.jpg)
Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 50: Transit Tangents Recaps
Thank you all for joining us on this incredible journey—50 episodes of Transit Tangents! In this special milestone episode, we're revisiting some of our most compelling discussions and providing updates on each topic. From MTA's congestion pricing plans to the impact of the new U.S. Presidential administration and the progress of Austin's Project Connect, we’ve got you covered. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest insights and developments across the transit world!
Hey everybody and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Chris and I'm Lewis, and tonight we're actually having a very special episode. We are in person in the campus area of Austin, right outside of Tweedy's, where shortly we'll be joined by some listeners and some friends of ours to celebrate our 50th episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going to be going on a short bike ride around town and throughout this episode you'll see some fun clips of us riding around. We did put this out on social media so you might be watching the event you were at. So thank you for coming, if you did. And yeah, and also on this episode we're going to be kind of talking about over the 50 episodes this year. We're going to pick a few of them and talk about some updates that have happened so you know a lot of them and talk about some updates that have happened. So you know a lot of them have been major news items and there have been some positive and some negative things that have happened throughout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so stay tuned for that.
Speaker 3:Awesome Doors are closing Public transit.
Speaker 2:That's my way to roll.
Speaker 4:I'm taking control. Stopped train tracks. It's my daily grind. Transit is the rhythm of my life, bus hopping on the train.
Speaker 2:Ain't nothing gonna be the same? All right, the first topic that we are going to revisit is congestion pricing in New York City. For those of you who haven't seen that episode and you want to see it in full, we'll put a link. But here's a quick recap and then we'll get into the update.
Speaker 1:Congestion pricing is something that we've been doing for decades now, and congestion pricing comes in many different forms. Everything south of 60th Street, was to be told, so that's basically everything south of Central Park, and the interesting thing about New York is that you have these sort of geographic boundaries. You have a couple of bridges and tunnels that connect it from the east and the west not really much to the south, and then on the north side, by Central Park, you have your series of sort of blocked off roadways, and most of those are one-way roads going in or out, so being able to toll a vehicle going into this district is relatively easy For those of you who haven't heard Congestion Kathy over in New York has currently killed congestion pricing for New York City.
Speaker 2:Kathy Hochul was speaking in support of congestion pricing up until a few months ago.
Speaker 5:Anybody sick and tired of gridlock in New York City? Yes, anybody want cleaner air for our kids and for future generations. Yes, well then you love congestion pricing, right? Yes, circumstances have changed and we must respond to the facts on the ground, not from the rhetoric from five years ago. I have come to the difficult decision that implementing the planned congestion pricing system risks too many unintended consequences for New Yorkers at this time.
Speaker 2:This was a policy that was set to take place literally in the month of June, and earlier in the month of June she kind of single-handedly came out and ended it.
Speaker 1:That episode was actually filmed back around July 2nd. Here we are five months later. It is December. We're looking at congestion pricing and the updates happening in 2025. We've talked about this a little bit on a previous episode, but it looks like congestion pricing is back on the table.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so in the beginning of January congestion pricing will actually officially kick in in the boundaries as described before. So basically anything below 60th Street on Manhattan. And yeah, I mean it's not going in at the initial $15 that it was going to be.
Speaker 1:But it will get to $15.
Speaker 2:Yeah, over time it's going to raise to $15. We're starting at $9 for each vehicle entering the congestion zone, though. So interesting to see it actually come to effect. I'm glad that it's actually going to come into effect, but I have a few qualms. I know you probably have some qualms as well.
Speaker 1:You've lost five months of funding for the MTA at this point, yep, and it's not only did you lose five months of funding, but now you've also reduced the total price, and so you're still not going to recoup what the expected funding was Totally. And even if you were going to drop the price, negotiate that over the summer and do it as quickly as possible. Don't delay through the election season like what happened.
Speaker 2:And I mean, if we remember back to that episode too, Kathy Hochul was potentially doing this for political reasons, to help Democrats through the elections. I don't need to tell any of you how that worked out, considering how New York City voted. I mean, obviously New York still voted for Kamala Harris, but one of the largest right-wing shifts in the country was in the state of New York and in New York City. So Kathy Hochul did no one no favors during during that. And then, not to mention the other side of this is you know when, when some sort of change happens, people are reluctant. At first, they want to hate it right, like, think of it.
