Beth Osborne has watched the same story play out five times: a new federal transportation bill arrives with big language about goals and accountability, states adopt the right words, and nothing changes. Osborne, who led Transportation for America and worked inside USDOT, has been through five federal transportation reauthorizations, watched reform language get adopted and neutralized every single time, and arrived at a conclusion that would have surprised her younger self. Recorded at the Strong Towns National Gathering in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this conversation with Chuck Marohn digs into the gap between what the federal transportation program claims to do and what it actually delivers — on safety, on repair, on congestion, on emissions — and whether there's any version of federal involvement worth keeping.
I'd like to introduce Beth Osborne. Beth is one of the people that I admire the most, for a variety of reasons, but particularly for her knowledge in this space — there's nobody comparable. I actually asked for a smaller, more intimate room, because she and I are just going to chat like pals. I wanted that to be part of it, but I also wanted everybody to be able to ask their own questions.
You literally have the country's expert on transportation policy here — how things function in DC from a transportation perspective, what past legislation looked like, and what future legislation will likely look like. As we go here, I will invite you to ask questions. We're in a little bit bigger room, so if you want to come down closer, that would be cool. Otherwise, raise your hand and we'll be friendly about this — we don't have to make it super formal. Let's do that.
I feel like you and I did not start out as friends, did not start out as enemies, but were in this frenemy zone. I always liked Smart Growth America, but I hated being called a smart growth advocate.
I remember that.
There was a whole thing that I was doing that was different. I feel like I've grown more comfortable in my own skin, so those things don't bother me as much as they did in 2009 or 2010. Smart Growth America has also changed and evolved.
Can you give us an overview of Transportation for America, Smart Growth America, and how that ecosystem exists today, and maybe a little bit of the evolution of it?
Smart Growth America — we just hit our 25-year mark — actually came out of the environmental movement. The notion was that the way we were sprawling was taking away precious land: farmland, productive farmland habitat, great outdoor spaces. Doing so was also polluting the air and water, and that was very much the focus. In our early work you'll see a lot of collaboration with Farmland Trust and groups like that.
As you move forward, it becomes so clear how many issues play into what makes a community wonderful or terrible. Here's the thing though: if you're about everything, you're about nothing. Over the years what we've done is focus things back down a little bit. In the early days of a movement you are trying to pull more people in, and as you do that a lot of your message becomes diffuse. We've sharpened it back up, which is a learning process.
We have the National Complete Streets Coalition. When we actually came up with the term 'Complete Streets' back in 2004 — does anybody in this room remember what it was called before?
I feel like I should know that and I don't.
You'll recognize it as soon as I say it: 'routine accommodation.' Inspiring, right? We realized that with that term we were never going to inspire a movement. Complete Streets started a movement.
In the early days it was about getting folks to adopt policies, but then they adopted policies and no one did a thing with them. My old boss at USDOT used to say that culture eats policy for breakfast — 100% right. So we then moved into the details of implementation, which starts to bring us closer to what you do. Now we're talking about what factors you look at when you're starting to design a roadway, what you're measuring, how you're making funding decisions — the nuts and bolts.
Instead of it being this broad term that everyone adopted because they recognized it was popular and then completely ignored, we were successful enough that our actual opponents were adopting our term and misusing it. We've had to move much more into the nuts and bolts of what you talk about. We're now looking at updating the way we evaluate Complete Streets policies to be much more stringent. There will be a failing grade. There will be a point where we say you don't get to call it a Complete Streets policy.
That shows you the evolution of what we've done, particularly on the transportation side. I started working in this area in the mid-nineties, and I've been through five federal reauthorizations of the transportation program. I've worked with a bunch of states on their transportation programs, and I have watched the same story play out over and over — people come in with ideas of how they're going to make the program work better, and instead we just raise more money and pass it around without any policy or accountability attached to it at all. So my position now is I don't want to give anybody money anymore.
It's so interesting, because as you were saying that, I was thinking of 25-year-old Chuck being like, 'We can do this!' — and now that I'm 52-year-old Chuck, I run into people who say, 'Hey, we can just get the federal government to focus on maintenance more and fund transit more,' and I'm like, 'Oh, you're so cute.'
You can, but there has to be a crisis to encourage anyone to do anything differently. People don't say, 'Oh, that's awesome, let me give up what I do now and completely transform this thing based on your whim.' They need to feel like the whole thing is going to go away if they don't do something different. So let's make it go away for a while. We'll take a break.
