Project 2025 and Public Transportation
The Republican Party’s Project 2025, outlining its governing agenda if it wins the election later this year, has been in the news lately, and I’ve wanted to poke around what it has to say about transportation policy, which hasn’t been covered in generalist news, unlike bigger issues. The answer is that, on public transportation at least, it doesn’t say much, and what it does say seems confused. The blogger Libertarian Developmentalism is more positive about it than I am but does point out that it seems to be written by people who don’t use public transit and therefore treat it as an afterthought – not so much as a negative thing to be defunded in favor of cars, but just as not a priority. What I’m seeing in the two pages the 922-page Project 2025 devotes to public transit is that the author of the transportation section, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, clearly read some interesting critiques but then applies them in a way that shows she didn’t really understand them, and in particular, the proposed solutions are completely unrelated to the problems she diagnoses.
What’s not in the report?
Project 2025 is notable not in what it says about public transit, but in what it doesn’t say. As I said in the lede, the 922-page Project 2025 only devotes slightly less than two pages to public transportation, starting from printed page 634. The next slightly more than one page is devoted to railroads, and doesn’t say anything beyond letting safety inspections be more automated with little detail. Additional general points about transportation that also apply to transit can be found on page 621 about grants to states and pp. 623-4 extolling the benefits of public-private partnerships (PPPs, or P3s). To my surprise, the word “Amtrak,” long a Republican privatization target, appears nowhere in the document.
There are no explicit funding cuts proposed. There are complaints that American transit systems need subsidies and that their post-pandemic ridership recovery has not been great. There is one concrete proposal, to stop using a portion of the federal gas tax revenue to pay for public transit, but then it’s not a proposal to use the money to fund roads instead in context of the rest of the transportation section. The current federal formula is that funds to roads and public transit are given in an 80:20 ratio between the two modes, which has long been the subject of complaints among both transit activists and anti-transit activists, and Project 2025 not only doesn’t side with the latter but also doesn’t even mention the formula or the possibility of changing it.
The love for P3s is just bad infrastructure construction; the analysis speaks highly of privatization of risk, which has turned entire parts of the world incapable of building anything. (Libertarian Developmentalism has specific criticism of that point.) But the section stops short of prescribing P3s or other mechanisms of privatization of risk. In this sense, it’s better than what I’ve heard from some apolitical career civil servants at DOT. In contrast, the Penn Station Reconstruction agreement among the agencies using the station explicitly states that the project must use an alternative procurement mechanism such as design-build, construction manager/general contractor, or progressive-design-build (which is what most of the world calls design-build), of which the last is illegal in New York but unfortunately there are attempts to legalize it. This way, Project 2025’s loose support for privatization of planning is significantly better than the actual privatization of planning seen in New York, ensuring it will stay incapable of building infrastructure.
This aspect of saying very little is not general to Project 2025, I don’t think. I picked a randomly-selected page, printed p. 346, which concerns education. There’s a title, “advance school choice policies,” which comprises a few paragraphs, but these clearly state what the party wants, which is to increase funding for school vouchers in Washington D.C., expanding the current program. Above that title is a title “protect parental rights in policy,” which is exclusively about opposing the rights of transgender children not to tell their parents they’re socially transitioning at school.
Okay, so what does Project 2025 say?
The public transit section of the report, as mentioned above, has little prescription, and instead complains about transit ridership. What it says is not even always true, regarding modal comparisons. For one, it gets the statistical definition of public transit in the United States wrong. Here is Project 2025 on how public transit is defined:
New micromobility solutions, ridesharing, and a possible future that includes autonomous vehicles mean that mobility options—particularly in urban areas—can alter the nature of public transit, making it more affordable and flexible for Americans. Unfortunately, DOT now defines public transit only as transit provided by municipal governments. This means that when individuals change their commutes from urban buses to rideshare or electric scooter, the use of public transit decreases. A better definition for public transit (which also would require congressional legislation) would be transit provided for the public rather than transit provided by a public municipality.