Speaker 2:I was before we started here. I was saying to Chris like when a roundabout gets installed somewhere, people complain about it for the first two months or so and then they start to notice, oh, you know, there's a little less traffic now, oh, it's a little bit safer to walk or bike through here, and then they realize, ok, this is a good thing for me. With the change in administration at the federal level, this is now going to be taking into effect in January. There will be plenty of people loudly complaining about this and begging the trump administration to find some sort of legal lawsuit or something to try to kill this and we won't have that six months of people being like, oh, actually you know they won't have gotten over the like this change is bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's sticker shock, and what's going to be really interesting too, was with the trump administration. They were against this project when he was president last time. One of the reasons why this project has been so delayed over time is because the trump administration dug their heels and it wouldn't give the approvals needed from the federal side for this project to happen. Yeah, uh, and continued to stall and delay not great.
Speaker 2:I'm happy again to see it going forward. I hope that you know the trump administration has got their hands tied with other things and being busy with other things and kind of don't pay attention to this, at least for a period of time, while it can build support and people can get over the shock of it happening. But I wanted to give you all that update. We'll definitely keep an eye on once this actually launches and keep folks updated with any things that happen.
Speaker 1:Maybe it'll be another episode and if you live in new york, reach out to us. Let us know how you think it's, uh, how it's going. If you still have to drive a vehicle into new york, make sure you have an easy pass and that it's updated. I was reading an article about that the other day uh, recommending that to drivers.
Speaker 2:So or be smart and take the mta preferably, preferably, taking him again we're gonna kind of revisit two episodes here number one, uh the uh vice presidential picks and our endorsement of tim wall I think realistic picks yeah that might actually get there. I am, I'm hoping for tim waltz, um, yeah, I think, I think he would do well as far as transit goes, but also helping the ticket win, yeah, um, but so you go, there's our very, very important uh endorsement from transit angels yes, tim waltz has secured the transit endorsement.
Speaker 2:cue the like breaking news, yeah. Graphic.
Speaker 5:Our endorsement was so strong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it put him over the edge If you'll remember, we gave, I think, five or six candidates.
Speaker 1:Put him over the edge of defeat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but anyway. So the episode where we kind of covered the VP potential picks before they happened, we timed that one perfectly, because it was less than a week later that Tim Walls was named the VP pick after our endorsement, I will say, and then also tying this into the episode that we did with Bill McCamley from Transit Forward, about essentially like making transit more bipartisan that conversation in general is way more important now than it was then and more important than ever. But yeah, I mean it's going to be really interesting, to say the least, to see how a lot of the transit projects across the country are going to go under the Trump administration.
Speaker 6:I'm not sure how well this is known, but Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation thing is, if you look in the page 600, I think it's page 636 and 38. Thing is, if you look in the page 600s I think it's page 636 and 38, they actually call for the elimination of the capital investment grant, which is the federal program that is used to help cities and communities build new transit programs. Here in Austin, we need $4 billion out of that CIG capital investment grant to be able to complete the light rail. It's like half of the funding to build the light rail.
Speaker 1:So, as we move into 2025, new administration, definitely some changes on the horizon for how the federal government is going to probably support transit projects in the future A lot of this. If we want to know what's going to happen, we can look towards the Project 2025 plan that is out there there and, as we already know trump.
Speaker 2:Trump had no idea what was even in it, chris. He didn't read it.
Speaker 1:He did happen to hire one of the main architects of it for the office of management and budget or whatever, but but he had no idea what was in it, chris but we can see I'm so good over you we can see generally the outline of what the Trump administration is going to do if we look at this Project 2025 document and what we know is that it calls for the elimination of some of the grant programs. It calls for a focus on more roadway projects and getting away from transit projects, things like that. It doesn't support electric vehicles. There's a lot of things in there that are sort of scary for anybody who's really focused on a more equitable transit future for the country.
Speaker 2:For sure, and while I think it is important I mean all of those things are very clearly laid out in the Project 2025 plan I do still think it's important to not be too doom and gloom.
