The Cost of Sycophants

In my previous installment, The Reorganization of USDOT (National Bus Trader, February, 2025), I riffed about some of the changes that an enlightened new Presidential Administration might do to improve some USDOT administrations and the operations they oversee. Unfortunately, almost no coverage (and likely little thought) has been given to the content of these changes by this Administration. Instead, it has become mired in a debate about the legality of replacing often-incompetent personnel who possess at least a knowledge of the subject matter with individuals with zero knowledge of the subject matter but who will make decisions and create changes more consistent with those that the President wishes, irrespective of the likely chaotic consequences of these changes on the central purpose for which these services were designed and intended. After all, the USDOT is in the executive branch of government, and apart from the issue of firing civil servants who had been appointed for specific terms by Congressional mandates (and so far most lower and appellate courts have agreed with the civil servants), the President is technically the boss of all these workers. The problem has been that he believes that hundreds of thousands of them simply do what they wish, which in fairness to President Trump, is not the way our government was designed to operate. Also in fairness to President Trump insofar as USDOT, I believe he is correct (although they likely do not contain hundreds of thousands of employees, and frankly, more employees are needed in some capacity – like FMCSA field inspectors (although this workforce should also manage to be decreased now that all motorcoaches are required to contain electronic logs (EEOCs).

The other side of the debate deals with concepts like continuity and mastery of the subject matter. Federal agencies do not play hop scotch. They attempt to manage truck-fulls (or bus-fulls) of complex operations and problems that often take the best technocrats decades in their respective fields to master – if and when they can. Clearly, most public transportation modes suggest that the best of these officials at the Federal level – and even more so at the state, regional, county and/or municipal levels – are far from a rudimentary understanding of how to coherently design or operate most modes, much less a mastery of how to design and operate them. Yet even for those mid-level civil servants competent in their jobs, and working in jobs that are sorely needed (e.g., air traffic control), it would be hard to replace hordes of these individuals overnight with even the most-experienced experts in these fields. And, frankly, large numbers of such individuals are not available or do not exist.

More importantly, the notion that an army of administrators can waltz in, take over and commandeer the provision of these service at all is patently absurd. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen; a Figure 8 racetrack. Ironically, even in those rare areas where radical improvements can be made at all, given the learning curve, the changes President Trump hopes for may be a long time in coming. How can someone who knows nothing about the subject matter make dramatic changes? Frankly, it is hard to imagine such individuals not making them worse – unless they simply spend months or years observing the existing services before making the needed changes – even if and when they can. As a result, even with new staff, many things will stay the same for a much longer time that the new Administration is hoping for – and promising to the American public.

In contrast, an overlap of existing and new personnel would actually be helpful, despite the resentment and animosity of those scheduled for termination. Plus, many such individuals would depart prematurely as soon as they found new jobs – although perhaps a contract could prevent this. But such an overlap would also be costly – although it would cost far less then giving career employees eight month’s of severance pay to do nothing, and not even be available for an occasional consultation. But this is only a hypothetical. Such an overlap is not going to happen. The new appointees will begin with zero knowledge, and as a result, the status quo so resented by President Trump will likely last for a good while.

For other agencies, like HHS, such nuances will not likely be encountered. This is because swaths of services, and pay-outs to recipients, will simply be eliminated along with the elimination of the staff who had been charged with operating the programs at the Federal level. (And without those at the Federal level, those at the state, county and local levels will have nothing to do. So without much coaxing from the President, much less any serious pressure, state, county and local government officials will simply terminate their respective officials who, without resources, will effectively have nothing to do. The same is obviously not true for transit services, for example: If all fixed route transit disappeared overnight, and particularly if subway service were curtailed (or even if the buses used as feeder service to them were eliminated), the inner cities would explode with chaos. The Rich would be unable to move about in their personal cars and limousines. And enough helicopters and helipads to compensate would not remotely be available. So the total elimination of certain transportation services would quickly translate into a bipartisan revolt, and no Republican congressperson who supported it could hope to retain his or her seat during the next mid-term election.[1]

This debate unfortunately resembles a double-edged sword with the blades on both sides badly blunted. Yet a mastery-of-the-subject matter versus an administrator is an important debate for a purportedly technical administration like USDOT, a department where evidence exists documenting decades of declining performance in the operations USDOT administrations purportedly govern. So it is worth examining this broad trade-off as it might affect various USDOT administrations.

While the focus of the debate over controlling and replacing personnel is generally presented as a battle of political power theoretically adjudicated by laws and the courts, such a focus ignores the question of whether a loyal politically-appointed generalist can learn enough about the subject matter to not drown the baby while refilling the bathtub.?

