It’s easy to understand why public transit agencies are target-fixed on the “next stop” in 2026. Final drawdowns of safety-net funds provided by the 2021 American Rescue Plan are happening now. IIJA reauthorization is proceeding in a political climate that is unlikely to be receptive to agencies seeking expanded support. The fiscal cliff is real.

But it’s equally true that long-term scenarios for public transit are as existentially dire as the short-term ones. That’s why it’s crucial to bring forward-looking thinking to reauthorization negotiations. If we truly want to build public transit that can navigate the challenges of the 21st century, we need to make real progress on changing how we finance, measure, and support public transit at the federal level.

As much as the funds from ARP and IIJA provided the public transit sector with historic capital infusions, they did little to dislodge, on a truly structural level, peak hour planning, hub-and-spoke networks, and other 20th-century orthodoxies that continue to limit ridership and relevance.

Reauthorization creates an opportunity to set a course that goes beyond putting patches on outdated systems. If we don’t start reorienting federal frameworks toward Mobility-as-a-Service in more ambitious ways, stagnant ridership, outdated procurement silos, and all the other challenges the industry faces will only compound.

This is not to say transit agencies are blind to innovation. Far from it. WMATA is developing AI-driven tools for bus fleet maintenance, using machine learning to flag component failures before they happen. LA Metro is implementing a cloud-based traffic signal priority system that will use GPS and AI to predict bus arrival times and preemptively clear traffic at hundreds of key intersections. By moving the “brain” of the traffic light to the cloud, Metro will be able to coordinate green lights across different city jurisdictions without installing specialized hardware at every pole.

But the AI applications transit agencies are focused on are almost entirely operational — tools that help them run existing systems more efficiently.

As valuable as that is, it’s only part of the story. Transit policy is already struggling to adapt to a post-Covid world. If AI does even a fraction of what its many proponents project, it will further rewire where people live and work, when and why they travel, and what they expect from every service they interact with.

As this plays out, the downtown office districts and commercial corridors that transit systems have traditionally prioritized will no longer matter as much as they once did. Peak hour will flatten or fragment even further.

A population that moves through frictionless AI systems all day will also bring very different expectations to the level of service and convenience they expect from public transit. So it’s ultimately not just a matter of building new AI-equipped buses to save on maintenance. We must rethink the entire utility of the network. In this new world, public transit must evolve from a “worker funnel” into a “community connector.”

As unlikely as this transformation might seem in this political climate and fiscal moment, it is at heart a pragmatic appeal. That’s because structural reforms we need aren’t primarily arguments for spending more. They’re arguments for spending smarter, and for stopping the waste that comes from funding 21st-century mobility needs through a 20th-century statutory framework.

First, we must remove the capital definition bias baked into Title 49. In an asynchronous, AI-mediated world, the digital layer is as critical as the chassis. We must expand the definition of “Capital” to include AI-driven routing software and V2I (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure) layers as depreciable assets.

This is less radical than it sounds. In fact, the FTA already grapples with this in the context of fare collection technology and cybersecurity infrastructure; the category has been quietly expanding for years. What’s needed is formal statutory recognition of what’s already happening informally, with appropriate guardrails. If WMATA can use federal capital dollars for a rail car but must scramble for local operating funds to pay for the AI tools that keep it running efficiently, our policy is failing our technology.

Second, we must acknowledge that our scoreboard needs updating. Measuring success by “Total Boardings” is a legacy of the commuter era that actively distorts agency priorities — rewarding systems that serve dense, high-frequency corridors while penalizing innovative service models that reach underserved riders less efficiently by traditional measures.

The University of Minnesota’s Access Across America project and the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program have both spent years independently validating a more holistic alternative: frameworks that facilitate access to opportunity instead of just maximizing vehicle throughput or turnstile counts. This approach measures how many residents can actually reach essential services like healthcare, education, and employment within a reasonable travel time, regardless of the mode they use.

The 2026 Reauthorization should formally adopt this approach, rewarding agencies that connect residents to essential services within 45 minutes regardless of the mode used. In an AI-driven economy, a “successful” trip might be a micro-transit van to a local satellite office rather than a train to a downtown hub. Our metrics should reflect that.

Finally, the current stovepiping of funds across Title 49’s urban, capital, and bus program accounts prevents agencies from acting as true Mobility-as-a-Service platforms. Changes here are an admittedly hard fix. Agencies have spent decades adapting their planning, procurement, and staffing to work within these silos, and predictable categorical funding is easier to build budgets around than flexible block grants.

But whatever upsides this predictability delivers, it also means agencies have organized themselves around these categories rather than around rider needs. Consolidating existing buckets into a Unified Mobility Block Grant would allow agencies the agility to partner with private-sector mobility solutions without the friction of procurement rules written in a pre-digital era.

In the current moment, survival may feel like the only thing on the menu. But a reauthorization that locks in the frameworks of the commuter era for another five years is not a pragmatic or realistic choice. Instead, it’s just another costly detour when it’s really time to update the map.