Speaker 2:I mean like, yes, republicans do have control of the House, the Senate and the presidency, so, yes, you do need to pay attention there. However, the House of Representatives they have a five seat lead. I've seen the Republicans over the last four years just struggle to pass legislation, struggle to choose speakers of the House even. I mean, if you'll remember, there's been multiple ordeals with that I do think that they're going to have a hard time cutting some of this already allocated transit funding, especially if some of this funding is happening in just a couple people's districts. Like those folks are going to have to go. You know, republicans will have to go back to their district and be like, yeah, I actually voted to cut this money that was going to come for a transportation project in our district. So I think that we need to be concerned about it and we need to really focus on like, framing these conversations the right way, like Bill had mentioned in the episode.
Speaker 1:What I am concerned about is with the bipartisan infrastructure bill. What you're saying is completely true. I think that any money that's already been awarded and allocated, it'd be really hard to claw that money back.
Speaker 6:And.
Speaker 1:I think that's good. I think that money is going to go out. I think anything that is a road project or a new bridge or something like that is a report project. All of those things are probably also going to be fine. Where I'm concerned is uh support for rail projects in the country, in other types of mass transit projects, and for, uh the promotion of electric vehicles. Yeah, which, as we have seen over the last four years, people to judge come on the show. It sounds like some time now he's got it's.
Speaker 1:He's been grilled so many times on evs and, uh, I'm I'm also, you know, just really concerned for what that looks like in the next four years.
Speaker 2:I think that the electric vehicle subsidies are probably gonna end, but who knows? Because, yeah, well, that's the thing, though, like elon could easily be like no, don't do that. And like trump's kind of, in a position where he almost has to listen well, I mean it's gross. I mean there's there's like a hilarious amount of billionaires now involved in the cabinet and whatnot too. So it's uh, maybe other billionaires will also have sway and they can fight over it.
Speaker 1:But what did you say about don't be so doom and gloom?
Speaker 2:well the thing is is like I uh, I'm generally more interested in transit as a solution than I am as electric vehicles. So, like, if they want to duke it out over electric vehicles, it'll be fun to watch. I hope that they get distracted with that and don't go cutting other things you know what I mean, yeah absolutely yeah, um, so we'll see there.
Speaker 2:uh, what, what? What ultimately happens? We're gonna jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video or subscribed, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. Also, leave a comment. We love reading them.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and if you don't have time to watch YouTube videos every time we release, you can always catch us on your favorite podcasting platform, from Spotify to Apple to anywhere podcasts are available.
Speaker 2:And if you want to support the show, we now have a Patreon launch. You get lots of additional benefits for being a member on Patreon. All the information for that is in the description, but without further ado, let's jump back into the episode.
Speaker 1:The third episode that we are going to revisit is a more recent one, uh, where we were joined by our good friend bumpsy, and that was on self-driving cars. If you've got a chance to watch that episode, we were taking a ride in waymo, which is a self-driving taxi that is experimenting in a couple different cities. I'd say experimenting, but they're deploying, yeah to uh, several different cities, right?
Speaker 2:um, let's take a quick look at that episode for a clip and then we'll give you some updates on just yeah, I mean there's some new news as far as Waymo goes.
Speaker 4:You know, it started as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, which itself started because of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and this is a bit of a history of the autonomous vehicle industry at large. But DARPA, which is a federal agency, had a competition, a yearly competition, in which teams would construct autonomous vehicles and then send them out into the desert in these races, and one of the teams from Stanford that ended up doing really well in these competitions ended up getting hired by Google and that seeded the initial self-driving car project.
Speaker 2:All right, so since that episode came out, waymo has actually publicly launched in another city, which is now Los Angeles. When we actually recorded the episode, they were still in kind of beta testing there. So that brings Waymo being live and open to the public uh, in san francisco, los angeles and phoenix. Now, the next city to come online live will be austin in the beginning of 2025, um, and then they now have announced there's there's testing going on in atlanta, and then just last week they also announced that testing is now starting in Miami. So Waymo is rolling out on a large scale at this point. I mean, this is exactly the same and people will be like, oh, it's not rolling out on a large scale, like it's only these, whatever cities. If you remember back to when Uber and Lyft started, this was exactly how they did it, and now think about how quickly it went from uber and lyft being in a couple big cities to literally in every city across the country.
Speaker 1:So I mean, you have a lot more experience now since we've had this episode.
