Chuck Marohn  00:09

At Strong Towns, we have five priority campaigns. The idea here is that these are major issues that we're focusing on. If we can make change in these realms, there's a sense of a balloon effect or an umbrella effect — it will cover so many other things that we want to see happen in the world. Of all of our priority campaigns, this is the one — highway expansions — that has had the least programmatic stuff with it. Transparent local accounting: we launched the Finance Decoder last year, and that has really transformed the way cities are talking about their own finances and the trajectory of their place. The Finance Decoder is one of those accessible tools, and it's really been transformative in that campaign. Our Safe and Productive Streets campaign — we've got the Crash Analysis Studio, we've been rollingout technical support around that, and we see more and more cities now interested in this approach. This is again a transformative thing that we can do at the local level. Of course, parking reforms, ourwhole set of housing toolkits — these are things directly for local officials, local advocates, people on the ground to roll up their sleeves and go do. That is generally our approach at Strong Towns: how do we equip local people to take action to make their place better, and then how do we, as a movement and as an organization, magnify that so that other people can learn from it, copy it, and make progress in their places? It’s a bottom-up revolution, as we’ve always called it.

The End Highway Expansions campaign is kind of the odd one out of all of those. Essentially, what we’ve said with End Highway Expansions is: just stop wrecking our cities. Stop making it worse. Stop this thing — expanding highways, putting all this money into auto-based transportation spending around the idea of a commuter culture. All of this is really the leading thing that is damaging the financial health and success of our cities. We’ve been pushing on this from a content and thematic standpoint for a long time, but we’ve not really had a programmatic approach to this.

Last year we had a friend of ours — a longtime supporter, someone who cares a lot about our movement — approach us and say, “We think the time is right. I think the time is right for a conversation aboutfederal transportation spending, specifically the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which has been insolvent since 2008.” We’ll get into that here in a second. It expires at the end of September, and I’m not going to get into politics here — I’m going to mention a couple things, but just to step back for a second: if you haven’t recognized it, politics are a little dysfunctional in America today. The idea that the Highway Trust Fund is just going to be renewed, kind of rubber-stamped, when it is so dramatically insolvent andthere’s lots of disagreement — it becomes a time when we can inject some new ideas into this conversation and actually have those new ideas affect how we talk about things.

The supporter of ours said, “I’m here to back you. I want to help you do this. What would it take?” We sat down and came up with a plan, and this is the kickoff of that plan. We’ve been publishing case studies and social media content and other things around this for awhile now, testing out messages and looking at things, but now we’re ready to roll out the white paper. For those of you who have been here a long time, I don’t write white papers — we don’t do this kind of thing. This is different for us.

I want to be clear off the top: we’re not trying to become a Washington DC lobbying firm. Our audience here is not congressmen and senators and the president and so forth. We’re not evolving into a think tank. We’re not going to get an office on K Street. This is really about changing how we talk about the work that we do — how we talk about transportation funding, how we talk about transportation finance — with the idea that if we talk about it differently, they will ultimately talk about it differently too. We’re trying to reframe the conversation.

Let’s talk about this “mission accomplished” concept. Everyone who’s here today — if you’re on YouTube, welcome, we love that you’re here. We are sharing what is a monthly member event that we do hereat Strong Towns to talk policy, talk ideas, and talk programs. We’re sharing this with you on YouTube today because we’re trying to help get this message out. If you want to come join us, strongtowns.org — come and join us, we’d love to have you. If you’re not on YouTube, if you joined through the regular method and got a Zoom link — if you signed up and you’re here on Zoom — you will have gotten in your inbox a copy of the report, or a link to the report, so you can download it. You’ll also get an invitation to the StrongTowns Commons, where we’re going to go after this to do Q&A and deep discussion. Let’s get into the content, knowing that all that is coming.

Mission accomplished. This is the idea that we built the highway system, and now we have to talk about what comes next.

Chuck Marohn  05:31

What do we want? I start with this rhetorically, not as a flippant question, but as a really deep question. When we think oftransportation systems and transportation finance, what do we — in the year 2026, in North America — want from our transportation system?

