“The beauty and tragedy of heavy rail is that once you’ve dug the hole in the ground and put a subway line in it, it’s there for 100 years whether people are still choosing to embark and disembark in that spot, or not,” says Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington who has studied the administration’s budget proposal. “So, you could see significant redesign of bus routes and patterns in a lot of these major cities.”

“This is a model for concentrated future growth,” said Robert Puentes, president and CEO of the Eno Center for Transportation. “It’s less about just concentrating [homes and jobs] so that people can use transit to get to those parts of the region, [and more about] trying to concentrate more of the work and play around these activity centers.”