With the White House actively dismantling clean transportation policy, what can states do to salvage progress? I talk with former DOT policy advisor Liya Rechtman about a little-known authority that lets states transfer highway dollars to fund transit, EV charging, and bike lanes. We explore how governors can use this tool, but only if they act quickly.
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David Roberts
Okay, hello, everyone. This is Volts for November 5, 2025. “Hey, governors: you can salvage sustainable transportation, but you need to do it quick!” I am your host, David Roberts. Clean transportation policy is under assault by the federal government. Congress has phased out the tax credits for electric vehicles. It has removed California’s waiver from the Clean Air Act, which allowed that state and more than a dozen others to set more ambitious auto-emission standards. Now, the EPA is going after basic federal fuel-economy standards. It is grim out there.
As with the many other assaults underway, states need to be thinking about what they can do to mitigate some of the damage. In this case, they need to consider what they can do with the time and money available to them to encourage clean transportation options, such as electric vehicles, multimodal transport, and land use reform.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Transportation was embracing these kinds of transportation alternatives. One of the people leading those decarbonization initiatives at DOT was Liya Rechtman, a policy advisor who was lead author on several key strategic reports and, as we will discuss later, worked on transportation modeling reform.
Rechtman is now serving as the senior transportation policy lead for Evergreen Action, a research and advocacy outfit. She has recently been alerting governors to the fact that they have a lot of authority to fund clean transportation — more perhaps than they are aware of — but their window to act is shrinking, especially with dimwit Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy getting ready to reshape how federal transportation funds are allocated (think babies, not bike paths).
I am going to talk with Rechtman about all the things states can do to salvage clean transportation policy and how long they have left to do it.
With no further ado, Liya Rechtman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Liya Rechtman
Hi, David. Thank you so much for having me. I’m a longtime listener.
David Roberts
Liya, it is grim out here. I want to start with a little context setting. Not about all the things that the government is destroying, as we just mentioned, but the opportunities that remain. Tell us, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set some new formula for funding transportation in states. As I understand it, that’s about to run out. Can you tell us a little background on what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set up and when it runs out?
Liya Rechtman
I am here with some good news on multiple fronts in a very grim moment. The very short version is that there is a lot of really horrible, very depressing stuff going on in climate policy, in sustainable transportation, in transit funding, but there are some solutions. Not everything is as complicated or as hard to fix as it seems. Sustainable transportation does not have to be our biggest problem. In terms of what the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set up — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a five-year “surface transportation reauthorization,” this massive bill that funds all of transportation.
It created a whole bunch of new competitive grant programs that are very sexy. You’ve definitely heard about them — the Reconnecting Communities Program, which helps communities divided by highways reconnect, as the name suggests. You’ve heard about programs like that. But I’m interested in the boring, in-the-weeds stuff that makes up about 75% of the funding that the federal government gets to states.
David Roberts
Surface transportation reauthorization, that’s a standard thing that they do. Is it every five years or is it not on a...
Liya Rechtman
It’s supposed to be every five years. Of course, it’s not perfect. In the last 25 years or so, there have been a couple of quick fixes, one-year continuing resolution type of things. But in general, historically, transportation has been a super bipartisan issue that has passed. Congress has not dropped the bag on transportation funding to date. Now this could be our year because we’re up for another negotiation.
David Roberts
This is a standard congressional process that got folded into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law because that was happening anyway, and it set a funding formula for transportation that was better in numerous ways than the previous funding formula. Now, as you say, that whole process is underway, about to happen again, and the results are likely to be grim. But we have one year left of that funding formula set up, is that correct?
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. Just to get into the weeds here, there’s the Highway Trust Fund, which is a massive chunk of change from the federal government that is meted out to every state based historically on some basic principles — how many miles of highway are in the state, how many people are in the state. You mentioned that Secretary Duffy is interested in babies, not bike lanes, which is a fantastic catchphrase, and that’s totally right. The secretary is trying to reshape the formula from basic transportation needs to things like birth rate and marriage rate, which will have, honestly, more confusing and complicating impacts than necessarily blue or red impacts nationwide.
No one’s clear what that will look like after the shutdown when he releases next year’s formula funding.
David Roberts
It works great as a five-second soundbite on Fox News. That’s the main thing.
Liya Rechtman
Oh, 100%.