I think what we want is very similar across most Americans. We want highway systems that are reliable. We want to be able to use them. Wewant them to connect places. We want our roadway system to work. Wewant transit, where it is applied, to actually function and bemeaningful — to actually serve people’s lives and be used in away that makes sense and actually improves places. We want our transportation system to be safe. We want our kids to be able to walkto school. We want people to be able to take normal trips and donormal human activities without having their lives imperiled on aregular basis. We want all of this to make our communities prosper, to make them better places, to bring us closer together, to allow us to live in our human habitats as fully human, to make these places wonderful.

This is what we want, and this is not an unreasonable set of demands. It’salso not a unique set of demands. This is not a red team set ofdemands or a blue team set of demands — it’s not urban or rural. This is really what we all want, what we all need, and what a transportation system should do. What we are coming to you with todayis not a question of values. We’re not saying the values of the country are wrong. We want to have a different conversation — notabout values, but about the structure that we use to deliver those values. How do we take the resources we have and structure our systems so that it actually delivers what we’re after? Because the current system is not designed to do that.

I want to use one example. Understand, I’ve written dozens of case studies around this idea over the past fifteen, sixteen years — there’s a lot I could have included. I’m going to focus on this story of New Haven because it was in the news recently and it caughtmy attention, but understand this is a stand-in for literally every city in North America.

New Haven recently announced, “We got federal funding for a projectthat we want to do in downtown New Haven to make streets more connected and more safe, and it’s going to be better.” When wedug into it, we saw that they did a study in 2022 — four years ago— where they identified a really dangerous part of the city. In2023 they applied for a federal grant to help them with thissituation. 2024, 2025, they’re standing in line and waiting. Nowthey’ve got a project that is funded. They’re going to do part ofit in 2026, with phases in 2027 and beyond. This was presented in themedia and in the city conversation as: “Look at this great success. Look at what has happened. Here’s a city that is trying to dothings differently, getting support from the federal government. They’re innovating, and now they’re going to go out and fix this,and it’s going to be much, much better.”

I get that story. I understand why we want to celebrate it, because people doing heroic things to make their cities better feel likeheroes — they’re doing really, really hard work. But I want us topause and recognize the cost of victory in the current structure. Not only did it take a number of crashes and deaths to identify the area as dangerous and prompt the study, but then it took multiple yearsfor that study to turn into a grant application, a grant award, a project scaled enough to actually get federal attention — so that we could then go out and fix six blocks of stuff in a city withhundreds of miles of streets, most of which are in dangerous shape.

The cost of victory in the current structure is just way too high.

Chuck Marohn  09:51

I’m not suggesting that these people aren’t heroes doing heroic things. I’m not suggesting this isn’t urgent work and that we shouldn’t celebrate the people who go out and do it. I’m not even suggesting that what New Haven is doing now is not a great step forward. I’m saying, in the totality of our nation, this is not good enough, andthis shouldn’t be good enough for any of us.

We have built a transportation system around the idea of creating aninterstate system. That transportation finance approach is built andcentered on the idea of building new, of expanding. Despite theadvanced age of this system, despite everything that we have built and are now required to maintain, despite all the promises that havebeen made — this is not a system that rewards stewardship. This isnot a system designed to steward a mature program. This is a system that still, in its core DNA, is saying: what’s the new thing we cando? What’s the new thing we can add?

This kind of makes sense, and it didn’t just happen — it isn’t something evil that we invented. This is something that grew out ofwhat we were trying to do. If we go back to the Great Depression, when the FDR administration laid out the first iteration of what the interstate system would look like, they had a grand ambition. They said: look, we have this new technology, the automobile. It is transformative in many ways. The vignette that I like to use is: if you’re a sugar beet farmer in northwestern Minnesota, which I’mvery familiar with, you got one shot to get your stuff to market. It’s a very small window where you bring your stuff down, put it ona train, and send it to Duluth. You’re going to get the marketprice in Duluth, minus the transportation cost — you are captive. If we can build a highway from Fargo to Minneapolis, now you can putyour stuff on a train and ship it to Duluth, or you can put it on atruck and bring it to Minneapolis and access the Mississippi River.You have an entirely different distribution network. It was clear inthe 1930s that this would revolutionize the economy of the country, connecting cities across distance and providing access to distantmarkets. By a decade after World War Two, we had a very clearmission: build 41,000 miles of interstate highway connecting citiesacross the entire continent of North America.