I want to get to your history inside the administration and then outside, but I'd like to do that by starting at the end of World War Two and the interstate system. I'm not suggesting you were there —
I'm older, though. Are you? I'm 54.
I'll be 53 next week. When we talk about the interstate highway system today, for very good and legitimate reasons, we often get the story entangled with white flight, inner-city blight, and racism — and that's an important narrative. But I think what it does is it clouds things, making it seem like there's a good-and-evil story: that was evil and now we are good. I don't think it fully examines why we did what we did and how human it was — and how related it is to our motivations today, where we make the same mistakes over and over.
So I'm wondering if you have a narrative of why we built the interstate system — what we were trying to accomplish, in the most optimistic way possible. Here's what Americans came together and tried to do — and what maybe the original sins of that were.
A lot of my thinking on this has been influenced by reading your work. The whole idea was to be additive — we have these communities with many ways for people to move around, and we're going to add to it to allow them to do more, go further, have additional benefit. The way we did it, I don't actually think it was intentional, ended up cutting all the rest off, so we were eventually left with no other alternative, and we continue to do that.
If there were evil people back then, there are evil people today. But what's worse is that most of what we did was utterly without thought and intention — which is tragic. We continue to do that today. If you read our report Divided by Design, we show you where in the current highway program it makes it almost impossible not to continue doing those things.
The reason I think that happened is that some smart people were asked to make something up — and that's what it is. What are the standards for determining how wide and where to put interstates? We'd never had anything like this. A bunch of very smart engineers said, 'Let's try this. This seems like a good place to start based on our knowledge, and obviously people will learn and iterate.' Who wouldn't do that? And the answer is: the United States of America.
Every country with lots of money would not bother to learn, right?
I think that's right. Having too much money makes you sloppy and wasteful, and there's less accountability. Having guaranteed money over the long term makes that worse. What has happened, particularly in the last 30 to 40 years at the federal and state level — because they're in conversation with each other all the time — is this: we completed the interstates back in the early nineties, or even the eighties, and there was a desire to keep funding things other than just maintaining what we had. So we widened the aperture and made the eligibilities much wider, and then we took all of the interstate rules and applied them to everything else, rather than saying, 'All right, if we're going to be applying this to an at-grade state highway, not limited access, that should be different. If it goes through a rural village or an urban area, that should be different.' No — we just slapped the Highway Capacity Manual standards from the 1940s onto all of it. One size fits all.
That's how you get here. All of it was just this thoughtless momentum — no thought of outcome or intention. To some extent I almost hate that more. I'd almost rather there be evil behind it.
It would be easier to fight if there were evil behind it. I do think — and you mentioned that Smart Growth America came out of environmental sensitivity — the early warning signals, the canaries in the coal mine, were the environmentalists and the racial justice people who in the sixties and seventies were saying there are obvious problems here.
The one that I like to bring up all the time is the fact that we were very close to using atomic bombs to blow up the Rocky Mountains for a highway. I don't know if you knew this.
I did not know this. Oh my god, tell me that story.
There's a book called Big Roads that covers it. There's a whole section about how they were going to run a highway through the Rocky Mountains, and it was going to be really hard to excavate all that rock, so the plan was to plant atomic weapons in the mountain and use those instead of dynamite.
The cool thing about it, in the narrative of the book, is that was the point when the environmental people — who maybe had not been taken seriously up to that point — suddenly got people saying, 'Are you joking me? That's an acceptable plan of attack? Okay, maybe these people have something valuable to say.' So here's my question. I feel like they were early warning signals. What was the first legislation that you were tangentially involved with?
TEA-21. And then when I went to USDOT, I worked for the guy who wrote ISTEA.
ISTEA — the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act — was historically significant. I was in an engineering program at the time, and I remember the vibe was, 'Hey, we're just gonna go build lots of stuff.' I was being taught engineering by the people who had built the original interstates, and they made it heroic — there were people who had been at D-Day, at Normandy, at Okinawa, and then there were engineers who had built the interstates. It was this heroic lineage.
They had built the bridges that got our troops from place to place, so they brought that spirit to this effort as well.
When ISTEA came along and then TEA-21, the next generation was basically told, 'All right, now you go out and build great stuff.' For people in the room who don't know — what was the shift with ISTEA and TEA-21? I feel like you embody that reform mentality, the idea that we can move this ship. What was the thinking behind it, in an optimistic way?