David Roberts
I doubt they’ve thought through it much beyond that. But this year left we have of the extant funding, this is our main focus today because we have one year left for states to access this money and spend it in productive ways.
Liya Rechtman
That’s right.
David Roberts
The funding comes in certain buckets. One way that states can have some autonomy. There are two things states can do that you describe in your piece: flexing funding versus transferring funding. I want to talk about those briefly. Flex funding allows states to take a chunk of this money that comes via transportation and shift it to other transportation priorities. Is that correct? Tell us about what flex funding is and what is involved in doing it.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah, let’s talk about flex funding. Because it’s a more popular state authority, it is less feasible right now. That’s not the good news I have to share, but...
David Roberts
I know that is the bad news, but we have to get through it.
Liya Rechtman
That’s the bad news. Very quickly, what flex funding is: states have the authority to move funding from specific highway projects into specific transit projects. That requires the state to go to their district highway office. The district highway office brings that to the headquarters office. The headquarters office has a negotiation with the headquarters transit office, and then they are able to move the money along in a political negotiation between the state, the highway administration, and the transit administration. They are able to move that money from specific highway projects into specific transit projects.
David Roberts
We’re assuming, and it seems quite clear, that this particular administration is not going to work productively with states to help them move money out of highway projects into transit projects.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. I’ll say diplomatically, I don’t have reason to believe that the federal government would be a partner to states looking to champion transit projects right now.
David Roberts
Yes. We should also say one more thing on flex funding because you sent me a study on how that authority has been exercised thus far. What you found is they don’t use it much. States aren’t flexing a ton of money, and what money they are flexing is more often going the other way. It’s more often going to highway projects. In terms of how this authority has been used, it doesn’t have a great record.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. In sustainable transportation, the famous use case from the last five years is that last year Governor Shapiro took a real leadership step and saw some massive failures on the Pennsylvania transit funding landscape and flexed $47 million from a couple of highway projects that were backburner into some key transit needs for the year. “Save SEPTA” is what the headline was last year with the governor. But normally it flexes the other way, as you said.
David Roberts
The background to all this is that most of the funding goes to highways and has traditionally. But as we say, that flexing, because it requires close consultation and work with the federal government, is likely off the table. But there is this other authority states have to transfer money, which to my uneducated ears sounds like the same thing. Maybe you can explain how transferring money from one of these programs to another is different than flexing money from one to another.
Liya Rechtman
Yes, totally fair to say that they sound the same. The bureaucrat in me is a little slayed by that, but they are pretty different processes. The really big difference has to do with the level of federal engagement. A state gets a chunk of change from the Highway Trust Fund. 50% of the money a state gets goes into the National Highway Performance Program. That’s mostly just for highway projects, but does have expanded eligibilities, which we could talk about for bikeways and some bus routes and things like that. About 25% of the money a state gets goes into something called the Surface Transportation Block Grant.
That’s really a slush fund. The eligibilities for that are enormous. There are two points of contact with the federal government on transfer. The simplest point is when a state is ready to transfer money from, say, the highway program into the block grant program, they have to send a very short form that says, “We are transferring money that would have been used for project type A and we’re transferring it to a different fund to use for project type B.” The federal government has to sign off on it, but it’s not at the headquarters level, it’s at the district level.
I’ve been talking about it as essentially “read receipts.” It’s very pro forma, like an FYI note that the state has to send to their federal district office, who they’re working with closely on a daily basis on major projects anyway. That’s one difference: just this short FYI. Another important difference is that it’s by project type, not by project. That eliminates some of the political friction in doing a transfer. What Governor Shapiro did, which was very brave and savvy given the needs of Pennsylvania’s transit system, was transfer money from specific projects on the Pennsylvania highway system into specific transit capital projects.
What I’m saying is it’s chunk by chunk, and in state DOT terms, we call it recoloring the money into a different stream. That is politically smoother, a lower lift. There’s a small complicating factor here, which we’ll work through, which is that depending on what pocket of Highway Trust Fund dollars you’re moving money into, it may need to be in the State Transportation Improvement Plan, which is just a statewide plan for how the state intends to improve transportation. The federal government needs to approve that every four years.