Chuck Marohn  12:16

We set up a dedicated funding stream to do this. One of the selling points at the time was that this would be completely funded by users. A gas tax was established with the idea that it would pay for the expansion and creation of the system, and ultimately for its ongoing maintenance and care. An important and underlooked thing is that this original mission had a clear stop condition. The idea was: here’s the plan, here’s the network, we’re going to build this, and thenwe will be done. That was where we sat in 1956 when Eisenhower signedthe Interstate Highway Act.

ChuckMarohn  13:01

Youcould make a case that this was done by the early 1970s — that wehad built everything that we needed to build. Certainly by the early1980s, the only things left were small segments here and there thatwere really difficult and tricky to build. This is the Glenwood Canyon project — the last big, tricky sticking point in connectingeast and west across North America. When this project was done, theFederal Highway Administration, along with groups like the AmericanSociety of Civil Engineers and others, held a ceremony here to markthe end of the construction of the interstate system.

Whetheryou say early 1970s, early 1980s, or 1992 — whatever your stoppoint is — we had built most of the interstate system by the early1970s, finished the last bits by the 1980s, and by the 1990s we werefinishing these really super hard-to-build things. But we have beendone now for over 30 years. We have built the entire system. You can go coast to coast on interstates. You can get from one side of the country to the other, and this mission that we set out has been accomplished. It’s done, it’s over. The federal government, even in this ceremony, acknowledged that fact way back in 1992.

Of course, we didn’t quit.

The project ended — we built the map as it was originally approved and designed — but all of that underlying expansion machinery did not end. All of the programs, all of the pass-throughs, all of the funding mechanisms — all of thatstill existed. It existed in this space of: okay, what do we do withthis machine that we built? What we did with the machine is westarted to repurpose it. We didn’t repurpose it away fromexpansion. We actually continued to add ways to expand and buildhighways, but we just retooled the system over and over and over.Often this was done in the name of reform, but what came out theother end was essentially an expansion of the same — whether it’sISTEA in 1991, TEA-21 in 1998, and on and on. Each administration has had a bite at the apple of how we are going to expand our transportation system, how we are going to put more money into morehighways, more frontage roads, more commuter-based transit — andhow, if we want to be generous, we are going to inject innovative reform into this bill. How can the federal government become the entity that funds your local sidewalk, or the walkway over that nasty stroad, or this innovation or that innovation? This has been theapproach we have taken since the early 1990s.

There’s no stop condition here. There’s no point in any law, any legislation, any review, where we say we’ve actually built enough —we have to make do with what we’ve actually built. We’ve accomplished it. We’re done.

When we look at what that creeping list of reauthorizations, reform programs, and extensions has done, it’s really added a lot of barnacles to the system. It’s distributed the focus away from a very mission-oriented “let’s build this interstate system” to something that has really sprawled out in terms of its focus and goals. If you go into federal law and ask what we’re trying to dowith the Highway Trust Fund, what we’re trying to do with federal transportation policy, we’ve got 20-plus different national goals.They contradict each other. They have no hierarchy. There’s nothing that says, “if you don’t meet this goal, it doesn’t work.”

I put together a little word cloud of some of our goals. We want to reduce emissions and we also want to reduce congestion — there’s no reconciliation of those goals. We want projects to be delivered more efficiently, but we want more public input and more dialogue — again, no reconciliation. Which one is more important than the other? Functionally, what this means is that everything someone comes to the table with, every suggestion that this would be a good idea, can be justified by one of the goals of our system. There is, again, no stop condition, no priority, nothing that says “this is what we value more than that.”

