending, as a $550 billion package nears approval in the United States Senate. But the United States has a poor track record of spending this kind of money wisely, particularly on rail transit.
As the Eno Center has documented, U.S. taxpayers pay a premium of nearly 50 percent on a per-mile basis to build rail transit compared to our global peers. Tunneled projects furthermore take nearly a year and a half longer to build than abroad
In a piece I just published for Smerconish.com, I lay out key requirements that federal leaders should consider including as conditions on these “Biden bucks” to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. To summarize the piece, federal transit dollars should:
- Include measures that prevent local transit agencies from “over-designing” projects to appease narrow interests with counter-productive and costly concessions;
- Ensure local leaders choose optimal rail transit routes to boost ridership and overall utility and cost-effectiveness;
- Streamline federal permitting, including via multi-agency coordination and expedited environmental reviews, with exemptions from analysis on impacts not all that relevant to environmentally beneficial rail – like traffic, air quality, and noise;
- Incentivize smart procurement of contractors, including a maximum on contract size to break up the work on large projects among smaller and more competitive firms;
- Give transit agency staff more flexibility on construction oversight, including ability to make basic decisions on project implementation to speed construction; and
- Require 24/7 construction to shave potentially years off construction timelines.
With a challenge this complex, no single solution will cure the United States of its poor track record on rail transit project delivery. But the infrastructure bill now gives Congress and the Biden Administration an opportunity to start fixing the problem — delivering climate-friendly infrastructure quickly and effectively to more people.
The one area where political observers thought Democrats could work with Trump is on infrastructure spending. Even Governor Brown, who got a lot of attention for savaging Trump right after the election, submitted a wish-list of projects he was hoping would get federal support, particularly high speed rail.
Trump could certainly use a big legislative achievement, and most Republicans are unlikely to go along with infrastructure spending, either because it will increase the deficit or require tax increases. So he’d rely on working with Democrats.
But at the same time, Trump wants to fulfill his promise to build a border wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. And if he doesn’t get money to build it through other means, it’s likely he would include it in an infrastructure bill.
Not so fast, says Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. In a letter to the senate majority leader, he warned against its inclusion in a budget bill or else it would risk a government shutdown, per Politico. And if it’s not in a budget bill, it may reappear in an infrastructure proposal.
Of course, a faster way to kill the wall might be to get some libertarian groups like the Pacific Legal Foundation to sue over the wall route, where it runs through private property. I know that’s an issue in state like Texas, where the wall would bisect some properties.
So far though, Trump seems like very much the political novice he claims to be, having campaigned on promises that are hard to achieve in practice. His unorthodox style got him an upset political win, but it remains to be seen if it’s actually going to work in the difficult process of getting major legislation passed. And the infrastructure bill seems like just one of those tests.