If there’s an amendment to that, the federal government needs to approve the amendment as well. The federal government does not disapprove of these. They’re similarly a pro forma read receipt. Sometimes there’s a discussion for a state, but it’s really low lift. In fact, when Secretary Duffy came in, he tried to move those reviews to headquarters and put a much tighter claw on what states were doing in their transportation improvement programs. State DOTs flipped out, and he moved it back to the district. Both of those federal interventions are pretty politically safe and light touch.
David Roberts
Okay. I just want to put an asterisk here: historically, traditionally. We have an administration that has done many unprecedented things. I’m very leery about saying this is a process that they can’t come in and screw up somehow if they really get a yen to come in and screw it up.
Liya Rechtman
That’s not wrong. I’ll say one thing about that. The Trump administration is trying to do two things at once. They’re trying to have a tighter hold on state authorities and undermine state rights and authorities, and they’re also destroying the federal civil service. There’s no one left to review these. They can’t both eliminate capacity and then expand the federal review process for states.
David Roberts
They can, and then things will just grind to a halt. They don’t seem to care if things grind to a halt. Things just don’t work. Things just don’t happen. Maybe they have some incentive to keep the basic things working. But dysfunction is not necessarily a bad thing.
Liya Rechtman
It just hasn’t been the case. You could be right. This is a hypothesis. This is a suggestion to states: “Here’s a stone you have not yet turned over. Here is an untested authority, an underutilized authority. Why don’t you try this?” You have states like Pennsylvania, California, New York that are trying to do electric vehicle projects and public transit projects and stop rural pedestrians from being killed on the side of the road without a sidewalk. Here’s an option that you may not have tried yet.
David Roberts
The option in question is you take money that’s going to the National Highway Performance Program and you shift it over to a different corner. That gives you more options to spend it on non-highway stuff. I’m assuming that states — this Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has been in place for a few years — states have had this in front of them for a few years and have figured out a funding formula. What you’re saying is in a year the funding formula might get completely redone in a way that’s much more hostile to transit, so you need to put more into transit and multimodal stuff while you can.
Is that the message here? “You have a year left to do this. Throw your formula that you’d worked out, throw that out, dump more in transit while you can.” Is that the message here?
Liya Rechtman
Yeah, that’s part of it. We’re working with an extremely erratic, highly adversarial Trump administration. Part of it is we don’t know how much time we have left on public transit and vehicle electrification funding eligibilities. I’ve been on the Hill for the last two weeks in D.C. having some conversations, and it seems there is a lot of support across state departments of transportation, obviously, and across industry to expand this transfer authority, which I think is interesting because they’re not even using it right now.
I think it would be hard for House Republicans, who have the pen on the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization, to totally eliminate these authorities. They may make it more challenging in some way. But states like having choices, even if they are not exercising them, it seems.
David Roberts
Yes. When you say expand, right now I think you can take up to half of the money that’s in the National Highway Performance Program and transfer it to one of these other programs that give you more options. When you say expand it, would that just mean more than 50%? You can transfer more of it.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. I want to be clear. I am not advocating for that. I personally don’t think that makes any sense because states aren’t using the authority that they currently have. But there is support.
David Roberts
That’s the metric, though?
Liya Rechtman
Yeah. AASHTO, which is the aggregator of state DOTs that represents them on a national level, wants to see an expansion of this authority. In my universe, they are an enormously powerful force. I would be very surprised, and I’m not an optimistic person, but I would be very surprised at this point to see this authority eliminated in the way that I expected when I initially started sounding the alarm, which doesn’t reduce the urgency here, but does enable use of this authority potentially to be a long-term strategic plan for states that are seeing their sustainable transportation funding gutted.
David Roberts
A lot of other funding sources are getting gutted. That’s another thing driving this. Here’s a pool of money that you could use. But, by transferring them away from highways to other stuff, you are transferring them away from highways. States will tell you, “Our budget’s not big enough, our highways are crumbling, our infrastructure is crumbling. We need more.” Moving money out of highways is not easy. As you say, it was brave for Shapiro to do it. It would be brave for these other governors to do it too.
It’s not nothing to do this, politically speaking.
Liya Rechtman
I want to give you a sense of scale because it’s helpful, especially in the transportation infrastructure world. We’re talking about some really big dollar amounts. Take Pennsylvania, which is middle of the pack in terms of what states are getting for the National Highway Performance Program. Pennsylvania gets $1.2 billion. The half that we’re talking about is about $600 million. The heroic move that I was talking about from Governor Shapiro, transferring money that saves SEPTA, was $47 million. Less than a twelfth of the eligible funding transfer saved SEPTA for a year.