Chuck Marohn  17:58

In this post-interstate era — this post-1990 era — we have generally used reform as a distraction. I think that’s the result, even if it’s been used as the marketing brochure of our reauthorizations. Early on, it was the TIGER grants — the idea that we want the federal government to fund innovative stuff, so come to us with your project and we’ll put it through a competitive grant process and award some money. Then that morphed into the BUILD grants, and then the latest iteration, RAISE grants. These are the ones — like the New Haven one — that we celebrate as: “Wow, the federal government’s a difference maker here. They’re helping us fix these six blocks.” I have argued since the early TIGER grants, since the early days of the Strong Towns blog, that this is the marketing brochure of the underlying expansion agenda. This is the spoonful of sugar to help the larger medicine go down.

I was trying to explain this to our team here, and everyone knows I’m a bit of a Disney parks fan — we take the team there once a year. I said, think of it like this: the reform programs, this list — now we’re at the RAISE grants — that’s like standing in the long line at Disney. You’re going to go on a ride. You want your RAISE grant? Get in line. You can stand and wait hours. If you want your money for expansion, if you want money for the standard highway stuff— build another lane, add a new frontage road, build a new interchange — that’s like the Lightning Lane. You just go straight to the front. You don’t have to wait. That’s all wired in place. The big difference, though, is that the expansion money is like 50 times the funding for innovation.

So you get the fast pass to all the money, and for a little bit of money, you get to stand in line for hours and wait your turn — or, in New Haven’s case, stand in line for years and wait your turn. This is what’s being sold as reform.

Everytime we go through an authorization, this is what the reformers — this is what the advocates, this is what people who want something different — are told: “Yes, we’ll accommodate you with this tiny sliver of the overall budget. But in order to get that little sliver, we’re going to fund the existing programmatic approach” —which, by the way, is at least 30 years out of date — “at full amounts of funding.” When I say full amounts of funding, that’s actually an exaggeration too, because the entire concept of auser-pay model is gone.

Chuck Marohn  20:48

Let me say this in a self-deprecating way: I’m 52 years old. When I was talking to the team here about the gas tax — many of them are younger than me — they actually said, “I’ve never even heard anybody talk about the gas tax. I’ve never even heard a debate about raising the gas tax.” I thought, how quaint — we used to actually talk about how you pay for things. We don’t do that anymore. It’s not part of our conversation. The gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. We just stopped talking about it.

There was a period in the 90s and early 2000s where it was: how are we going to pay for transportation? These programs are growing fasterthan our budgets. How are we going to do this? We don’t have thatconversation anymore. That’s really because in 2008 we broke theseal on the Highway Trust Fund. Up to that point, interstates werepaid for by user fees. Yes, in the 70s and 80s there were reforms tothat — we started to use gas tax to also pay for commuter transitand other transit types of investments. Iterations of that changed things a little bit, but the idea was that you were going to have asystem where the costs were not general tax revenue — not, as theyare today, just borrowing and debt and deficit spending — but wherewe would have the discipline of actually running a system where the users paid for it. A slow and distant feedback loop, but a feedback loop nonetheless, that would have us balance demand with spending. This is no longer the case. Not only is it no longer the case, there have been, to date, almost $300 billion in bailouts of the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Every state is now a subsidy state.

Think of the early days of building the interstates: we started here and hadn’t gotten there yet, but this state was paying gas tax, andthat covered those early years. There were always states that gotmore money than what they sent to Washington DC in any given year. That’s completely gone now. Every state gets more money than people are actually paying in gas tax.

Chuck Marohn  23:07

Transportation for America put together this chart — and by the way, Transportation for America is the leading common-sense voice in advocacy. I said we’re not people in Washington DC trying to change this. They are. They’re an organization doing intense work trying to help lawmakers and decision makers understand this stuff. They put together this chart showing the Highway Trust Fund and the bailouts we’ve experienced. The big red line is what the Trust Fund has actually done in reality — that’s the gas tax. You can see that beyond 2026 it’s already deeply, deeply negative, and it goes even further negative. What you see at the top, where the green comes up, those are the bailouts — where Congress has voted to transfer general fund money, or, as we would say today, deficit-spend: just print and borrow money and throw it at highways and expansion and these projects.