Leaving aside that the biggest public-sector transit agencies in the US are not municipal but state-run or occasionally county-run (in Los Angeles), the definition of public transit in federal statistics and funding is exactly what Project 2025 wants. There are private transit operators; the biggest single grouping is privately-operated buses in New Jersey running into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel. These buses count as public transit in census commuting statistics; they have access to publicly-funded transit-only infrastructure including the Lincoln Tunnel’s peak-only Express Bus Lane (XBL) and Port Authority Bus Terminal.
What’s true is that rideshare vehicles aren’t counted as transit, but as taxis. Larger vanshare systems could count as public transit; the flashiest ones, like last decade’s Bridj in Boston and Chariot in San Francisco, were providing public transit privately, but went to great lengths to insist that they were doing something different.
Other complaints include waste, but as with the rest of this section, there isn’t a lot of detail. Project 2025 complains about the Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program, saying it leads to waste, but it treats canceling it as unrealistic and instead says “a new conservative Administration should ensure that each CIG project meets sound economic standards and a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.” In theory, I could read it as a demand that the FTA should demand benefit-cost analyses as a precondition of funding; current federal practices do not do so, and to an extent this can be blamed on changes in the early Obama administration. But the FTA is not even mentioned in this section, nor is there a specific complaint that American transit projects are federally funded based on vibes more than on benefit-cost analysis.
The two main asks as far as transit is concerned are about labor and grants to states.
On labor, the analysis is solid, and I can tell that the Project 2025 authors read some blue state right-wing thinktanks that do interface with the problems of transit agencies. Project 2025 correctly notes that transit worker compensation is driven by high fringe benefits and pensions but not wages; it’s loath to say “wages are well below competitive levels” but it does say “transit agencies have high compensation costs yet are struggling to attract workers.” So far, so good.
And then the prescribed solution, the only specific in the section, is to reinterpret a section of the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 to permit transit agencies to reduce overall compensation, which is currently illegal. As a solution, it is unhinged: transit agencies are having trouble finding qualified hires, so reducing compensation is only going to make these problems worse. It doesn’t follow at all from Project 2025’s own analysis; what would follow is that agencies should shift compensation from benefits to cash pay, but that’s already legal, and at no point does Project 2025 say “we recommend that agencies shift to paying workers in cash and will legally and politically back agencies that do so against labor wishes,” perhaps with a mention that the Conservatives in the United Kingdom gave such support to rail operators to facilitate getting rid of conductors. There’s no mention of the problems of the seniority system. Furchtgott-Roth used to work at the Manhattan Institute, which talks about way more specific issues including backing management against labor during industrial disputes and how one could cut pensions, but this is nowhere in the report.
On grants to states, Project 2025 is on more solid grounds. It proposes on p. 621 that federal funding should be given to states by formula, to distribute as they see fit:
If funding must be federal, it would be more efficient for the U.S. Congress to send transportation grants to each of the 50 states and allow each state to purchase the transportation services that it thinks are best. Such an approach would enable states to prioritize different types of transportation according to the needs of their citizens. States that rely more on automotive transportation, for example, could use their funding to meet those needs.
American transit activists are going to hate this, because, as in Germany and perhaps everywhere else, they disproportionately use the public transit that most people don’t use. On pre-corona numbers, around 40% of transit commuters in the United States live in metropolitan New York, but among the activists, the New York share looks much lower than 40% – it’s lower than that in my social circle of American transit activists, and I lived in New York five years and founded a New York advocacy group. The advocates I know in Texas and Kentucky and Ohio are aware of their states’ problems and want ridership to be higher, but, at the end of the day, American transit ridership is not driven by these states. Texas is especially unfortunate in how, beyond Houston’s original Main Street light rail line, its investments have not been very good. Direct grants to states are likely going to defund such projects in the future, but such projects are invisible in overall US transit usage, unfortunately.
In the core states to US transit usage – New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, Washington, Pennsylvania – the outcome of such change would be to replace bad federal-state interactions with bad state politics. But then, to the extent that there’s a theme to the problems of Project 2025 beyond “they aren’t saying much,” it’s that it’s uninterested in solving competent governance problems in blue states, and essentially all of American public transit ridership today is about the poor quality of blue state governance.
What does this mean?
