This week, the Institute for Progress published a Transit Abundance Playbook, a collection of 15 articles with recommendations that policymakers can adopt to help transit agencies build projects faster, cheaper, and more effectively. The articles — written by leading transit practitioners, researchers, and advocates — translate research into policy solutions.

The Playbook is organized around solving some major problems in transit project delivery: weak early planning, overly expensive design choices, outdated procurement rules, poor coordination with utilities and other third parties, slow permitting, and limited in-house capacity at public agencies. Aidan Mackenzie, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute, said, “We wanted to publish these ideas before Congress negotiates the surface transportation reauthorization bill.”

The Institute’s work effectively builds on and complements research conducted by other research institutions, including Eno and NYU’s Marron Institute.

Eno’s Project Delivery resources hub contains reports, data, and best practices aimed at improving how transit infrastructure projects are planned, designed, and constructed. It includes the Rail Transit Project Delivery Around the World report, which found that the U.S. pays more than a 50 percent premium to build rail projects compared with peer countries, and the Blueprint for Building Transit Better report, which provides a set of governance, process, and standards recommendations.

Just as there is no single cause of America’s high transit costs, there is no single solution. The Playbook reinforces the lesson that reducing transit costs is not about one magic reform. It requires improving many decisions made at many points in a project’s life.

One of the Playbook’s most important themes is early planning. Transit agencies often make decisions early in a project that shape long-term costs. If agencies do not have enough experienced staff, realistic schedules, reliable cost estimates, or clear project goals at the beginning, they may pay for those weaknesses later through redesigns, change orders, delays, and disputes.

In the Playbook, NYU’s Eric Goldwyn writes that some agencies do not resolve obvious constructability challenges (such as utility conflicts) in advance and can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on planning and design for projects that never get built. Paul Lewis, Eno’s former policy director, recommends steps to improve early planning capacity and reduce reliance on consultants. He does not propose eliminating consultants, but rather argues that public agencies need sufficient internal capacity to effectively manage consultants, challenge assumptions, retain institutional knowledge, and make informed decisions.

Rohan Aras and Alex Armlovich at the Niskanen Center argue that federal incentives are needed to reduce needless bus customization. (Heads up: Eno released a report, today, that reinforces and expands on these recommendations.) The Playbook also addresses staff capacity at the state and local levels by recommending policy changes to help agencies become better owners, managers, and learners, so their projects are more likely to succeed.

Eno’s contribution to the Playbook, “Share the Truth About Transit Project Failures,” builds on one of the themes contained in Eno’s 2025 report “The People Behind Major Transit Projects.” The Playbook article explains how transit agencies rarely document and share the hard lessons they learn from large projects. Agencies have understandable reasons for being cautious: reputational risk, litigation risk, political risk, and concerns about future funding. But when lessons are not candidly recorded and shared, agencies repeat mistakes that could be avoided. The article recommends steps to overcome these obstacles, including creating a confidential lessons-learned repository and convening more in-person peer exchanges.

The Playbook highlights permitting reforms related to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Jamey Tesler, a fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, refers to the environmental law as “a common pain point for transit agencies, contributing to project delays and cost escalations.” He recommends that transit agencies be given the authority to streamline their environmental reviews. Hayden Clarkin, known as the Transit Guy on Substack, goes even further. He recommends that transit projects approved by ballot initiative should be exempt from NEPA.

In May, Eno published a report by Rebecca Higgins, Eno’s vice president for policy, that also examined NEPA issues. She found that Congress has ample opportunities to enact changes that meaningfully improve coordination, timelines, and outcomes. The most straightforward and yet meaningful approach, she argues, would be to focus on the existing authorities already in law that could be expanded or clarified.

Congress has already been considering some of the ideas recommended in the Playbook. For example, in May, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted 62-2 to approve the BUILD America 250 Act. It includes a provision that would allow FTA recipients to acquire property before completing an environmental review and later seek reimbursement if the property becomes part of an eligible capital project.

The hardest reforms identified in the Playbook may be the ones that require changing the relationships between agencies, utilities, local governments, and other parties. One Playbook proposal looks to the Italian “conference of services” model, which brings affected parties together in a public process to identify conflicts, assign responsibilities, and resolve coordination problems. Although this model could help reduce “intra-government delays and value extraction,” it would likely require significant state-level legal and political changes.

After reviewing all the contributors’ articles, Mackenzie said he was most surprised by how useful subway automation could be. He said, “High operating costs are a drag on our ability to expand frequent service. For example, at pre-COVID ridership levels, automating train driving could save enough on operating costs to make subways in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Boston profitable based on farebox collection alone.”

Mackenzie was referring to the article written by Andrew Miller, a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute. He recommends that Congress revise the labor protection law, formerly known as Section 13(c) of the Federal Transit Act, which was originally enacted to protect workers during the transition from private to public ownership of transit. Miller writes that “No legacy U.S. heavy-rail system has automated its operations to permit trains to run without onboard crew. In contrast, countries like France and Canada, each with robust labor protections, automate without conflict.”

U.S. transit projects do not have to be as expensive, slow, and frustrating as they often are. The Institute for Progress’s contribution to project delivery research shows that better rules, better incentives, better information, and better institutional capacity can make a difference.