As with everything financial in our system, those bailouts are gettingbigger. Every iteration is like a bigger wave on the sine curve —they’re all getting bigger. The last one, with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, was the historic one — the biggest of all. The authorization runs out September 30 of this year. If we are not going to do another big bailout and line up more money, if we’re not going to change this system, then the trend is that red line coming off the green: steady, steady down, and we’re back indeficit conditions again. The financing of this program no longerworks. It hasn’t worked for two decades. Even before that, in the90s, when we were reforming and changing things, the trajectories were all negative. We could see this. We have built a lot ofinterstates, and maintaining a lot of interstates is reallyexpensive. When you’re doing all kinds of other things beside sactually maintaining them, it’s really, really, really expensive.

On top of that, I want to give you a sense of how deep the hole is that we have dug for ourselves. Back in the Biden administration, the President released what he called the American Jobs Plan. The American Jobs Plan would eventually become the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. But when it started, when it was proposed by the White House, it was the American Jobs Plan. If you go and read it, right at the very top it says: “This is an historic public investment in our nation’s productivity and long-term growth.” Historic — meaning big, huge, enormous, massive.

Ifyou flip to page two or three, the American Jobs Plan makes the case for the need for “historic” — why do we need to be so big? The plan says one in five miles — or 173,000 total miles — of our highways and major roads are in poor condition, as well as 45,000 of our bridges. This is describing the size of the problem. The size of the problem is enormous, huge. We need a big bill because this problem is really big.

The American Jobs Plan then goes on to say: “Here’s what we want todo to address this huge problem.” This massive, historic investment is going to modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and mainstreets, and it’s going to fix 10 of the most economically significant bridges and repair the worst 10,000 smaller bridges. If you actually read the press articles written at the time — this is a big historic bill, we’re going to build, build, build — I said, okay, I can do math, numbers mean something to me. Let’s look at this and actually see what is being said. Here’s the miles in poor condition. Here’s the number of miles that this historic, massive investment is going to modernize. Here’s the number of bridges in poor condition. Here’s the number of bridges that the American Jobs Plan was proposing to repair.

ChuckMarohn  27:43

Now, this was the original plan put out by the Biden administration. What happened after this? It went to Congress. It was debated — we had Joe Manchin saying he’s not going to vote for it, holding it up. We got a year of legislating. Then came the break-through: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. What did it do?

It took those miles of road to modernize and shrunk it down. It took the number of bridges to be repaired and shrunk that down even further, and added a whole bunch more stuff to be built.

This is a system that, even at its most historic, cannot fix things faster than they fall apart. We actually have things falling apart at a rate quicker than what our most aggressive funding package can deal with.

I’ve been really critical of the American Society of Civil Engineers — I think they have an incoherence about how they have created the problems that they lament. But my criticism is not that they don’t properly understand the problem; I think they misunderstand the solution. They see the solution as more money, when the solution is actually something very different: changing the structure. The American Society of Civil Engineers puts out an infrastructure report card every few years — one in 2017, one in 2021, and one last year in 2025. In each of these report cards, they give an overall number for the investment gap in trillions of dollars. Back in 2017, that was $2 trillion. By 2021, it had risen to $2.6 trillion. Then we had the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — this historic investment in fixing and modernizing infrastructure — and what happens? Our infrastructure gap jumps to $3.7 trillion. We are having our systems fall apart faster than we are able to maintain them, and that is going to remain true as long as the bulk of our energy goes to expansion and building new stuff instead of actually stewarding the systems we have.

Chuck Marohn  30:00

This is the financial part, but I think we have to step back in 2026 and recognize the opportunity costs we’re missing. If you listen to our national leaders — regardless of what party they’re in, what disposition they have, what states they represent — they all talk about similar grand things they want to do. Whether it is energy efficiency and energy self-sufficiency to handle things like data centers and onshoring of businesses, whether it is building plants and equipment so we can manufacture things in America, whether it’s building lots of housing to make housing affordable in cities big and small — all of these things require focus. They require energy, capital, people to work, steel and concrete and asphalt and copper and other goods, and people to actually do this work.