The guy who actually wrote ISTEA is a guy named Roy Kienitz. But before I get into that — if anyone doesn't subscribe to the Eno Transportation Weekly, I strongly suggest you do. Jeff Davis over there gives the greatest history on this stuff, and he's so good on the budget. When I was at USDOT, we would check our numbers against his. He's a generational talent in understanding how the federal transportation budget works.
If you go back to 1982, there was a need to raise the gas tax, because we had more interstates to build from the original plan, but the tax had lost its buying power. A bunch of urban representatives, particularly from the House, were not enthused about raising more money for highways, because they didn't think that money was going to come to their urban districts — or should, because those urban districts shouldn't be crisscrossed with highways. They already knew from what they'd read in The Power Broker and books like that that it was doing damage. They only agreed to go along with that gas tax increase if one penny of that increase went to transit. That is the beginning of the 80/20 split in the federal program — and, by the way, that is the last time any group of members of Congress asked for any real reform to this program.
When ISTEA came along in 1991, there was frustration that we were scattershot building stuff and not thinking about how it fit into making urban and rural areas function. They put much more robust language into both statewide planning and metropolitan planning organization planning. They also wanted to make what we now know as the STIPs and the TIPs — the Transportation Improvement Programs — something other than a list of projects. That's why it's called a Transportation Improvement Program. It was meant to be a program of projects to build toward the goals of your plan.
What we didn't do was require those plans and programs to actually be in conversation with each other. The notion was that it was going to be focused on goals, not modes — focused on outcomes rather than getting through a list of projects. It was meant to move toward a much more multimodal approach and be in conversation with land use. There are things in there where you can tell that's what they meant, even though they couldn't use the term 'land use' at the time.
It's so interesting to me, because as an engineer working in the profession and then going back for a planning degree — working through ISTEA, TEA-21, all the way up to TIGER — I was on the project development end of that, and there was never a sense of 'here's the goal.' It was just: here's how to get your project funded. Here's how to take the things you were doing before, put the right words and language in, and make it fit into the new square hole.
I have a sticky note on my computer that says: 'This is how they beat us.' The first thing, when you say something like, 'Our roads aren't safe, we need to slow down traffic,' they say, 'We're already doing it.' And then you look into it and they're not doing it. Then they say, 'Well, we should add that as a stronger planning factor' — which they will ignore, because they don't pay attention to their planning factors. When that doesn't work, they say, 'We will add what you're trying to do — traffic calming, whatever — as an eligibility in the current programs' that they will also ignore. Then if all else fails, they say, 'We'll create a little program named after your cause.' And what's beautiful about that is everyone stays focused in their little program while the rest of the program makes all of it worse. We call that a win.
This is where my cynicism leads to optimism. If you can see where the landmines are, you can avoid them. One of the biggest problems we face is we won't admit that they're there. I have seen this through the reauthorization of ISTEA — called TEA-21 — and then the next one, named SAFETEA-LU. SAFETEA-LU, by the way, was named after the wife of Don Young, the chairman of the T&I committee out of Alaska — who, naturally, should be setting all national transportation policy.
What I've seen happen is little programs get added to address the problem without actually addressing the problem. We need more ways for people to walk safely? We'll create the Transportation Alternatives Program. We recognize our highways are unsafe? We'll create the Highway Safety Improvement Program. We recognize we've built highways through the middle of cities and might need to remove them? We'll create the Reconnecting Communities Program — which I helped write, and I believe in the purpose. But when you make it a billion dollars while you're spending $55 billion to break things more, what are we doing? I keep seeing a lot of my allies go out and champion these little programs because it's easy to describe as a win. But they are announcing their loss and don't even know it.
I'm going to take issue with my progressive friends, because they go so easy on progressive administrations that give pretty speeches and do nothing to change the program, and then they're genuinely bitter when they get almost the same thing from conservative administrations — because they're giving bad speeches. But the program never changes. As somebody who worked at USDOT for really extraordinary bosses — Secretary Ray LaHood and Secretary Fox — I remember Secretary LaHood being in front of the authorizing committees, the people writing the rules. They would ask him why he didn't fund their project, and he would explain: the feds don't really fund projects. We have less than 5% of the program we have any control over. You wrote the bill so that the state has all the power. And the people writing the bill don't know that. They have no idea how this program works — and yet, maybe because of that, it has strong bipartisan support. Strong bipartisan support to do something that equally undermines both parties' priorities and accomplishes none of them.
I feel like the thing I have learned most from you is how the interaction between state DOTs and the federal government actually works — and how it's like that Spider-Man meme where all the Spider-Men are pointing at each other.