Administrators versus Technocrats

As a technocrat with little interest or experience in administration, I have, throughout my entire career, resented and fought against the notion that an administrator can simply be dropped into a position and perform effectively. My first five years of employment in the public transit field should help the reader understand my feelings about this issue, and how I succeeded in every project by virtually ignoring every administrator I came across:

·???????? In my first job after receiving a Masters Degree in Urban and Regional Planning, I and my far-more-savvy boss spent a full year writing a document that explained, to the newly-appointed Director of the Bureau of Policy and Planning (within the Illinois Department of Transportation) what his 22-member staff actually did. During this year, he had no idea. Yet somehow, without any leadership during this period, the mostly technocrats’ decisions and activities simply rolled along, many of them with excellence. While occasionally skewed by poor and sometimes crooked political decisions, most things got done. Potholes were fixed during the time of year they should have been. And an annual transportation plan was created (albeit with some political surprises and shenanigans). But planning and programming got done, and its tasks usually got done on time. Regardless, apart from political interference that created some significant problems, the technocrats appeared to do just fine without any administrative oversight – which the document being prepared by the consulting firm for which I worked was designed to facilitate. So much for the value of administrators.?

·???????? In my next job as a Program Manager for Washington, D.C.-based Public Technology, Inc., administrators similarly had a small role. What passed for a Board of Directors – representatives from every U.S. city with a population over 500,000 – identified their cities’ most serious problems, we voted to select a “top 10,” and our mostly young and inexperienced staff conducted research on it, and mostly wrote documents about these problems and issues – often with exhaustively-helpful information and solutions. In these efforts, out staff worked loosely with members of UMTA (now the FTA) who usually possessed some familiarity with the subject matter. And my boss was not an administrator, and had a superior understanding of how USDOT, and UMTA in particular, worked. And she possessed a conceptual knowledge of how various modes of transportation worked. So our staff was set loose to do our technical best, and in many cases, produced invaluable tools.[2] But the nearly complete absence of almost-always-ignorant administrators made this progress possible.?

·???????? In my third job, I did 99 percent of the work on a document initially aimed at identifying barriers to the diffusion of innovation in the transit industry (part of the project’s title, considered to be insulting, was changed from “innovation” to “information”), while my boss and a Cincinnati-based consulting firm chimed in occasionally, took all the credit, and most of the money, while contributing almost nothing to the document I produced (and which was barely edited). But in an era where Americans got the phone, or when not, returned their calls, I at least spoke directly with numerous General Managers about this problem, made a handful of site visits, learned a lot, and wrote a medium-sized document containing the results. Plus my boss was, refreshingly, not an administrator, and had a sound understanding of fixed route transportation. So once again, I escaped the clutches of an administrator.?

·???????? In my last job in D.C., my overbearing boss, a retired Army Colonel, was a pure administrator who knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter of anything (I suspect this was even true of his understanding of anything military). Our task was to simply prepare case studies on a selection of paratransit systems around the country. In the process, I (the Project Manager) or pairs of my staff spent roughly a week each in 18 cities, and examined 30 systems. When I was hired, the project was already underway – for several months during which almost nothing was accomplished. Conforming perfectly to administrative practices, the team had spent months classifying which cities to visit: Some urban, some rural, some from the north, some from the south, etc., so that our sampling would be “representative.” At that point in our history, 10 percent of all projects contracted out were doled out to minority-owned firms, and in the South (Washington, D.C. is clearly in the South, while certainly not the deep South), the least-important 10 percent of an agencies projects went to these firms. Writing case studies, intended to be published, would be read by no one in the outside world, but might project a burst of insight to the Dead State bureaucrats for whom we worked. Otherwise, the firm’s modus operandi was to use up all the initial funds to develop a rationale for triggering the granting of follow-up projects. In other words, my firm, run by not only administrators, but was essentially a crook. (And as a minority-owned firm that only did a tenth of the project, and the least-important ones, such corruption was completely ignored, it was rarely reported (whistle-blowing did not exist in the 1970s), and the bureaucrats overseeing the project within UMTA could not have cared less.

?Renegade that I am, the moment I came? on board I tossed every shred of my team’s work in the trash, developed a basic set of questions to ask each city, assigned various staff to telephone nearly 100 of them, and from the information we obtained, simply chose those cities and systems from which I felt we could learn the most. We then scheduled week-long site visits to all 18 of them. I ignored my boss’ idiotic instructions completely. But knowing nothing about the subject matter, and already having squandered at least a fourth of the project’s budget, he could not afford to fire me. (Halfway through the project, he himself was fired because our project was on time and on budget, when the company’s goals. As noted, were to use up all the grant money to figure out how to craft a document justifying an “add on,” which would effectively double or triple the original budget.) ?