When we devote such a huge percentage of our economy to expanding highways, what we are saying is: we are valuing these things, we are deploying our resources this way, more so than any other priority that we have. If we step back and recognize there are higher priorities — we no longer need to connect the sugar beet farmers in northwest Minnesota to markets around the world, they’re connected today — do we need to make better use of those connections? Yes. Do we need to become more savvy about how those systems function? Absolutely. Does that mean we need to keep with the current system of expansion? If we do, there are significant trade-offs in our competitiveness and in our ability to do other big things.

Chuck Marohn  31:55

I also want to point out — especially to people who have keyed in on reform as being the thing we should do, meaning let’s work within the Washington system, let’s go there and try, in the next authorization, to get a little more reform, a little bigger bite at the apple, a little more here or there — I want everyone to understand how fragile that approach is today.

We have a system — and we could debate the reasons, but I’m choosing to live in reality and not try to litigate the reasons — that has concentrated a lot of power in the White House, a lot of power in the executive. Because of that, we see things happening in our system that are challenging to people who want to see reform happen on the ground. We have authorizations that have been approved by Congress tospend money in certain places that the current administration has said it’s not going to do. Let me be fair: we can go back to the Biden administration and see the same kind of behavior. It wasn’t as high profile, and it wasn’t done for the same motivations, butit was the same kind of thing. If we are going to have a system that concentrates power the way that we do, what we are going to see is that any long-term investment — anything that we think we’re going to do from a transportation standpoint out of Washington DC — is subject to who is going to be in the White House next.

I know there are a lot of people who would like us to think that way, a lot of people who want us to put all of our chips on the next presidential election or the next midterm election. Obviously, that’s not how Strong Towns functions, that’s not how we think about things. But I want to say to the people who want us to go down that route: if your reform depends on who occupies the White House, that’s not durable. That’s not something you can count on, that’s not something that’s going to be around. It might work out for you in the short term. You might be able to point to an instance here or there where you got an outcome that you wanted. But this is not systematic change. This is not the kind of thing that’s going to build strong towns.

Chuck Marohn  34:09

Here’s what we are proposing. The first thing we need is to congratulate ourselves, pat ourselves on the back, and declare mission accomplished on the highway expansion era. We did it. I think we can argue a lot about the merits of some of our choices, and I certainly have lots of concerns about the way we went about it, but what we really can’t argue is that we did it — it’s done, we built it.

Let’s celebrate the positive parts of that. We did connect a continent. I drove my daughter down to school at the University of Arizona last fall on high-speed interstates — it’s an amazing system. The rest of the world holds us up as the gold standard of building transcontinental infrastructure. This was a major accomplishment. We can close the loop on that and stop pretending that we need to keep doing that. It’s done. Eisenhower would look today and say, “Wow, we accomplished it. It’s over. Mission accomplished.”

We then need to take the next step and redefine the federal role. We redefine the federal role by saying, first and foremost, the one goal of the federal government when it comes to transportation is going to be stewarding the interstate system.

We’re going to do that by taking the gas tax money and reapportioning almost all of it back to states, with the caveat that states need to maintain the interstates in an acceptable condition. I’m not going to go into the depths of roughness factors and engineering-geeky stuff — I think people in Washington DC can debate and figure that out — but the idea is this: right now, we send money to states to build the interstates. I’m saying we send money to the states, let them have that gas tax money to spend how they want, but with the requirement that they must maintain the interstate system to this standard. The stuff going through your states has to be maintained.

Number two: the federal government is really the place for national safety standards — particularly on interstate highways, but also on other roadway and transit systems. They are a place for bringing together best practices and setting national standards. That is a really good role for the federal government. Disaster response is another important function: if there is an impairment to one of our interstate systems, the federal government is uniquely positioned to respond to that on behalf of all of us. Then I think the federal government is well-suited to do research and data — to be the aggregator of best practices, to collect from states and places that are doing things successfully and share those out, to convene, and to be the place where we aggregate our data across the country.

ChuckMarohn  37:07

This puts a lot of authority in states. I was having a conversation with someone about this because there was a lot of cynicism about giving this money to the states with limited strings attached — just “you have to maintain the interstates between cities.” The cynicism was: “Well, these states don’t function really well today. These states are not going to do the kind of things that you want, Chuck.” I can acknowledge that, but I think we can also acknowledge that states today sit downstream of the funding. When I had that Disney slide with the two lines, the state DOTs are in the Lightning Lane, accessing that 50x pot of money. I’m saying, don’t make them stand in any line. Just give them the money and then tell them to turn around and talk to their cities, talk to their people, talk to their constituents, and say: what is the best way that we spend this money?

