Talking Headways Podcast: The Long Road to Real Transit Progress
This week on Talking Headways we are sharing Part 1 of our conversation with Reece Martin of The Transit Brief in Toronto at the Mpact Transit + Community Conference. We discuss China’s transit expansion, the politics and impacts of fare policy, construction costs around the globe, the US’s existential crisis and the material benefits of progress.
Avid listeners know the drill: Press play on the audio player embedded below, read an AI-generated transcript here, or digest the edited excerpt at the end of this post.
Reece Martin: The US is clearly in a civilizational struggle with China — and it’s like, hey, they’re building all this stuff, and you can’t build even highways? Even if you think that the right thing for the US to do is just build more car infrastructure, you can’t even do that.
The state is geriatric. It’s run by geriatrics. It’s an existential problem. You wanna build defense infrastructure. You wanna build transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure — and you just can’t because of all of this proceduralism and various other problems, right?
The things that would let you build more subways, would let you build more housing, and would let you do all these other things. And I think it would make the United States a better place, a more dynamic place, right? And it’s good for the economy, right? I’m reading a fantastic book, I recommend everyone goes and reads it. It’s called Order Without Design, by Alain Bertaud.
He’s French. My French pronunciation, despite being Canadian, is horrendous. It’s great. But it’s also quite interesting because urban issues are very progressive-coded, and he’s like a total market fundamentalist, and it’s great. We impose so many constraints on ourselves, and if you actually didn’t, you would probably get better, more dynamic cities.
Cities are what creates great dynamic economies. And you look at a place like New York in the early 20th century — that’s the dream, right? They’re building a ton of infrastructure, building a ton of housing. The city was growing. It was getting denser.
It was getting more dynamic, like what Chinese cities are experiencing now, right? It’s the same thing. It’s a state-led process, whereas in the US and in London as well, this was actually run by private companies initially. And to some extent, New York subway expansion was kinda killed by the city getting involved and then kind of building all of these redundant parallel lines to the private operators.
You need to create that dynamism that lets cities grow. Look at Austin or Atlanta. They would be better cities if they had great transit systems because it would create competition. Even if you’re a driver — it’s like, well, if the roads are too busy, if they’re not improving, then I’ll just get on the train.
But because that doesn’t exist, your whole city just suffers as a result. And so I think that something that is healthy in Ontario and in Canada more broadly is that transit and transportation, while it’s still politically contentious, nobody disagrees that you need to build this stuff.
Jeff Wood: My wife’s Chinese. We’ve been going back every year. I usually spend about a month there, and it’s just eye-opening to go and see what’s happening in Shenzhen or even Hong Kong or even in northern cities.
Her city is the main city in a province, and it’s a small city compared to Beijing and Shanghai, but it has two new subway lines. And just seeing that and how the people are responding to that.
I interviewed Olivia Plotnick, who is an American from Oregon living in China. She’s been living there for the last 10 years. She’s a brand specialist, and she did this trip where she went to 30 cities in three months using high-speed rail. And I asked her: “Well, what do people think about this?” And she said, “I talked to the cab drivers, and they think it’s amazing.”
All the high-speed rail, all the infrastructure, they can see things happening. They can see more customers. And on her side, where she talks about brands and new brands, the second tier of Chinese cities, there’s a competition between these brands that are starting up because of all the infrastructure that’s happening.
And there’s a discussion about not only building the infrastructure, but about how we can make our regions better because of the infrastructure we’ve already built. How can we create better biotech investment? Well, let’s create a cluster of cities outside of Shanghai that you already connected with subways and with high-speed rail that enhance the ability of people to share information and share ideas to get more patents, those types of things.
And I feel like we’re having that discussion a little bit in the private sector. The folks that are investing in technology are doing things, but it’s not kind of the same way as thinking about how you can connect all these places so that new discussions about technology and investment and all those things can happen.
It’s really frustrating to go and see what they’ve done there and what we’re doing here, and what we’re wasting money on in the United States. And I shouldn’t say here because we’re in Canada. But in the United States, we’re still spending so much money on road expansion and the highway system, and it’s already built out.
It’s completely not valuable anymore to spend more money on it because it’s built out. You need to shift over to something else, like high-speed rail, that’s actually going to connect places and create that vitality and that collision of ideas that we really need.
Reece Martin: I think there’s two things that are pretty interesting. I’m actually a tech guy. I did computer science at university, so I’m not super-cynical about tech, even if AI is a little concerning. You have to sometimes reflect that most of the new technology developed in my life, in terms of the value extracted.
There’s a lot of good biotech. It’s great that we can cure a bunch of cancers that we previously couldn’t. So I don’t wanna be too negative. But if you look at consumer technology and software, which is a huge part of the economy, a lot of this stuff is useful, but a lot of it is actually just net-negative on people’s quality of life.
Like Instagram — the world would probably be better without it, right? There’s a lot of things like that. So you just sort of wonder. You look at China, right? They’ve spent all this money and effort building something. If you live in Portland, and you could go to Seattle for the afternoon, that is gonna make your life better in a way that Instagram is not gonna make your life better. It’s gonna let you live in the real world.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, the tourism there has exploded. People can go to different parts of the country and see some of their sights and ancient sites.
Reece Martin: And that’s good. Imagine if it were easier and cheaper to travel from California to Nevada or California to Arizona. Even politically, these things help people not be crazy because they would interact more with people with different views and from different places. And I think there’s been a real focus on this: How do we extract more money out of people for the latest iPhone? And not: How can we materially improve living standards?
I can see some of this as a Canadian because when I grew up in Vancouver, the SkyTrain system was 40 percent as big as it is today. The city looked totally different. It’s covered in high-rises now. There’s this all-new SkyTrain. There’s new highways and bridges.
The same is true in Toronto and Montréal. If you look at the population of Canada when I was born, it was probably in the high 20 millions. We’re now at 40 million. It would as if the US was at 500 million people, if it had experienced that kind of growth.
There’s housing costs, which are really difficult here. I don’t want to frame it as entirely positive. But you just recognize that positive progress is possible. When I was growing up, you couldn’t just take the train to the airport in Vancouver and then take into the city from Toronto’s airport. Now you can.
Next year it’ll be Montréal. This constant sense of progress and more options, more accessibility, more people that you can meet every year. When people don’t have that experience of living in a society that has so much forward progress and momentum, I think they underrate how valuable it is.
Even if you are a cab driver and you’re a bit worried about what you’re gonna do — well, so much is happening. I’m gonna figure it out, right? It’s a positive for all of society.
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