The state of Pennsylvania gets that money every year. If you’re looking for opportunities and scraping the barrel, right now in Pennsylvania, they’re in a transit fiscal crisis. SEPTA is unfunded. The MAGA Republican legislature has taken the whole budget negotiations for the state hostage, and they’re at a total gridlock. This is an opportunity for a governor or for a state DOT secretary that doesn’t require legislative approval. A very tiny fraction of the money available for highways could make massive inroads in digging public transit out of a hole or vehicle electrification in a state that needs that, California.
David Roberts
Maybe another way of putting that is the amount of money states get for highways so dwarfs the amount of money they get for other stuff that a modest transfer doesn’t make a big dent on one side, but can make a big difference on the other side.
Liya Rechtman
Exactly.
David Roberts
Let’s talk about some specifics about where we’re transferring this money to. The National Highway Performance Program is this big bucket of money, and you can transfer it to these more specific programs that give you choices. Talk a little bit about what these programs are. You mentioned the Surface Transportation Block Grants. I think that’s the one states like the most, because it’s got the most flexibility. It gives them the most autonomy. But then there’s a couple other programs you mentioned, too. Maybe just mention those and what you can do with the money in those.
Liya Rechtman
Sure. My recommendation would be to transfer money into the Surface Transportation Block Grant program because it’s such a slush fund with such a breadth of eligibilities. It also is more supportive to local, regional, and city transportation agencies, which I think is really important. There are a couple of other programs, too. There are about nine. I’m not going to list all nine because some of them are the ferry funding program and the freight program, which is pretty bread and butter. The most obvious other programs that you could transfer into are ones called — everything in transportation is acronyms. I know you deal with that all day.
David Roberts
So many acronyms. Good grief.
Liya Rechtman
One we call CMAQ, but it’s the Congestion Mitigation Air Quality Program, and that is specifically to support areas with poor air quality in reducing air pollution and reducing emissions in certain regions. That program is — the highway program is 50% of the money, the block grant program is 25%, and everything else is 2%. It’s barely worthwhile to get through the whole list. Famously, in the climate world, you have the Carbon Reduction Program, which we were excited about when that passed in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. It’s 2% of the money, the carbon reduction program in total —
David Roberts
Which ironically represents an enormous increase?
Liya Rechtman
Yes and no. The fact is that you can do much with the block grant program and with the National Highway Performance Program — there are also eligibilities in there that I think you and I would like, bikeways and sidewalks — you can do much with those that I don’t mean to undermine the Carbon Reduction Program and the incredible work that went into creating that. Expanding it would be amazing. But also, half of the money that California gets for highways is the total of the Carbon Reduction Program.
Just to give you a sense of scale, I did that math on the spot. I want to make sure that’s right, but I’m pretty sure that’s right.
David Roberts
The main recommendation here, to boil it all down, is to governors: “You have the authority to take money that is in your National Highway Performance Program and shift it to the Surface Transportation Block Grant program, which allows you to, instead of spending the money on highways, spend it on transit, etc.” That is the core here.
Liya Rechtman
Just to build that out: installing EV infrastructure, making sure that EV infrastructure has a relationship with the grid that is effective, doing bus rapid transit corridors, bus shelters, bus benches, pedestrian access to bus stops, bike access and storage to bus stops. They have thought about the real people-centered approach to transportation that I think we want to see. Joint development with private developers — that’s commercial or residential building near public transit that adds value to the public transit station, which is what every YIMBY wants to see out of their transportation dollars.
It’s a really long list. I was looking through some funky stuff. There’s money for employer incentives to make more flexible schedules, you have reduced peak travel times in high commute areas. There’s a lot that you can do. I don’t want to underestimate the opportunities available through the block grant program that I think states are not using effectively.
David Roberts
You mentioned that this is not a trivial amount of money. You mentioned in Pennsylvania, you can transfer up to half this money. Half the money for Pennsylvania would be $600 million.
Liya Rechtman
Pennsylvania built out their entire statewide NEVI program, their EV program, with $171 million, which is less than a third. For scale, I think it’s really important to keep, because we start throwing numbers around and they don’t mean anything after a certain point.