I’m not claiming that states are smarter or better at this. What I am claiming is that they’re closer to the consequences, closer to the people, closer to the problems, closer to what’s going on. If we allow our state DOTs to orient horizontally — orient down into their communities, orient that way, as opposed to orienting upward to the federal government and what spending categories they can use to qualify for that Lightning Lane — you’re going to get projects that are much more responsive to actual needs on the ground.

ChuckMarohn  38:38

I had people say, “Chuck, states are not reformers,” and I’m going to beg to differ. On the left here is Matt Meyer — he’s the governor of Delaware. On the right is Doug Burgum, former governor of North Dakota. Blue state, red state. Both of these people in these photos are introducing me to go up on stage and speak. Both of them are up there talking Strong Towns stuff, talking about reform, talking about how they want to change their state. I have talked to multiple governors, talked to leaders in states all across the country. There is a hunger to do things differently. There is a system that is wired to not do things differently.

These people are reformers. Are we going to get states that do really dumb things? Initially, probably — there’s a lot of stuff in the hopper, a lot of projects with momentum and inertia that will get funded if you give this money back to the states with more flexibility. But there are also a lot of states that will, day one, scrap the whole expansion agenda and just start doing really great projects. Over time, that will shift. Strong Towns is not arguing that we should shrink our ambition. We’re arguing that we should focus it.

The problems that we have today are not problems of connecting a nation. They’re not broad problems of making sure you can get from Minneapolis to Dallas, or from New York to LA — that’s not the problem we’re working on today. The problem we’re working on today is that our highways are overcongested, our streets are not safe, we can’t do basic things, we need more housing, we need more jobs. We need stuff that requires a finer touch — an approach that really works at a neighborhood level, with the nuance that requires. We can’t do that from Washington DC. We might want to, and we might hold up New Haven as the example of what the federal government can do, but if we do that, we also have to acknowledge the four years of death and destruction. We also have to acknowledge all the other stuff that’s not getting done.

Chuck Marohn  40:44

What we’re talking about here is not shrinking our ambition — we’re actually talking about growing it and focusing it on the urgent needs that we have today as a country. Building the interstates was a really big thing. Whether you are a red state or blue state, whether you love highways or hate cars, I think we can acknowledge that. I think we can also acknowledge that stewardship of the interstates is still a big thing. This is a big responsibility, an important thing. Embracing this as an important thing is not a diminishment of who we are as a people — it’s not saying we’re not going to build anymore. This is actually something worth celebrating. This is a big thing.

If we make this shift, we stand to gain a ton. No more having people stand in long lines and wait for table scraps. No more election-cycle whiplash where a new president comes in with a new agenda, scrapping these projects and starting new ones. No more Lightning Lane for all the bad projects. No more 50x pots of money where they can just access it at will and build all this stuff.

I put this slide in here because it’s one I sat in on years ago in Omaha, when the MPO there was going through all their plans for complete streets, multimodal transportation, and highway expansion — here’s the package we’re putting together. They got to this slide and said, “Our plan is going to cost $7.6 billion, but we only have $3.9 billion in projected funding — including not only what we raise locally, but all the federal money we’re getting.” I raised my hand: “Where’s the rest coming from?” “The federal government — we’ll look to them.”

We have created a system — and I’ve worked in this system, I’ve been there, I’ve experienced it — that is not in touch with financial reality. We are able to just have unlimited demand, unlimited needs, without any real discretion about how we use them, how this makes sense, what this adds to our long-term backlog, how we make better use of the stuff we’ve already built. We can create unlimited needs with no trade-offs, and then have an X in our budget: we have this much money, plus X, and X is the money we’re going to get from the federal government some day. This is delusional, and it has wrecked our planning departments at the state level, the regional level, the local level — all the way down.