Speaker 2:You got access to the beta or waymo and you've taken dozens of rides maybe not dozens, but quite a few. Uh, big thanks to uh jj, who was also in that episode with us. Um, he was the one I spoke with remotely. He was like if you want, I think I have one more code for Austin, and I didn't even tell Chris about it. I was like I'm using that code we're not having a debate about it.
Speaker 1:You did tell me about it you said, hey, he offered a code and I took it. I'm like, fine, to be fair, I live in the service area.
Speaker 2:So I mean to be totally. I live in my house, yeah, I live in the service area. So, um, so I mean to be totally honest and I kind of. We talked about this a little bit in the episode and I want to revisit this because, um, some people have given some flack about about being slightly for the self-driving cars. I don't think self-driving cars are a replacement to transit at all.
Speaker 2:However, they're giving us like oh, yeah, yeah, yeah mean, most transit people are wholesale against self-driving cars, period. No ifs, ands or buts about it. Transit is the solution to navigating people in a city. There's only so much space on the road. Whether a car is self-driving or not, there will be traffic, right? I also don't think that taxis are going anywhere, period. And if taxis can be much safer a la, not having a person driving, texting, tired, whatever it may be and can have you know the technology involved with these self-driving cars, I would rather it be that. And then the second point, which is something we made during the episode, is I think transit agencies should look into how they can use this technology, as it becomes more affordable, to act as kind of the pickup service that we see, or having some sort of even if it is a fixed route through a kind of more sprawling suburb that gets people to the last stop on the train line, to act as the kind of feeder into the larger transit network.
Speaker 2:I I think we'd be doing ourselves a disservice to not look at this technology. Are there issues with it? Still, absolutely, but like there, you know this the amount that this technology has evolved and how much better it has gotten over the last couple even year. Yeah is absolutely insane and as I've gotten to use it a little bit more, I mean it is genuinely impressive and if anyone's in austin and wants to check it out, I'm happy to actually like take you. Reach out to us and I'll I'm happy to take you for a ride for the sake of time, we took out a section from this episode.
Speaker 1:If you'd like the full experience, subscribe to our Patreon, where you'll get full episodes and bonus content.
Speaker 2:All right, last one here, and this is kind of a combo. We're following up on our interview with Travis County Judge Andy Brown. We were talking about rail in Texas in general. You know we focused pretty specifically on between San Antonio and Austin, but also just in general, as well as our episode on Project Connect. So here's a little bit from both of those as a little bit of a highlight and then we'll kind of get into some of the updates.
Speaker 3:So my dream is to have either a lot more Amtrak's on this train in some way that they work out a better deal with Union Pacific, and that probably means, you know, adding a track for a lot of the journey. So that's one option. Another option is there's a private company in Florida called Brightline that you know they have. I went out there, wrote it and it's a very nice train. It's pretty expensive. I've heard some criticism that they're they're very expensive. They, they cater, I think, to people who might otherwise you travel on a plane and kind of compare it that way.
Speaker 1:Common theme here as we move into 2025, we're going to continue to monitor progress on some of these initiatives, especially Project Connect and rail connections between Austin and San Antonio. For those of you who are not familiar with Texas, our legislature meets every other year and this happens to be the legislative year, so there is a lot of activity right here in Austin where things are being decided for transit initiatives all over the state.
Speaker 2:Totally and there's been a flurry of bills actually floated in the last week or two as the legislature is kind of gearing up for the session A few in support of state funding for Texas Central Right now. That is, the high-speed rail between Dallas and Houston that's been proposed. That would require 20% funding from the state. As it stands right now. Currently the state is saying that they would fund zero. So we did see a bill introduced that would give the appropriate funding for that.
Speaker 2:We also saw a bill introduced that would have high-speed rail connection also on the other side of the Texas Triangle, essentially going from Dallas heading south through Austin, san Antonio and down to Laredo, which would be a connection where Mexico is actually proposing also connecting a rail there that would continue down to monterey. So that was also introduced. But it's not all good news because, uh, for every bill that has essentially been introduced, uh, that is pro high-speed rail, there has also been one introduced that is trying to kill it. Uh, one of them was essentially saying that, trying to take away texas central's ability to use eminent domain, um, among, again, among other things.