This goes to what your congressman was saying: why didn't you fund my project? If a state DOT wants to build highway expansions, I wrote this piece about the 'lightning lane' for highway funding versus the long line for anything else you wanted to do. How does that system actually work? If you're a state DOT with your own transportation improvement plan, you're going out building projects and then asking for reimbursement. Where does the buck stop?
The state DOTs are the emperors of the program. Full stop. What the folks at AASHTO will tell you is it is a federally funded, state-run program — and that really is what it is. The states determine what they will tolerate and what they want. Their secretaries of transportation will call very young transportation aides on Capitol Hill directly. Remember, there are really no transportation aides on Capitol Hill — you come to Capitol Hill to change the world, and you can't change the world if the issue only comes up every six to eight years. You will have changed jobs three or four times. The average tenure is about two years. So the transportation aide you get connected with is the tax legislative assistant, or the housing legislative assistant, or the environment legislative assistant who's being dragged off their issue because this bill came up. They're being called by the Secretary of Transportation from their state, who needs more money and more flexibility to do whatever they want.
Now, in setting up the federal program that way, the program often snaps back when someone tries to do something good. There are so many inputs, but because it requires everyone to align — or a leader who is unbelievably brave and willing to bulldoze everything — anytime someone tries something new, there's some piece of it that snaps them back.
I remember talking to a former Secretary of Transportation in Washington who wanted to use shorter timeframes for traffic modeling — bring it down to 10 years instead of 20, because no one knows what traffic is going to look like on one strip of road in 20 years. The Federal Highway Administration division lead — there's one in every state — said, 'Federal regs don't let you do that.' That's actually not true, but federal headquarters pays no attention to its divisions, and so you find a completely different approach to how things are handled at the division level. Then if you try to build the project according to your own approach, they might fight you on allowing reimbursement, so it's just sloppiness in the weeds. Not because there's any real policy — it's just that no one is saying either 'get out of the way and let states do what they want, full stop,' or 'let's have some goals and align our funding with them.' Neither is happening, and so we have this patchwork mess.
The metaphor I have in my mind is like an incremental developer who is out building housing, and the building inspector comes out and says, 'You can't do that.' You can fight it — they have ten thousand pages of code and you can dig through and find the exceptions — but you've got to get your project done, so you just go along with what they're telling you.
At some point you just have to pick your fight. The problem with transportation is that when you develop it incrementally, it doesn't communicate. It's supposed to be a system, and we have this system funded mostly at the state level, some at the federal level, some at the local level, with a patchwork of road ownership and a different approach from locals to counties to states — we never actually get to a coherent system. We need some flexibility to allow folks to handle things differently in different places, but we have to at least agree on what we're trying to accomplish and hold ourselves to some performance measures.
Let me ask you about California and Texas as two examples. They're the blue and red poles of our country, and kind of represent the extremes. I want to focus on California first, because I am sensitive to the hypocrisy. California is a state that every time there's a forest fire goes out and says 'climate change is causing this, we need Washington to do something about emissions' — and then they took the Biden bill's climate money and used it for highway expansion.
Let's take them at their word that they're not trying to be hypocrites — they actually believe what they say. How does a state DOT produce outcomes that are the opposite of their stated intentions so often?
It's a great question without great answers. I'm a lifelong Democrat, and I work for a 501(c)(3). These days we actually align a lot more with what I'd call local and state level Republicans — from a fiscal conservative perspective.
The old Republicans that don't exist anymore.
Yeah, those guys. I said yesterday, all you young people will not believe this, but we actually used to care about deficits — it was really a thing. Bills would come up and people would ask, 'What's the impact of this on the deficit?'
I probably fit into what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican. I grew up in the nineties in the South, from New Orleans, and they were already headed in this direction. But I have to say: my fellow Democrats, especially statewide elected Democrats, see hard hat jobs, full stop. What those hard hat jobs might actually accomplish is not part of the calculus at all. If you talk about climate, they will tell you they're going to fix it by electrifying the cars. That's it. Transportation policy is not part of the conversation at all.
Going back at least ten years, we were saying putting all your eggs in the electrification basket is too dangerous. If you think climate change is a real problem, you can't say 'let them eat electric vehicles.' You have to make it easier for people to move around without a car at all, or to survive on fewer cars. The beauty there is you'll bring down emissions faster than it takes to turn over the vehicle fleet.