Chuck Marohn  43:30

We need to actually change the system. If we shift from a federal, centralized system to one where 50 states are managing these pots of money, not only are we going to get better projects, but we’re going to get reality-based transportation planning — for once in my lifetime. We are also going to get a more level playing field. The Urban3 map that we’ve got here — Urban3 is famous for their financial productivity modeling. We’ve all seen these maps. They’re genius. The one thing they show over and over again is that neighborhoods where you can walk, neighborhoods where you can bike, neighborhoods with that type of land-use pattern are tremendously productive financially.

I remember sitting in a meeting with Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 in Lafayette, Louisiana, where they were showing us where the MPO wasgoing to make all their transportation investments from the federal level. They were all out in the low-productivity areas. In the coreof the city — where there was all the need, all the high productivity, all the positive financial returns — those projects weren’t competitive. They weren’t competitive because theyweren’t big enough, they weren’t flashy enough, they didn’t meet the Lightning Lane criteria. These are where the high-return investments are. If we can get rid of the system we have now that wires the money for the worst possible projects, we actually have achance to say: you want to make an investment that pays off? You want to spend $1 and get more than $1 back? Stop building that 20th mile of frontage road. Stop building that eighth redundant interchange. Stop building the thing that we have been done with for three decades. Let’s build a different style of investment — one that actually has a payoff, a payoff that is financial and a payoff in terms of higher quality of life.

I want a chance at a system that works with nuance. The current system does not, and it is never going to. There is no set of reforms, side programs, or long lines you can stand in that is going to get us to a system that works with nuance. The only thing that’s going to get us there is structural change — bringing this down closer to where that nuance actually lives and where that money can actually be deployed.

It’s pretty clear what’s going to happen if we don’t make these changes: we’re just going to continue on the same trajectory. Our backlogs are going to continue to grow. We’re going to continue to crowd out the type of projects that we need to do. We’re going to continue to take our staff time and our engineers and our contractors and our asphalt and our concrete and our steel, and devote it to things that do not have the return that they once had or that we need. We’re going to continue to live with crazy political volatility where the next president can just decide here’s a brand new set of things we’re going to do. We’re going to watch good people — Strong Towns advocates in cities all across this country — stand up and ask for common sense things, and have their leaders lookback at them and say, “We don’t have a functional mechanism to deliver that.” This is what happens if we don’t change, and we need to be done.

Chuck Marohn  46:44

I don’t want more historic investments that have the same outcomes. Iwant us to do something fundamentally different. I want us to declare mission accomplished and move on to the next iteration of what anational transportation policy looks like. We’re positioned to dothat today, and we need to make that move now.

Chuck Marohn  47:07

I want to share with you one thing that we put together for all of you. I will share the link to our website where you can get a copy of the report. I’m also going to share the page because I love what our team has done with this — you can go there and get a copy, it’s free to download. Please share it out. This is a dialogue, a conversation we’re trying to have. Please talk to people about this in your world.

Here’s the one I want you to see: the Highway Trust Fund expires September 30 of this year. There’s a countdown clock — we’ve got 222days. I’m not under any illusion that we are somehow going to marchon the Capitol and change the way they do things, and all of a sudden the Strong Towns nation rises up. That’s not who we are, it’s not how we do things. But I do think we can change how our mayors talkabout this, how our city council members talk about this, how they talk to their congressional delegations. I think we can change theway our cities communicate about this. I think we can say that we’re sick of this system — we’re sick of standing in line, we’resick of getting table scraps. We want this system to be reformed andchanged, and we can communicate that message. We can communicate it to our local leaders, and they can communicate it to others.

I’mgoing to tell you that I have had enough inquiries from members of Congress, from people dissatisfied with the system in positions of power — not this administration, but every prior administration inmy professional life — where I’ve been able to interact and have a conversation around these ideas. There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party, a lot of people in the Republican Party, who want this system to change and are ready to go in this direction. What they need is to not have fear that they will pay a price for doing that. The way they don’t have fear is if we are talking about it differently. I’ve got my hat. Mission accomplished. Let’s go out there and talk about this as something that is done, that we can move on from, and that we have greater ambitions — better things to do with our time, our money, our people, our energy.

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This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.

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