A third of the way through the site visits, after visiting Tulsa, OK – whose paratransit system was providing nearly 11 passenger trips/hour (most others were lucky to provide a trip and a half per hour [many provider fewer trips per hour today, largely because scheduling is automated] –I met face-to-face with our liaison at UMTA, and convinced him that, if given the chance, I could figure out the principles that govern efficiency in demand responsive paratransit operations (almost all of which were called “Dial-A-Ride” systems in these days when almost everyone “got the phone”). Given the go-ahead, while my entire staff turned over twice (loathing the minority-owned firm for which we worked, whose owner had only a high school education but a lot of connections), I figured everything out -- thanks, again, largely to a genius in Tulsa (see https://transalt.com/principles-paratransit-system-design/). When it came time to write the final report, we had burned through $238,000 of our $250,000 budget. Yet I could not get the report typed by the “typing pool” – a collection of the boss’ concubines who collectively typed three words a minute. (I could not make this up, and for years kept evidence of it.) So I walked into UMTA’s offices one morning and gave my liaison a choice: Either (a) UMTA would get nothing for its $238,000 (the only person working on the project still working at the firm was me), since I would simply quit – giving him nothing since the report had not yet been written, ?or, (b) for the remaining $12,000, I would write and submit the whole report, and type it myself, which I did – but only under the name of the firm I created for it, whose name (Transportation Alternatives) I have retained for the last 50 years. Again, no administrators were spoiling the results of a hard-working technocrat who spent two years mastering the subject matter to a point where, by 1981, I knew far more about demand-responsive transportation than anyone else in the country (certainly including anyone working for USDOT). Needless to say, a decade later, in my ninth year operating what must have been the nation’s most efficient, safe and innovative 70-vehicle paratransit system, in Los Angeles, I was not invited to help author the Americans with Disabilities Act. Despite the obvious success of my efforts, USDOT did not enjoy ultimatums, the Report was published yet never disseminated (much less widely), the career of my UMTA Project Manager was likely stalled forever, and I was never again hired to direct another USDOT project – other than working on three National Academy of Science projects nearly 30 years later – projects funded by UMTA’s successor agency, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), whose staff had long forgotten about me. ?

These snapshots of my four-job, five-year “career” in our nation’s capital is not presented to illustrate my prowess in public transportation. I have a resume and seven websites (the most important are publictransitexpert.com and transalt.com, the latter of which I chose as my firm’s URL in the early 1990s). Instead, this overview is designed to illustrate one side of a perspective that, several months ago, was turned on its head by he newly-elected Administration.

Trials, Tribulations and Solutions

While I was lucky in my early work, I had several excellent bosses, and worked hard. But the reader should see from the overviews above that I controlled what I did in every single job, operating as a pure technocrat, and effectively ignoring anything and everything any administrator wanted or ordered me to do. However, it is also true that almost every second I worked on these four projects, I was unaffected by any political persuasion, and my work was as bipartisan as any project or project effort could be – not intentionally, but simply because of the nature of the work and the lack of politics that affected it (with one strident exception in my first job that did not interfere with my work or its results). Curiously, the brilliant boss of my second job, and her husband (the former protégé of famous Senator Phillip Hart), thought that politics were nothing but a game, if not a poorly-run circus, and paid no attention whatsoever to partisan politics, even while politics did affect the types of work that consultants performed during different periods of our history, although not as much as they soon will.[3]

Yet, in truth, what if I had not worked hard? What if I had not been competent? What if I had been lazy? And what if I could have slanted my work politically (even while this was not possible with the work I did, much less that that time in our history)? ?

These questions, and the conundrum they represent, are the essential dilemmas faced by our new Administration, at a time during which we have evolved, over half a century, from a mildly political but largely bipartisan era dominated by compromise and progress to a completely polarized society reflecting the basic issue that had dominated mankind throughout history once our hunter-gatherer culture morphed into a mostly agricultural society, where the formalities of territory were far more important: The struggle between the haves and the have-nots, and two viciously competing “camps” overflowing with disrespect and vitriol for their opponents. But National Bus Trader is not a political magazine. It is a transportation magazine. Yet to our dismay, almost every transportation decision about every mode has become political, and corruption and incompetence that barely existed 50 years ago has run wild. So if this is representative of the majority of Federal agencies (which I personally doubt), President Trump has a right to be concerned about it. And while I despise his choices, approach and motives, I genuinely appreciate and applaud the effort. Apparently, quite a number of fellow-Americans agree, while many or most likely also agree with his approach (and many with his motives).?

Nevertheless, is this the fault of the civil service? I feel that some of it is, as many civil servants – particularly those at the local, regional and state levels -- are far more incompetent than those at the federal level. Yet the executive branch of the federal government does not control the goings on at these levels, even while it can do things to influence them (like supporting gubernatorial and mayoral candidates of its party). Do I think changes – including personnel changes -- should be made, at a large scale? Yes I do. Do I think that an army of administrators with zero knowledge of the subject matter can suddenly fill tens of thousands of jobs and improve the operations of activities in their department? Not on your life. Of course, this may be a minority viewpoint, since many Americans agree that simply eliminating federal agencies that oversee and perform tasks in fields like law enforcement, foreign aid, consumer protection, internal revenue, education and justice should be eliminated altogether s a swell idea.

