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.