Speaker 1:So the same playbook. That happens repeatedly, honestly yeah either it's taking away something like that from texas central pre-empting cities to prevent them from being able to pass laws that allow them to build transit. It's just, it's. This is tired at this point one of those.
Speaker 2:This is one of those things that we need. We need conservatives to be like. We need to be like hey, you need to teach those libs over in california how to be build high-speed rail. Like we can do it better than them and faster. Like we haven't even broke ground yet and I bet we can build texas central before they finish california high-speed rail. That needs to for this to happen. Like that needs to somehow enter into the conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll see what happens. We're also following legislative bills that may potentially impact Project Connect Totally. Here in Austin we had a little bit of a legislative scare I think it was last year or earlier this year where there was a bill in committee that was going to potentially force the city of Austin to pass a referendum every time we were going to issue debt against Project Connect, so anytime we were going to issue a bond or something that was defeated by a procedural motion. So it was really something that we barely barely exceeded and it prevented Austin from having to put a referendum on the ballot from this November to vote again on Project Connect. But we'll see what happens in the legislature because it's not out of the realm of possibility that we're going to have to vote on Project Connect again in the next election cycle.
Speaker 2:And there's currently another lawsuit, you know, kind of going on it seems like the Austin Transit Partnership. The folks actually dealing with the construction and the city are confident that they're going to win that lawsuit, but you never know. So, between bringing up the legislature, this lawsuit, and now also thinking about you know, we've kind of hinted at this already quite a bit but like what the status of the federal funding could be, there is a lot in the air right now with it. One thing that will be interesting to see, kind of any day now um, we're going to get the draft eis, uh, from project connect, so we're actually going to be able to at least get a glimpse at more of like this is what it will look like and exactly where it will go and all these sorts of things, um, which is a kind of a big next step.
Speaker 1:This is a very necessary step to actually secure that federal funding so the faster that we can get that done. Again, we'll continue to monitor project connect and everything else is happening happening in the texas legislature, so stay tuned for that into 2025 and uh.
Speaker 2:with that, this is our 50th episode, so we're going to transition into a bit of uh, some highlights of our almost first year, our first 50 episodes of doing this. It's only been possible because of all of you continuing to watch and those of you who've actually helped support us directly via Patreon. We super appreciate it. It's been fun being able to chat with some of y'all on the Discord and directly on Patreon, so if you're interested in supporting us there, you can go ahead and do so. But yeah, it's been a journey. I don't think that either of us, when we started this, would have thought that we would have 50 episodes by now.
Speaker 1:No, I don't think so either. It was kind of like let's go to 10 and see how it goes, and then we just kept doing it.
Speaker 2:We were joking about it last night. We actually were filming this the day after. We just did the ride and everything and we had some friends and viewers all together at a local bar here in Austin and we were chatting about it and I was just like, yeah, I can't believe we've done this many. But it's also just become it's a lot to put together. Have a show come out every single week, especially when it's I mean, this is purely like a side hobby for us, like we both like work full-time. So uh, it's, yeah, it's. It's a lot to put together, but it's been it's become ingrained in my week now.
Speaker 1:It's good. Yeah, it's something I'm really proud of and, uh, we'll be doing as long as we have fun with it and that it's feasible welcome to the first episode of transit tangents it's the 20. This is where we need to be a purple suit and he was like young man, young man, and then tried to like, convince me to buy silver, like I think.
Speaker 2:I'm no longer like, even for the gondola. What are we doing today? We're trying to walk over the sidewalk. Is what we're trying to do? 99 trying to do 99.
Speaker 6:We're going to try to check out.
Speaker 2:I almost ate it right there you can literally see the slip on the ground. Pete Buttigieg, come on the show. We are obviously on the go right now.
Speaker 1:I'm being converted to the cult of the e-bike.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah I want them to be able to live in the city without parking Cheers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's all going to be focused on solutions.
Speaker 1:Just seeing a click with people when you explain something to them and then they finally get it.
Speaker 2:Really just for people to nerd out about transit.
Speaker 1:It says the 223 is not going to be here in Transit. Tangent's tough Actually. Here comes a red train now.
Speaker 2:And enjoy the rest of your.
Speaker 6:Transit Tangent Tuesday.