I’ve seen criticism of Project 2025 on left-wing social media (that is, Bluesky and Mastodon) that portrays it as evil. I haven’t read the document except for the transportation section and the aforementioned randomly-selected pair of pages, so I can’t judge fully, but on public transit, I’m not seeing any of this. I’m not seeing any clear defunding calls. I’m seeing a reference to anti-transit advocate Robert Poole, the director of transportation policy at Reason, but only on air traffic control; he’s written voluminously (and shoddily) about public transit, but Furchtgott-Roth isn’t referencing any of that.
What I am seeing is total passivity. Maybe it’s specific to Furchtgott-Roth, who I didn’t hear about before, and who just doesn’t seem to get transportation as an issue despite having served as a political appointee at USDOT. Or maybe, as Libertarian Developmentalism points out, it’s that the sort of people who’d write a Republican Party governing program don’t think about public transit very much and therefore resort to catechisms about reducing the role of the federal government and repealing a labor law that isn’t a binding constraint. Occasionally this can land on a proposal that isn’t uniformly bad, like granting money to states rather than projects; more commonly, it leads to misstating what the federal and state governments consider to be public transit. I’m not seeing anything nefarious here, but I am seeing a lot of ignorance and poor thinking about solutions.
Pedestrian Observations 
I appreciate your willingness to actually look at facts instead of just parroting narratives with regards to Project 2025. I am significantly further to the right than Donald Trump is and the discussion centers around protecting the individual rights of citizens as opposed to dismantling public transit.
I support private public transit whenever possible, but I recognize the importance of a system that incorporates both the private sector and the public sector. Most Republicans are like that. Our urbanist friends would be well served to understand that both political parties like building new things. Brightline is a nice model to emulate because the development that carries the biggest bang for buck at train stations is transit oriented development. It wouldn’t be that difficult to convince a future administration led by a builder to incentivize the building of affordable housing around existing and new transit.
People who are more familiar with the internal machinations than I am, by which I mean Matt Yglesias, point out that the Trump administration was in favor of building more housing in urban areas until 2019, when some switch flipped and the party became NIMBY-aligned as the Democrats aligned with the YIMBY advocates. The blue-state pattern these days is that the ideologues who follow national politics and move in national circles are YIMBY, regardless of whether they’re neoliberal or socialist, and the locally-rooted people and political machines are NIMBY. In New York, Republicans are running on suburban NIMBY grievances against any attempt to abolish single-family zoning…
And yeah, the Brightline model could work. But Project 2025 the document does not talk about it. The word “Brightline” appears the same number of times as the word “Amtrak,” zero. The transportation section just doesn’t commit to anything.
That’s interesting to me, because they’re more likely to represent constituents who don’t have nearby access to an airport and would be unlikely station locations if Amtrak ever privatized and closed down service in areas to become profitable.
Just look back to the last time the orange wanna be dictator was in charge and let us know just how many projects were actually funded and progressed. That should clear up any misconceptions you have. The MAGA party is in hoc to big oil, public transit is for poor people who are failures as they aren’t white and rich so why bother providing anything for them. And Project 25 is basically a blueprint for white Christian nationalism and America first, so the chances of learning anything from outside the US will evaporate, not that the US currently learns much anyway due to its exceptionalism.
National transit database reports a category of ridership called Vanpool. These are rideshares.
“The current federal formula is that funds to roads and public transit are given in an 80:20 ratio between the two modes, which has long been the subject of complaints among both transit activists and anti-transit activists, and Project 2025 not only doesn’t side with the latter but also doesn’t even mention the formula or the possibility of changing it.”
The 80:20 world is very stable for driving and roadbuilding. If I hated transit, it would be hard to beat the status quo policy. There is just enough funding for transit so that people who are not paying much attention think that transit is well funded, but not enough funding to hurt the overall roadbuilding program. Not talking about 80:20 is a good approach for transit haters.
Well, anti-transit activists are still mad that the ratio is 80:20 when the commute ratio is more lopsided. (The counterargument is that the American transit modal split pre-corona may have been only 5%, but in the situations in which roads are widened – peak traffic, often involving city center traffic – the modal split is much higher.)
Yes. The typical anti-transit activist is not happy with 80:20. I am claiming that not talking about it would be a smart and winning play for the anti-transit movement (just as we should not be happy with the 20 as pro-transit activists, so we should talk about it). New Starts cannot do much even with this improved split.