Regardless, at least in the field we are discussing, what can a President do to eliminate waste and improve efficiency with a small army of administrators tasked with replacing hundreds of thousands of employees with a smaller number who know absolutely nothing about the subject matter?

Believe it or not, I have an answer – a solution. I feel strongly that the answer is for this cadre of administrators to actually enlist a cadre of technocrats outside these agencies to help perform this Herculean task. I am not talking about permanently engaging these technocrats. ?And I am not talking about engaging consulting firms. (As I learned decades ago, most consultants do little more than borrow your watch to tell you what time it is.) Regular readers of National Bus Traders should already know my feelings about the worthlessness (to be kind) of transportation brokers.

Now, with the left-leaning innocence of someone who has never joined a political party,? I feel that this approach – a short-term combination of administrators nursed into marginal technical proficiency by a small, temporary band of experts in the subject matter, who would eventually leave the scene -- ?is much better for a right-leaning or left-leaning President than trying to grab power and get shut down by so many circuit courts that the Supreme Court could not possibly adjudicate most of their cases even if it wanted to. I feel strongly that my solution, noted above, is the only approach to the transition President Trump wishes for and, as President, deserves to have (notwithstanding the legal rights of many civil servants and the laws associated with them).?

Technocrats, Politics, Winners and Losers

It is not simply my own feeling, but I feel strongly that most people of all political persuasions want things done coherently. To the degree certain things may lean politically one way or the other is a choice that our nation has been structured to accommodate. To the winner goes the spoils. This time around, the distribution of wealth will swing in the opposite direction that it did under the previous administration. And that will be manifest in countless changes to a huge swatch of social programs as well as technical ones. To those who would rather see it differently, too bad. They, or we, can do what we can to stop the forces they or we do not like from going overboard, and will use what resources they or we can to try to stop them from doing so. But those on the Left lost the election, fair and square. And to the losers in our system of government, the spoils do not accrue.

But this article is not designed to focus on such abstractions. It is designed to focus on how people with a knowledge of the subject matter can help those in power, who do not have such knowledge, to effect meaningful and appropriate change. In another field, would I help a bunch of administrators replace an army of social workers with an army of administrators who would reduce social security or MediCare benefits (which, selfishly, I receive)? Not a chance. But would I, as a technocrat, help a cadre of administrators replace some dead wood in the transportation field with a temporarily-integrated mix of administrators and technocrats who could eliminate waste, and pull the public transportation field in a direction where the modes that, over the years, we have nearly destroyed will work again? Absolutely. And what I myself would do, and which candidate I prefer, is of no importance whatsoever. I feel strongly that this feeling is widespread among technocrats favoring both political ends of the spectrum. (And ends of the spectrum is now largely all that we have.)

Under such a positive and cooperative framework, that small minority who actually knows how to operate various transportation modes coherently and efficiently would likely not only assist the new Administration in such efforts, but would do so enthusiastically. Most technocrats in public transportation would hope to never spend a second in the same room as Elon Musk. But most of us would love to help accomplish many of his stated goals – at least those that are not political. Getting rid of waste, lowering costs and increasing efficiency are the goals of good technocrats and non-technocrats alike in every mode of transportation. Most of those with the knowledge to accomplish such things would jump at the chance to participate in an effort to help the current Administration, and even its rocket-launching ruling gadflies, to accomplish these goals. As a raw sample of the things that could be done by knowledgeable technocrats (while administrators could only make things worse) would include the modes described below.?

Motorcoach Service.? Bringing motorcoach service into the prosperity of yesteryear is a serious challenge that likely cannot be met. But this hardly means that many things could not be greatly improved. (See https://transalt.com/article/new-opportunities-for-increased-motorcoach-usage-in-transit-service/.)

This improvement does not mean that change would not be challenging. A reality is that demand is limited, and inflation will soon become rampant (and to be fair to President Trump, outside the control of any President or any other single individual). But around the edges there are still things that can be done. National Bus Trader readers know that I have railed against charging motorcoaches bridge and tunnel fees. I would allow them to use many transit facilities, including their bus stops. I would create intelligent parking places in urban areas for motorcoaches within a reasonable distance of their drop-offs, and there would be room for parking them if they and transit buses carried more passengers into and out of the cities, reducing the number of cars, and making more space for parking available. And while I, like President Trump, disfavor it, New York City’s congestion pricing experiment seems to be creating plenty of extra space in the Lower Manhattan roadways (https://transalt.com/article/congestion-pricing-how-it-can-make-sense/), and to a lesser degree in surrounding boroughs. ?So while this program poses a serious hardship to poor commuters for whom intelligible public transportation is not available or practical, it cannot help but produce more parking spaces, including spaces that could be reserved for motorcoaches (which cannot simply deadhead to the nearest operating division at the end of the driver’s shift). I would also launch demonstration programs to produce and deploy revamped motorcoaches to compete with mid- and short-distant commercial flights – including even prohibiting many of the latter (see https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-1-magic-corridors/ and https://transalt.com/article/survival-and-prosperity-part-2-the-magic-coach/).