David Roberts
California, you also cite the example of California. What are the numbers in California? How much could California be playing with here?
Liya Rechtman
California, in the National Highway Performance Program, has $2.6 billion. Half of that is $1.3 billion, which is more than some states get all told across these funds. That’s because California has a really high level of density. They have an enormous number of lane miles already. A huge population. It completely makes sense. That’s a big chunk of change when we’re talking about $1.3 billion. The reason I brought up California — Governor Newsom has come out as this big EV champion pushing back against the Trump administration in a number of ways.
He put out an executive order saying, “I want to push back on the elimination of the Clean Air Waiver that California had and of the EV tax credit. I’m going to do anything I can and search every corner.” I got together with a loose network of advocates who are all talking to each other and strategizing together called the Clean Rides Network. We put forward a letter to Governor Newsom and the California Air Resources Board saying, “Have you thought about transfer funding, among other solutions?” CARB, the Air Resources Board, released their report on how they are going to be funding electric vehicle infrastructure.
They said, “Transfer funding is an interesting option for us.” It hasn’t happened yet. I’m waiting to see, ready and available for any California decision makers who want to chat more about it. That’s part of why I’m focused on California, because the chunk of change is enormous and the need and the leadership vision is there. It’s about connecting the dots between the demand and the supply.
David Roberts
What’s the political economy here? Why would they hesitate? Part of the downside is if you’re moving 50% of your highway money to transit stuff, you’re losing 50% of your highway money, which is not nothing politically speaking, but why else would they hesitate? It seems like an obvious win here. If Newsom really wants to do this and there’s $1.3 billion available to him to do it, what’s the hang-up?
Liya Rechtman
I think it really comes down to people. The climate offices in a lot of state DOTs are totally isolated from the people who are making these decisions — the asset management and budget offices. They’re not always talking to each other. The climate folks are often not empowered, the sustainable transportation folks are often not empowered to get into it with the asset managers and with the budget officers who are making decisions in a status quo way that they’ve been making on repeat, on autopilot since the beginning of the national highway system.
David Roberts
Part of the background here is that state DOTs are notoriously awful. It’s a strange place to look for salvation at this point because I and many other people have spent decades complaining about state DOTs precisely for the reasons you say. They’re just locked in habitual ways of thinking, locked in old ways of thinking about traffic and all these things, and highway obsessed. They have these little sustainability offices down at the end of the hall but not involved in the main decisions. All these complaints about state DOTs, all that stuff is still true, isn’t it? This would be an uphill climb, just pushing your state DOT to be bold and do something different.
Liya Rechtman
Yeah, I don’t mean to be cheesy, David, but I see myself as standing on the shoulders of people like you and Doug and Sarah from War on Cars on the thought leadership side in terms of bringing climate concerns to the transportation world. More materially, I really stand on the shoulders of people like Jeanie Ward-Waller from Caltrans, who was a woman engineer with a true transportation planner’s understanding of how decision making worked in the agency, looking to make changes, bringing up women, bringing up transportation planners, and doing that heavy, underappreciated work of bringing new people into decision making and political leadership positions.
The historical legacy of transportation decision making and state DOTs is alive and well, I assure you. But I do think that we have new opportunities now. Transportation planners are trained in basic understanding of climate impacts to infrastructure on the resilience side. They are trained with more of an eye towards people-centered design and low-carbon transportation options. Not necessarily because of the climate impacts, but because of the affordability, equity, access impacts, everything else. And because they build better communities. It’s fantastic that emissions reductions are aligned with those solutions.
Personnel is policy. The personnel is changing in these transportation agencies. I hope that the role of myself and others in the advocacy world is empowering some excellent people who are already in those sustainability offices or leadership roles and also helping build that pipeline of people going into transportation commissions, to state DOT directors, to leadership appointments in the governor’s office who can help shepherd in novel policy ideas — especially in this time of enormous financial need for state DOTs.
