Can you explain how much maintenance work transit agencies vs. state highways do?
State highways are 90% building and 10% operating, while transit agencies are 90% operating — pulling off the daily commute — and 10% maintenance. Most people judge their local transit agency based on the morning or afternoon commute, whether the train showed up or broke down.
Transit agencies are operators in their DNA, and highway agencies are constructors.
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Can you explain how state highway agencies get money from the federal government, vs. state and local transit agencies?
State highway agencies don't ask for money, they simply get it. This is called formula funding or apportionment. Every five or six years — the last time was 2021 — Congress passes a bill that lays out how much money each state will get for the next several years. This is mostly for roads and bridges.
Once you have that money, you don't just know what you're getting this year, but also what you’re getting the following few years. The current Federal Highway Bill ends September 2026, but states are already planning projects for 2027 and 2028. They don't legally have that money yet, but, practically speaking, they do. This makes a big difference.
Transit agencies get formula funding too, but it’s for maintenance, not big projects. For major projects, transit agencies must apply for grants and go through a multi-year process before knowing if they'll receive funding. Once they get money for one project, they have to repeat the process for the next project.
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Another example: The Green Line Extension to the T [northwest into Boston suburbs] made the Green Line nearly 5 miles longer. If you try to operate a much longer transit line with the same number of trains, it's going to take way longer for a train to get from the beginning to the end, and you’re going to wait at the platform longer for the next train. So you have to buy trains — I didn’t know that at first. I was just thinking of the extension as its tracks, signals, platforms, right?
So they had to buy 24 new trains, which cost almost $200 million. Now you own 24 new trains. Where are you going take care of those trains? There's all these FTA requirements: they have to be inspected, they have to get upgrades. The MBTA don’t have enough space at their existing maintenance facility at this point: They have a certain size fleet. So now you have to build a new maintenance project.
The cost of the Green Line Extension includes 24 new cars in a brand new maintenance facility: hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, if you take the cost of the project and divide by the number of miles, you'll have a really high cost per mile. But hundreds of millions of that cost aren't to extend the system by 4.7 miles; they're to buy trains and build a maintenance facility. US transit agencies are criticized for spending more than their European or Asian counterparts, but our system is project-driven. In a different country’s system, that’d be in a different part of the budget. The problem for transit in the US is there is no different part of the budget.
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It’s not a bad thing to spend a long time planning. There's an argument to spend more time planning, and then go fast once you get started. But we can plan forever, and this is particularly true for projects for which we don't have enough money. If you're an elected official who supports that project, you create some sense of momentum by having planning meetings and issuing documents and doing PowerPoints and little events.
Consider South Coast Rail in Massachusetts — when we held a groundbreaking ceremony, the state senator said, "This is my fifth groundbreaking for this project." Because previous governors had found some money and done a little piece of work.
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Until someone is willing to make a decision — either yes we're building it and I can tell you how we’ll pay for it, or no we're not — then planning and permitting and public engagement can go on and on for decades. Then, when people look backwards, they say, “Oh, the planning, permitting and public engagement is why it took decades,” as opposed to the unwillingness to make a go/no-go decision.
But really, the lack of money is why it took decades, and during those decades, we did a lot of planning, permitting, and public engagement to keep the project alive.
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Tell me about the redesigns. What changed about the actual project?
I live on the other end of the Green Line, the western end. When you walk to a Green Line station in my town, it’s like walking to a slab of asphalt. There’s no station, no fare gate, no heat, no rain protection. You just stand there and wait for the train to come.
They had designed beautiful stations — $50, $60, $70 million stations. But if the stations cost $5 million instead of $50 million apiece, and there are six of them, that’s hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s pretty easy math.
So what do you hold constant? You have to know what you're aiming at. We said two things. One: it’s got to cost hundreds of millions of dollars less. It wasn’t like, “Oh, if you save 3%, we’re going to clap and go ask the legislature for the money.” We had to shave hundreds of millions off the cost.
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One other controversial thing: there was a beautiful community path for walking and biking that paralleled the entire Green Line Extension. Where we got in the most trouble was where there was room for the Green Line, but not enough room for the bike path. It turned into an extremely expensive bike path, because you had to do really expensive things to make it work, like moving transformers out of the way.
We said we were willing to build it with a non-continuous bike path. “We’re not going to take it all out — we’re just going to take out the really expensive parts, and those will be on city streets.” I mean, people bike on city streets. I do. But people hated it.
Our obsession with procurement served us well here. There were four things that we could not figure out how to pay for, the most important of which was this community path. We came up with the following idea: we were going to bid it out, and we already knew what the highest price was going to be. It was going to be $1 below what the Control Board said they were willing to spend.
So we set up the competition very differently. It was complicated, but it allowed us to pick a team we liked. But we also said: “The bidder who can figure out how to pay for the most of those four things, and still come in under the price, will win.” The winning team figured out how to pay for all four — including the community path — for less than the amount the Control Board said they would pay, because we let the private sector figure out the solution, instead of designing it to 100% and then asking what it would cost.
From the interview:
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