I would also impose limits on shift inversion – to the dismay of the few large and wealthy motorcoach oligopolies. Somehow, I fail to understand why we allow this yet pay for air traffic controllers – and impose strict limits on the amount of time pilots can work, and the time they must be off duty between shifts. (How many years will it take a new administrative staffer to understand and fix this problem – if the Administration is even interested in it, or even finds it – since the FMCSA’s current staff – likely with the rare support of the National Transportation Safety Board – has been unable to effect such a regulation?) Otherwise, as much as the current Administration is perceived by many as loathing the Poor, I doubt that a desire to make them suffer would dominate efforts to save taxpayer’s money and reduce traffic – which would benefit both the Rich and the Poor. In simple terms, every one of these efforts is completely apolitical and bipartisan.

Taxi Service. ?The major, core strategy would involve eliminating Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) from the transportation landscape, which operate largely as criminal enterprises, and by their exemption from paying medallion fees in virtually every major city that I know of, they have deprived local governments of considerable, and in some cases like New York City, extraordinary revenue streams. In contrast, I would greatly, and creatively, expand the role of taxis, including making many more vehicles wheelchair accessible, and deploying them in ways to reduce the cost of the deployment of “dedicated vehicles” in complementary paratransit service. And I would expand the use of taxis to serve as feeder services to transit stops and rail stations (which would increase ridership and farebox revenue, greatly reducing costs). I would certainly replace a huge swatch of poor-performing transit services with taxis altogether, or at least particularly during the times of day when the demand for transit is low.

I would also eliminate the disruptive institutional barriers common throughout the industry – like preventing a taxi that dropped off a patron outside its service area from picking up a passenger in that outlying service area whose trip would coincide with that vehicle’s return to its designated service area – a dynamic that a simple app could accommodate. And I would encourage shared ride taxis, combining it, perhaps, with safeguards to protect the majority of riders from the minority of predators. I would establish formal, coordinated network of taxi and airline dispatchers so that, particularly for late-night planes whose landings have been delayed, the volume of taxi vehicles needed would match the demand for them. Along with this, I would restructure the arrival areas for patrons entering taxis to reduce the wait times for both taxi drivers and their passengers – not unlike the 10-vehicle-at-a-time phalanx approach employed by Las Vegas’s airport.

Insofar as airlines, I would facilitate a significant effort, including a stringent regulatory ????component, to transfer a considerable volume of short- and medium-distance commercial airline trips to taxi trips – or where demand justified it, to transit and motorcoach trips. (see https://transalt.com/article/expanding-the-mode-split-dividing-line-part-1-exponential-airline-industry-corruption/). In conclusion, the goal would not be to simply? transfer trips in small vehicles to larger ones, but to also deploy smaller vehicles for the same purposes to which larger vehicles are now used. Given the increasing importance of climate change, and the diminishing urgency of taking measures to reverse its course, the substitution of almost any reasonable ground vehicle for one that requires the fuel, and emits the pollution, of an aircraft for the same or similar trips, may be among the most important policy changes that can and should be made in all of public transportation. However, given the corporate resources and clout of the airline industry, this change is likely to be among the least likely to be affected by the Trump/Musk Administration mandate to improve efficiency and reduce waste.

In certain scenarios of extremely limited demand – like Shadowline Service where even buses were practically empty – I would substitute taxis for buses. (Within such confined spaces, I would install video cameras in every vehicle – which I would recommend for every mode, along with requirements for their regular review. But along with a general shift from large to small public transportation vehicles – a dynamic induced by the corruption of TNCs – I would make efforts to expand the flexibility and deployment scenarios for taxis, including again, expanding the percentage of these vehicles that were wheelchair accessible.?

Far more importantly than any of these measures, I would completely disband Transportation Network Companies – dripping with corruption as they are (see https://transalt.com/article/uber-and-lyft-defendants-most-vulnerable-lawsuits-most-lucrative/ and https://transalt.com/article/uber-and-lyft-even-worse-than-expected/). This single measure would instantly revitalize the nation’s taxi industry, and if medallions or other financial mechanisms continue to be applied to taxi owners (TNC’s have almost universally exempted from such requirements – in my mind a criminal exemption since they provide far fewer benefits to their riders than do taxis, not to mention that taxis do not steal the personal information from their passengers and everyone in their passengers’ social media networks), the increase in taxis (whose numbers the emergency and spread of TNC’s have decimated) would conservatively add tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars of revenue to the nation’s coffers, thereby reducing the level of financial benefits these cities would need to receive, for the same level of service, from Federal financial sources. ?