Harris County Metro (Houston) just walked away from a federal grant for a BRT project, FFS. The local match was too rich for them (I have not looked at the numbers, but the new board is very bad). Most states are closer to TX and FL than they are to NY and MD. All state transportation money is encumbered for roads in TX, and it would take multiple amendments to the state constitution to change it. I am very grumpy with the City of Houston and State of Texas now. And I do not hear anti-transit activists here talking about 80:20 because it is of no consequence here. It is probably a big help for MTA and MBTA, though.
I am quite familiar with Diana Furchtgott-Roth. She and her husband published a series of articles denouncing the Maryland Purple Line light rail project, without revealing that they had been paid by the nimby Town of Chevy Chase to write them.
We learned that she had been paid only by filing a Public Information Act request with the town, which it denied, filing a lawsuit, and appealing an initial adverse ruling. (I am posting an image of one of the emails between the Furchtgott-Roths & the town on my Mastodon account.)
“Private transit” buses should be on an equal footing with “Public transit” buses. If public buses are exempt from congestion tolls, then private buses should be exempt too. If public buses can load/unload at the red curb at the train station, then private buses should be able to too. If public buses can use the bus-only lane on the street, then private buses should be allowed as well.
This is already policy – private buses from New Jersey do get to use the XBL and Port Authority.
It’s controvertial. See the “tech bus” in bay area.
I feel like I’ve mentioned this as an issue before: Americans by and large do not see transportation as “problem”, because by and large they have a car and are so used to the built-in costs of car ownership and an automobile-based transportation paradigm that complaints about it seem trivial, esoteric, or simply abstract, even as people regularly complain about traffic or the cost of gas, or have stories about an accident someone they know was in. It’s background noise, water in the goldfish’s bowl.
The most globally significant issue with this is that it forces decarbonizing transportation down to the level of individual choice. Because of decades of relatively cheap gas (even if people still buy enormous vehicles and then complain about fuel costs) and insurance, Americans are used to driving large, powerful cars at relatively (or merely subconsciously perceived-as) low cost, and even if threatening that status quo isn’t perceived as a threat per se, it is a risk which is only very slowly–and not irreversibly–working out in favor of EVs, because there’s no real coercion in how people buy their cars, only marketing.
Put another way, it’s a much more difficult thing to coordinate the purchasing habits of millions of partly irrational individuals (which is all of us) so as to make the smarter decision for the sake of the climate, or even themselves, than it is to, say, let grid utilities do the math and start building solar/wind farms because it’s the financially sensible thing to do.
It’s exactly the abdication of systemic government responsibility to at least try to direct the transportation situation which is probably the most hazardous aspect of Project 2025’s transportation advice. That it says so little means plenty of laxity is present to allow bad new ideas, or simply no new ideas and a continuation of the unsustainable and dissatisfying status quo. It seems like there’s at least a lot of room for legitimate interpretation of its commentary on the issue this way.
Dogma doesn’t need to make sense.
Especially after it has been run over by their Karma …
It’s the Heritage Foundation’s ruminations and fantasies. Very technically has nothing to do with any campaign or candidate anywhere. Or any party. Because it’s the Heritage Foundation and they can’t do any coordination with any candidate or any campaign. The candidate claims he doesn’t know much about it or the foundation.
It overlaps a lot with Agenda 47, the Trump campaign’s ruminations and fantasies. That they don’t talk about much anymore. The Republican Party’s official stance is the platform they just adopted. Which overlaps with both Project 2025 and Agenda 47. At least they adopted a platform. They didn’t in 2020.
I’m not going to read any of it because it’s the same people who claim Joe Biden is an incompetent doddering old fool who simultaneously is orchestrating the Deep State so well we don’t see any evidence of it.
It’s a useful read as the closest American equivalent of a Westminster system party manifesto. Trump is claiming not to know Project 2025 but he has people in his inner circle who were involved in it – and the claims are not about some kind of party-Heritage separation for campaign finance reasons but because Project 2025 is getting a lot of criticism over its, let’s call it maximalist, takes on things like abortion.
There is an official party document, the platform. That people are paying a lot of attention to Project 2025 doesn’t make it party policy. It gave the flunkies at Heritage something to do.