I promise we’ll get back to trains soon!
It’s the time of the year when families get together to sing carols and do battle on issues of all kind. At my family’s dinner table, it usually devolves into a contest to see who can outflank each other on the left—like the Sanders and Warren families got together for Raclette. “You want a public option for healthcare? Well I want socialized medicine or nothing!”
As the voice of moderation in all things, I am am used to taking a lot of incoming. “There’s no room for Joe Manchin apologists at this table,” my uncle told me yesterday, after I suggested that Manchin’s blockade of Build Back Better might have actually been a boon for inflation-stricken Democrats.
So it’s surprising to me that there is one issue about which I consistently come out to the left of everyone else: transportation policy.
I think, for example, American cities should be tearing up their road networks and eliminating on-street parking wherever possible to create better, Dutch-style routes for bicyclists a la Anne Hidalgo—the Paris mayor who has ridden her drastic bike infrastructure to popular success and a presidential run.
“But I like my car’s air conditioning!” my cousin—born and raised in temperate Seattle—protested. “I can’t arrive at work sweaty.”
I think urban cores all over the country should implement congestion charges and use them to fund more robust public transit. Not a single U.S. city’s public transit system lives up to the standard set by the rest of the developed world—or even those of large swaths of the developing world.
I think the federal government should fund intercity high-speed rail in high-density corridors. More on this when we get back to trains.
Even though these are considered left-of-center ideas in the American political firmament, they should not be. I don’t think of them as left. I think of them as the most straightforward way for governments to provide economic opportunity.
One problem of the modern left is the blanket expectation that government can and should offer a panacea for every social and economic ill in the book. How it will do this precisely…is never quite clear. Never mind the fact that procuring almost any good or service is massively more expensive when governments do it. Never mind that the efficacy of past attempts at well-intentioned social programs have been cost ineffective at best and have torn apart families at worst.
When startup founders think about providing a new good or service, their first goal—if they’re smart—is finding product-market fit. In other words: am I (person/company) uniquely able to make and deliver a good or service that achieves is sufficiently useful for a low enough cost that people will pay for it.
When politicians assign government to fix problems, this kind of critical analysis rarely happens. No one asks: is this is a service that the government is uniquely capable of providing? Will it provide a high return on invested capital?
Transportation, on the other hand, is a department where governments large and small, all over the world, have discovered product-market fit. Transportation is something that only governments can provide comprehensively, due to the necessity of inter-regional operability. It takes governments to be able to build infrastructure (private partners can also be helpful in development phases) where it’s highly needed but also where it’s highly profitable, and to be able to distribute capital between the too to ensure widespread service.
That’s not to say that governments—especially ours, should not be striving to do this work better and more cost-effectively; they absolutely can and should be.
But unlike many social spending programs, better transportation is a surefire way to lubricate economic growth and offer more equality of opportunity. A Harvard study found that commute time is the single greatest indicator of the odds of escaping poverty in a region. It was found to be more predictive than crime, than test scores, and more predictive even than the number of two-parent families in a given area.
Transit matters.
This is a freeform daily newsletter about the transportation industry: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I take shallow dives into topics that I think are interesting, including write ups of startups in the space, historical explorations, market analyses, company and personal profiles, interviews with industry players, and occasional personal essays.
Thanks for reading—and please let me know if you have any feedback or if there is anything you would like to see me cover.
Ride well,
DS