Fixed Route Transit. I previously wrote an extensive series of articles for National Bus Trader that focused on the missing pieces that a transit system must have. Most challenging would be the creation of park-and-ride lots (see? https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-2-park-and-ride-lots/), although within limits, tools like eminent domain could be employed to create them where they are most needed. But fixing transit service means coordinating it with many fellow modes, using buses, as well as dedicated vans, accessible vans (which not occupied to transport elderly and disabled passengers) and taxis as feeder systems to bus stops (as well as rail stations, as noted (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-3-feeder-service/). I would reinvent ridesharing to focus on transfers to transit – not on efforts to compete with it (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-5-ridesharing/).

I would also increase high occupancy vehicle lanes (see https://transalt.com/article/making-public-transportation-work-part-6-high-occupancy-vehicle-lanes/) – and along with them, permit more highly-occupied personal vehicles to use these lanes by the progressive use of parking prices that were inversely proportional to the number of their passengers: Cars with a single driver/occupant would subsidize the discounted rates for those with four or more riders. I would eliminate asinine fare collection technologies, and even reintroduce cash fares – while streamlining the processing of them with approaches that were never tried because the technology to do so was unavailable at the time. Needless to say, I would focus law enforcement efforts on large-scale waste and corruption – like the New York and New Jersey Port Authority’s $16.4B grant to widen Route 1/9 on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel – a handout to rich landowners, stores, other industries and alleged mafia dons that did not create a single additional car’s worth of additional capacity in the tunnel.?

Finally, I would both eliminate the inconvenient and pointless use of high technology for fare payment purposes and provide incentives for bus systems, in particular, to accept cash for fare payments (see https://transalt.com/article/increasing-ridership-by-discounting-cash-fares/), even while refusing to accept cash payment is an approach employed mostly in large urban areas. Frankly, many fare-card or (worse) script-based systems are not only inconvenient to passengers, but require more driver involvement and increase dwell times compared to drivers occasionally making change. (Requiring either automated fare payments or exact fares would be a compromise.)

Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) Service. This mode would be a cinch to fix. I would eliminate all the brokers who completely dominate it, skim off most of the money, and with no knowledge of demand-responsive operations, lead to enormous volumes of waste in the form of inefficiency (see https://transalt.com/article/nemt-brokers-motivecare-and-mtm-stealing-hundred-of-billions-from-our-healthcare-system/). Many of the benefits to this elimination were covered in the section above dealing with improvements to the taxi industry.

Because brokers rarely provide any training to the unreasonably-large number of service providers they allow to participate in the programs (largely because they do not possess the knowledge of how to select the most qualified, have no idea what the optimum number should be, and because their funding agencies could not care less and place no pressure on these brokers to “select” and “negotiate with” these providers as the contracts between these agencies and their brokers generally require), and as these same ignorant and indifferent providers are rarely required to meet any efficiency-related standards (partly because their funding agencies cannot devise any), a large percentage of NEMT service trips – if not the majority of them – are effectively limousine rides for the ill and disabled. Most taxpayers understanding these dynamics would be repelled by this latter example of waste. But because a single monopoly is likely stealing more money from our healthcare system each year than Elon Musk’s companies are earning, I suspect that reversing this criminal activity will not come about – at least as a component of Musk’s efficiency-improving/cost-reduction pogrom.

The principal means I advocate for addressing this problem is to simply move the funding for this service from HHS to USDOT, and not only disband NEMT brokers altogether (indicting and convicting them of consumer fraud would be a natural companion action), but transfer the funds for NEMT service from HHS to USDOT, and consolidate NEMT service with that of complementary paratransit service – effectively shifting the control of NEMT operations from crooked administrators to transportation professionals, even while their paratransit programs may not be high performing. But since a large percentage of paratransit trips are medical trips, this consolidation should, with precious little guidance, greatly improve the efficiency of paratransit service almost without any knowledge or additional effort, and reduce their costs per passenger trip substantially.?

Complementary Paratransit Service. Allowing a degree of elitism to leak into this sector’s repair, a few people in the United States actually know how to operate efficient paratransit systems. But I would stress the redesign of systems to reflect the principals I outlined for UMTA in the project described above (my last job in Washington, D.C.), for which USDOT published the two-volume manual I created for this mode (see Special Paratransit Services for Elderly and Handicapped Persons, Volumes 1 and 2 (USDOT, October, 1981). These manuals could certainly use an update. But there are principles involved in the management of time and space, and the management of time and space is the key – and the only key—to the efficient operation of any shared-ride demand-responsive transportation system. The problems is that since the early 1990s, paratransit officials only learned how to “work the robots” (scheduling software), and have no understanding of the principles that govern efficiency. Many of the main points were covered in three articles I wrote about “special needs transportation” (the pupil transportation industry’s version of demand responsive transportation for disabled schoolchildren) for School Bus Fleet, roughly a decade ago. One of them is attached here (see https://transalt.com/article/cutting-costs-by-mastering-time-and-space-part-i/).