David Roberts
Also, politically, all these governors — if you want to be an anti-Trump, if you want to be a fighter, if you want to draw some attention and do something other than just writing a sternly worded letter, this is something you can do. You can move millions of dollars to good things and you can frame it as a blow against Trump. There’s a political lane here for governors to distinguish themselves. I wanted to ask you, when this surface transportation funding formula runs out, which will be a year from now, they’re going to pass a new one. I assume people are already at work on that. Two questions. First, let’s talk a little bit about modeling. We love modeling here on Volts. I saw that you did some work on modeling. One of the things I hear from sustainable transportation people year after year is that the traffic engineer and traffic planning community is working with old ideas and old models.
We desperately need a new way of modeling and understanding traffic and how it works. That will affect these funding formulas. Briefly, can you tell us what your work on modeling was and what you found in a nutshell?
Liya Rechtman
I love that you love modeling. No one says that ever. Thank you. Very grateful to be able to talk about probably my favorite topic. To go back for a second to what you were saying about what are the costs here: this seems like an amazing opportunity, but where is there loss with this decision? I understand how you could see loss. If you’re gaining public transit funding from a zero-sum pie, you’re losing highway funding. But the fact is, I see this as expanding the pie, especially when coupled with better modeling. There’s an enormous amount of overspend on the state highway systems and national highway system.
That is because state modeling will tell you nearly every time that expanding your highway will lead to better traffic flows. That is not true. We’ve all seen that. You get a new highway lane, a new big box store comes in, and now you’re 10 minutes away from a Costco and you think that’s going to change your life. Within two years of that big box store opening and that new highway lane opening, you’re stuck in traffic again. By the way, your bodega has closed next to your house. Now this is your only way to get groceries.
David Roberts
It’s known as induced demand. I need to yell at someone about this. You’re an innocent person. Induced demand is something that little transportation babies learn at their mother’s knee. I knew about that before I even really was engaged in all this stuff. The news is out. People were talking about induced demand decades ago. It is just remarkable to me that state DOTs are still doing this.
I don’t even know what the equivalent is. It’s like pre-Galilean astronomy or something. They’re using ancient, obviously false techniques and they just keep doing it. What is going on there? I’m glad you formalized all this and put it in a report— “induced demand exists, we should pay attention to it.” But what is the resistance? Why has it taken so long? Do you have a good answer to that?
Liya Rechtman
Yeah, I have many thoughts here. I think there are two reasons. When I was at DOT and at the federal DOT working on this issue, someone sent me this dissertation by a woman named Amy Lee. Myself and the political appointees sat down over Christmas break and all read this woman’s PhD dissertation. The dissertation was on transportation decision-making cultures and why we keep building new highways that don’t help anyone. There were two reasons as far as I can remember from what Amy Lee said.
The first was that local officials love a ribbon cutting more than anything else. This becomes a legacy project for them. What they care about is the short-term positive benefits for jobs and for traffic flows. They don’t care about those jobs being temporary and they don’t care about the traffic flows getting gummed right back up a year later. They care about their immediate term — making it to their next election.
David Roberts
They don’t care about those things that they’re building costing more to maintain than they produce in tax revenue shortly after being built.
Liya Rechtman
That’s right. That’s one feature. The other is — and this is the bogeyman of all sustainable transportation — the construction industry has been very unwilling to get behind sustainable transportation as a job builder, which we know it is, it’s great for jobs, and has a real stranglehold on decision makers at every level of government.
David Roberts
They just want to build what they usually build — they want to build what they’re accustomed to building, which is roads and stuff.
Liya Rechtman
That’s right.
David Roberts
Could I also throw this in there? I don’t know if this was in the dissertation, but when I think of the phrase “male engineers,” several qualities pop to mind. Openness to change and innovation coming from young people who might not be white or engineers or men — not one of their signal qualities. I’m going to go ahead and editorialize that probably that’s got a little bit to do with the culture too, that these are old men set in their ways.
Liya Rechtman
I want to take it a little deeper than that because you are completely right. But there is more there in terms of engineers and why they make bad choices. Engineers are licensed and their licenses come with very limited protection from exposure to liability. That means they are very unlikely to sign off on novel project types and very unlikely to support innovation because their whole livelihood is at risk almost immediately when they are a first mover.
David Roberts
Interesting.
Liya Rechtman
This is one of my special interest areas: engineering licensing, liability exposure. I saw during the pandemic that engineers were very nervous about signing off on complete streets projects. That’s because they saw expanded exposure to pedestrian fatalities from complete streets. It didn’t matter that we know already that every new lane mile leads to increased exposure of pedestrians to vehicle collisions.
