This week we’re joined once again by Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute to discuss his annual transit project updates at Transit Explorer.
In this episode — part one of two — we talk about housing strategies for properties near transit, exciting transit openings in 2025 and which cities could use a subway project. We also talk about government deference to local officials and how we can better use public assets to create more housing.
Next week we’ll see which 2024 predictions we got right, and make some more predictions for the coming year.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: I’m interested in your thoughts on the French side of things, too. We’ve had Eric Eidlin on, who was a German Marshall Fund fellow, and he looked at German and French high speed rail lines and the land-use stuff that goes around that. And some of the stuff that he shared with us is really interesting, specifically around how the French state operates and whatnot.
So I’m curious, like, about your kind of back and forth on the two — what we might learn maybe from that side of the ocean.
Yonah Freemark: One thing that I found fascinating in my research — so basically to do this work, I interviewed hundreds of locally elected officials, like city councilors, mayors, regional actors, even some state legislators in both countries. And one thing that was fascinating is the parallels between the U.S. and France. They have very different legal regimes. The U.S. and France don’t share a history of their constitutions. They act differently. Nevertheless, in both countries, there is this very strong attachment to the idea that local governments are best representative of the viewpoints of people on the ground.
What you’ll find is that people working in France and regional governments or in the U.S. and state governments often defer to elected officials who represent municipalities for decisions that are important to their constituents. I interviewed some folks in the California state legislature, for example, who essentially told me that even though they had the right to supervise, for example, policymaking related to the Gold Line extension out into the eastern side of Los Angeles County, they didn’t want to engage in that oversight. They wanted the local governments there to make the decisions. And in France, I heard very similar things. I spoke to the vice president of the region of Île-de-France, which is the Paris region. And what he essentially told me at the time was — if local governments really want something out of a project, it’s not my role, even though I have all the cash, it’s not my role to tell them to do or not do something. It’s up to them to tell me what they want. And I thought that was a really interesting parallel between the two countries.
Jeff Wood: What does that mean for transportation projects? Does it mean that local agencies try to ask for too much when it comes to some of these projects? And maybe some of that deference causes some consternation.
Yonah Freemark: I think that’s absolutely right. I think the deference given to local officials makes sense from a political and democratic perspective, but it has the consequence of systematically resulting in projects that might be less efficient and more expensive than if the projects had been planned by a central authority without the input of those local officials, I document in my paper essentially how, in Minneapolis, the route of a line was changed to support a local official who made her case to others in the region.
Even though that change cost the Metropolitan council, which is the financer of the project and Hennepin County, significantly more money. And we saw something very similar in the Paris region, where essentially a group of local governments said, we want this Metro line to interconnect, which essentially meant the trains could run around the region.
There wasn’t necessarily much evidence that would provide a significant benefit to riders, but the people in the communities really fought for it. And, maybe they were right to fight for it, but the result was the region had to spend hundreds of more millions of euros to pay for the project.
I think this might be one contributor to higher costs of construction over time is just the engagement of different local officials. But I think one thing that’s worth emphasizing here is that, this is not a problem that can be solved by institutional change. In many of the examples I document, all of the official power is in those higher level governments to make the decisions. But what’s happening here is that the local governments are using essentially what I’m calling de facto power to get what they want out of these projects.