Pupil Transportation Service. Pupil transportation service suffers, cost-wise, from many of the same dynamics that interfere with the productive deployment of fixed route transit service – although it suffers, financially, far more since (a) Federal funds do not cover 80 percent of the costs of the bus (plus other capital expenses) and (b) Federal funds do not cover a significant percentage of these buses’ operating costs – including driver, fringes and maintenance.[4] I would enforce the requirements for disabled students to travel in the “least restrictive environment,” placing them on full-size general education vehicles wherever their presence did not unduly lengthen the ride times of the general education students onboard, or where they would not present a danger to other students or vice versa. I would teach this industry how to monitor service, and how to enforce the negative results. And in this safety-conscious sector, I would design a universal training manual for drivers and attendants that mirrors the content of the once-every-five-years National Congress of Pupil Transportation and, for vehicles, the “White Book” published by APTA decades ago, and occasionally updated. And I would emphasize tiers of service, and focus on coordinating this approach with the start times of various schools (an approach greatly underutilized that I used to great advantage in the paratransit system whose operations I directed for a decade). But this sector is familiar with tiers, and while few systems likely exhaust the possibilities that I employed in my paratransit system, many school personnel have managed to design sophisticated systems in, often, three tiers (elementary school, middle school and high school). Finally, I would minimize the goal of electrifying the nation’s entire fleet (see https://transalt.com/article/electric-buses-part-1-the-good-the-bad-and-the-challenge-of-both-schoolbuses/, https://transalt.com/article/electric-schoolbuses-part-2-a-small-transit-agencys-early-foray-into-electric-buses/ and https://transalt.com/article/electric-buses-part-3-technically-feasible-concepts/.) This approach would only make sense in certain school districts. The others should be allowed to continue operating clean diesel buses.

Limousine Service. This mode is likely the safest non-rail ground transportation mode, has the fewest problems (other than TNC’s stealing some of its business), and there are precious few opportunities to improve its efficiency (other than by consolidating companies, which would not serve the public well as it would dilute competition). So I have no serious ideas for improving it. I would like to see a few accessible limousines – while the need for them is questionable since the inefficiency of non-emergency medical service effectively provides most of its riders with accessible limousine service.

Passenger Rail Service. This mode – particularly AMTRAK -- is bloated with regulatory violations and safety problems that it shows no interest in alleviating. I question whether such problems will ever come to the attention to the new Administration’s DOGE crew, with no knowledge of the subject matter (as with the other modes described above). Frankly, AMTRAK personnel are unfamiliar with concepts like inertial and centrifugal force, training is woeful, and God only knows what this leviathan will do with the $60M that former President Biden awarded it as part of the infrastructure improvement bill (much needed to repair roads, bridges and tunnels). Taking back most of this bonanza (in former years – although perhaps a while ago -- AMTRAK received subsidies like $1.5B/year) may be difficult as a legal matter. But of all the modes full of ?waste, I would start here.

Car-Sharing. Car what? This is no mode that any of you have ever heard about. (I am not talking about car rentals). That is largely because I doubt it exists. But it should.

Car sharing is exactly what it sounds like – only it needs a coordinator/dispatcher to manage X number of vehicles. Car sharing is essentially a replacement for transit routes that chew up enormous amounts of public funds while providing hardly any ridership. I know of one route in New Jersey that transports fewer than one passenger trip per hour. And it deploys four vehicles on this route (oddly in a sophisticated arrangement what might work great in a system with actual passengers). Car-sharing is nothing but a fleet of decent new or used cars that could be pre-scheduled or dispatched to a variety of certified (licensed and insured) passengers.

At the moment, because the vehicles are not autonomous, the trips would have to overlap: Before reaching his or her destination, the vehicle would have to first pick up the next driver who, after dropping off the one who had just dropped him or her (and his or her passengers) off would then pick up another driver on his or her way to his or her destination. So dispatching skill would be essential. Even so, the costs would be a fraction as much as the costs for deploying near-empty buses. Plus, little or no parking would be needed.

Now here’s the good part: If we ever develop safe driverless vehicles (HAVs), the overlapping pickups would not be necessary: At the end of one driver’s drop-off point, the vehicle would simply deadhead to the next driver’s pickup point. Some dispatching and pre-scheduling would likely be helpful. So no robots would be of much value (other than perhaps Google.com/maps or a similar GPS program identifying travel times). But a density of riders far too thin to justify fixed route transit would likely be thick enough to support this type of service with a reasonable degree of efficiency.