David Roberts
We’re not working very hard to reduce pedestrian deaths.
Liya Rechtman
Because that’s a standard, that’s flat. We don’t know what the level of pedestrian fatalities could be on complete streets. I think it’s low. But the fact is that engineers were unwilling and nervous about that risk. I think that’s another area that someone should look into: how to support engineers in making novel choices.
David Roberts
This ties back into the abundance conversation — just how litigious and set up for stasis the whole system is. I think that’s part of that. We have to find this about state DOTs. What I want to return to is this new transportation reauthorization, the new bill. Do we know anything about it yet? I’m assuming based on what Sean Duffy said, that it’s going to be crazy. Do we know anything about it in particular? Have we gotten a glimpse of the process?
Liya Rechtman
I don’t know what Sean Duffy said about it, to be honest, but he is neither responsible for it nor our best and brightest. It seems he is on the outs with the Trump administration as of this recording. There was some news this morning. All that to say, I can’t imagine what he’s imagining. I will say that this has historically been a pretty bipartisan area.
David Roberts
Congress hashes this out. Do you think that will prevent some of the more theatrical Trump craziness, just the fact that there are so many hands in the pot here?
Liya Rechtman
Sean Duffy likes to make big, splashy headlines, as you said at the beginning. But he’s an implementer at the end of the day of congressional mandates, and he would do well to remember that when he’s trying to cancel grants that were competitively awarded through congressionally mandated funding. There is bipartisan leadership on the Hill, across the Senate and the House, that are working on this right now. It’s looking likely that this transfer authority will persist for another five years into the next surface transportation reauthorization. The real question in my mind is the Highway Trust Fund is in a hole, there’s not enough money in it because as cars have become more economical with fuel, there’s less and less money in the gas tax. The gas tax has never been tied to inflation. Every pump at the gas station, your gas tax dollar means less every year because of inflation.
David Roberts
That would require serious and delicate negotiations. Final question about what the feds could do: federal money to states for transportation is one of the biggest buckets of money that feds hand out to states. I can 1000% imagine Trump using that as a tool to bring states to heel, to just say, “We won’t send you your transportation funding if you do xyz.” That’s illegal, but unclear if that matters anymore. Is there any prospect of that happening?
Liya Rechtman
You’re right that it doesn’t matter that it’s illegal in some ways, but that is a great place to demonstrate how transportation is really different than other issue areas. They turned off the taps at the beginning of the Trump administration on projects and did that thing I mentioned at the beginning where they tried to re-review state transportation improvement plans and take out anything DEIA and anything related to bikes and all of that. The president of AASHTO, the transportation organization that represents all state DOTs, came to Congress and the taps got turned back on. Trump does not have, in my opinion, so far the power to turn off transportation funding. The game is too serious.
David Roberts
I bet that’s part of why he’s mad at Duffy. This is part of why he’s mad at Chris Wright at DOE — because Chris Wright is sitting down with some of the industries that Trump wants him to screw and listening to them and offering them some concessions, trying to be reasonable about implementing Trump’s vision. Trump doesn’t want him to be reasonable. Trump wants him to act quickly and be as destructive as possible. I wonder if something similar is going on with Duffy, if Duffy is listening to state DOTs, for instance, too much.
I wonder if that is one of the reasons Trump wants to boot him.
Liya Rechtman
I personally don’t think Duffy’s that deep. I think all this stuff goes over Duffy’s head, in my opinion. But no one’s paying me the big bucks to analyze him.
David Roberts
Terrified. This is the one thing I hear from him regularly, that he wants people to have more babies and he’s terrified of putting public transit.
We don’t yet know what that’s going to look like, that new reauthorization, but there’s reason to believe it won’t be as theatrically awful as a lot of other stuff the Trump administration does. States are very invested, there’s a lot of hands in the pot, everybody in Congress is working on it, etc. The main message of this pod is to governors: you have this pool of money in your transportation fund. You have the legal power to transfer it to other programs where you can then spend it on sustainable transportation, EVs, etc.
It is a big pot of money in a lot of cases, and there is nothing they can do to stop you from doing it. If you want to take short-term action on sustainable transportation, this is the big pot of money that you need to be accessing. But there are other things states can do too. You wrote a piece earlier this year about various things states can do to mitigate some of the damage here. Maybe quickly run through a couple of other things that you think are high on that list.