Remember, the folks working in climate policy came out of electric utility and manufacturing regulation — a world where you put scrubbers on the smokestacks of power plants. They want to put a scrubber on each little smokestack. They don't get that by the time you do that, there will already have been too much carbon emitted, and frankly they don't know how to model it. So they put all their eggs in the electrification basket, which is all being rolled back now.
The data center situation is making that whole thing look silly.
It's an odd system where, overall, transportation at the state and federal level attracts rhetoric about what it's supposed to accomplish, but there is no outcome connected to it, no accountability for achieving those outcomes. Our position is that, according to Section 150 of Title 23 of the U.S. Code, there are performance measures and there are seven national goals. You cannot have seven goals — you can't have more goals than fingers on one hand. That is true for every part of your life. As Secretary LaHood taught me: if you put all your energy into three things, you might achieve one.
They have seven. Let me break them down to four, because they're highly repetitive. Safety, fix the system, reduce congestion, and reduce emissions. What have we done since the beginning of my career? On safety — we've done performative things that have not improved outcomes. In fact, it's gotten worse. We are an international embarrassment. Third-world countries have far safer roads than we do, and we don't even seem to know we're an embarrassment, which is worse.
Our report Dangerous by Design has a new edition coming out in June, so pay attention. Two: we have not fixed our crumbling roads and bridges. They are in exactly the same condition they were in the year 2000-2001. If you look back at the ASCE report cards, they're the same. The backlog keeps growing proportionate to the funding — we're on a treadmill.
Three: congestion. It is staggeringly worse. The United States has pioneered a way to move fewer people more slowly on wider roads. If you pulled together a hundred of the smartest engineers and said, 'I want you to spend as much money as possible building more capacity to move fewer people slower,' they'd struggle to do it.
Four: in terms of air quality, we are emitting more, even under the latest bill that was supposed to be a climate bill. We've shown it will result in significant increases in emissions, which will be worse because we've rolled back electrification and the CAFE standards. So we're in this strange place where the federal government is going to make absolutely sure you cannot save money on gasoline. If we're accomplishing none of our stated goals, let's stop, because we're digging the hole deeper.
Here's where I think we have our biggest disagreement: I think you believe the feds impact things more than I do. I think they are completely powerless. You have suggested turning back the gas tax to the states, and I say: end it completely. Starve the beast. Let's be done with it.
I want to get to that, because I feel like there's an interesting vibe right now. I brought up California — that was kind of mean of me. I want to bring up Texas, because it's the same result with a different cultural flavor.
One of the biggest pushbacks I get to ending the federal highway trust fund and giving the money back to the states is people pointing to Texas and saying, 'You just want them to build more highways.' I think I understand why Texas is the way it is. The cultural context there is: build it wide, build it straight. I remember a talk where Andrew Card, a former transportation secretary, was praising Texas and saying, 'In the Northeast, it's so hard to build — but in Texas we can build highways really cheap because there's all this open land.' I'm thinking: in the Northeast, everything's close together. Where you're at in Texas, everything is far apart. You can build it cheaper, but you have to build ten times more to connect things.
What concerns would you have with just letting Texas be Texas?
We're already letting them be Texas. That's my issue. I don't understand the confidence people had in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. When it passed, I said it was going to build more highways. Now, our latest report Repair Priorities does show states have moved more federal dollars into repair than in the past, but it's late and it's too expensive to repair things now, so it's not pushing through that backlog.
I don't understand how people think the feds are holding states back. We aren't having any meaningful impact on states. Yes, states do have small bits of money to spend on sidewalks from time to time, and they also have a hundred ways to get out of it, and they do. They are ripping out sidewalks to expand roadways as often as they're putting them in.
This is where cynicism leads to optimism for me. As soon as we realize how little we're getting out of the federal program, we might actually be able to start getting what we want and need. But we have to admit how unimpactful all this energy at the federal level has been in changing anything. Will Texas do bad things? Yes. But you know who else will do bad things? Pennsylvania. North Carolina. Statewide elected Democrats are not good on transportation.
Beth Osborne, it is always delightful to talk to you. People can follow your work at tforamerica.org. If they want to reach you personally, what's the best way to do that?
If you go to our website, my email and phone number are right there. I do welcome people to reach out. I'm always looking for partners and to learn more about good ideas at the local and state level. Please not only let me know what you're up to, but let me know what would be helpful to your efforts, because we can design our program and our work to be more supportive of what people are trying to do.
You're doing very important work, and I thank you deeply for taking the time to chat with us today. Beth Osborne, thank you so much.
Thank you. This was fun.
Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care, everybody.
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