Liya Rechtman
Just to reiterate your point, my main point is there are a lot of hard calls that governors have to make right now. Electric vehicle infrastructure funding doesn’t have to be one of them. There are authorities available to them, there are creative opportunities. What better time to make creative choices than in a moment of enormous need? In terms of the other opportunities, as you mentioned, transfer funding is a big one. I see that as the biggest chunk of the pie. But there are also ways to expand the pie.
I was talking to Senator Faith Winters from Colorado. She is the author of a delivery fee for e-commerce vehicles where if you are staying home and ordering in Chinese takeout, you pay a 50-cent fee. That fee goes to the state for EV infrastructure. That’s one type of option.
You can always levy more fees. I don’t think that works as well necessarily in other places as it does in Colorado. There are cap and invest programs like what California has and New York.
David Roberts
Except New York’s is currently in limbo somewhere.
Liya Rechtman
New York is imagining having in the future, I’ll say. There are a couple other types of intervention as well. I was on the phone the other day with Connecticut’s Green Bank talking about their electric vehicle bus program. Having some of that wraparound financing instruments for vehicle electrification — maybe there are other types of opportunities for sustainable transportation amongst green banks. I think that’s worth looking into. My favorite in terms of current administrative authorities, which is my main bailiwick, are public procurement requirements.
States need to buy vehicles for their highway patrol, for their street sweepers, etc. They have money allocated to do that. Just make that electricity or zero emission. That’s another authority that states should be looking to where you already have money and you can shift it slightly or add additional requirements to it. A lot of states are doing that already in terms of public procurement requirements and a lot of cities. Climate Mayors championed, I think it was 350 mayors made commitments around that maybe two years ago. I don’t know how those are going, but that feels like an obvious choice when you already have to spend money on new vehicles to add electric to your rolling stock.
David Roberts
But I will say as a note, all the options that you list in your piece for what they can do outside of this main bucket have to do with electrification, electric vehicles. I notice you don’t really say anything about what I would say is the other big tool, the other big possibility here, which is just getting people out of cars by better land use.
More density, etc. I notice those are not listed in your piece.
Liya Rechtman
It was just an electric vehicle piece. It’s not to say that there aren’t other opportunities. I’m one person writing one memo at a time trying to solve the problems with smart growth in America. But there certainly are — Colorado has an incredible smart growth state standard. I was just in Minnesota for a modeling conference talking with some folks at MnDOT, which is the Minnesota DOT, about their new GHG standard, which I think supports more transit-oriented development. I could wax poetic about transit-oriented development and the need for —
David Roberts
SB 79 just passed in California. All those things are part of this picture too. Just getting people out of cars. By way of wrapping up, I love all this. I love that there are things people can do, there are things governors of states can do immediately that are not small. To be realistic here, it does seem to me transportation is one of those areas where states just don’t have enough money to fund it themselves. At the end of the day, this is one of those areas where you really are dependent on the federal government.
You can fiddle around the margins, but there is no long-term solution to a federal government that is hostile to sustainable transportation. Do you agree?
Liya Rechtman
Long-term solutions to a federal government that is hostile to sustainable transportation? I guess I’m saying that this could be a long-term solution. In the longer term, we don’t know yet. I don’t think we’ve ever had a federal government as adversarial to state authorities and rights as the one we have right now. I am hopeful that this current state of play will not be the status quo for much longer because we’ll have a new reauthorization coming up. Republicans in Congress need things to get done and states red and blue need things to get done, they need their bridges built, they need their transportation system funded.
Depending on how we formulate the next surface transportation reauthorization, this expanded eligibility and letting good states do good things could be the long-term strategy if we push state DOTs and governors, if we get good people into those roles and if reauthorization permits it. I’m more hopeful than you are on this. That’s what I’m saying here. States have options and I am hopeful that they will continue to have options to fund sustainable transportation with federal dollars as a solution and not as a barrier.
David Roberts
Awesome. I’ll end on your note of optimism then. Nobody needs more notes of pessimism from me. States can do a lot. Governors can do a lot. They don’t need permission. Governors, go out and do this. Thank you so much for coming on and talking us through this. I love hearing these practical solutions. Thanks for walking us through it.
Liya Rechtman
Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