This mode is particularly essential in an era where fixed route ridership is continuing to decline, the cost of purchasing and operating transit buses is going up, and inflation is going to make it harder and harder for many people to buy, operate and maintain a car – much less as many as they would needed. This dynamic will also help support transit in certain places (if all the missing pieces are provided, as noted above (see Fixed Route Transit). But it should make car-sharing a savior-on-wheels.

Finally, this type of program would work well as a demonstration program, an experiment formerly employed often by USDOT to learn what types of service areas are most conducive to it, and what goals could be met with minor changes.[5] Not to stray into politics, but as a necessary sociological consideration, this mode may be most effective in those places where voters and taxpayers are less tolerant of supporting grossly-underused transit, and where they are unlike to support free transit. The rural South comes immediately to mind. Yet there are pockets of poor folks throughout the country – including some in cities, although there are likely better solutions for transporting these folks than car-sharing – like general public dial-a-ride service (see discussion below).

Shadowline Service. ?Like many innovations, this one may exist in a few parts of the country with heavy or light rail service. Shadowline service is, like Dial-A-Ride service and Car-Sharing, exactly what is sounds like. During those times of the day (or mostly late at night) when passenger rail ridership is barely-existent, buses can replace the trains (not on the tracks obviously) by running the same basic routes along the roadways adjacent to them, and focusing their stops on the same stops that the rail system would serve. In fact, Shadowline service would likely be more efficient during these times of the night because additional stops could be added: The bus system would not have to build a station; it would merely stick a “Shadowline pole” in the cement where a bus stop sign did not already exist. (And most such stops would already have bus stop signs installed, since rail stations are natural stops for almost any bus system.)?

If anyone has any doubts about the cost-savings involved, they merely need to take a midnight ride on the NYCTA’s subway from JFK Airport to downtown Manhattan. And this is not even 3 AM. And JFK is not even the further station from the core of the system (downtown Manhattan). But one would be lucky to find more than a handful of passengers on the entire train – much less in a single car. And many of those on board would be homeless people sleeping on the train – at least heated and cooled, and a lot safer than sleeping in a tent (if one could get one) on some Manhattan sidewalk.

For what its worth, using New York City as an example, it is clearly no longer “The City that Never Sleeps.” Most restaurants and nightclubs now close around or before midnight. There are still workers in other fields (that have no audience to serve) who need to commute in and out of the City – although parking during these hours (known as the “owl” period in the transit industry) is not hard to find, and even congestion pricing fees would not apply to Lower Manhattan motorists during these hours, or would be heavily discounted. In New York City, many subway lines could shut down altogether between roughly 1 and 5 AM. Many others could be “shortlined” during these, or even more hours, and Shadowline bus service could complete the outer segments of their routes.

General Public Dial-A-Ride. This mode already exists, and there is a considerable amount of it in low density areas that cannot support fixed route service. As an example, much of Rhode Island enjoys this type of service in place of fixed route service in low demand parts of this largely rural state. It is not only cheaper, but better for the riders: Ride times are longer. But everyone will be picked up and dropped off at his or her home, or (in parts of the country with no winter), close-by staging areas. A better, more modern name for this could be General Public Paratransit. However, General Public Dial-a-Ride has been around for decades (and it even has a full-blown advocacy/information sharing organization that encompasses much of this service, as well as urban fixed route service – the Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA). I happen to favor the term “Dial-A-Ride” for this mode since reservation clerks would be needed for the dialogs that robots cannot handle – at least not for awhile. So “getting the phone” is a necessity (while, frankly, it should be for every mode, even while its not – particularly for fixed route transit and passenger rail service, while paratransit and, particularly, NEMT services deliberately expose passengers to excessively long telephone hold times to discourage ridership as a cost-saving measure – a practice that should be stopped -- although this practice is frozen into broker-dominated NEMT service throughout the country).

Frankly, I am much in favor of bicycle programs, even while I have witnessed abuses with municipal programs. And most electric scooter programs (like Bird Ride) have failed, due to logistical problems, including every community’s own and different rules for each of their systems. Otherwise, as the car country, we are not well-equipped to accommodate bicycles like, for example, Denmark does (and to a lesser extent, but still more than us, other EU countries and, frankly, most other countries on the planet).?

Passing Around The Peace Pipe

One difficulty which further compounds the Musk blitzkrieg approach to replacing knowledgeable civil servants with novices is the fact that the provision of most transportation services – taxis and limousines are the exception – involve extensive cooperation among the federal, state and local levels. With novices at every level (fortunately the Federal government cannot replace state or local employees – although they can make plenty of deals to do so.

And then, of course, big business profits largely by corruption, and the new Administration is zealous in its efforts to help big business in both the tax arena and, more so, in its relaxation and removal of what one suspects will be an extraordinary rollback in regulations. How much corruption is overlooked remains to be seen. But to be fair to President Trump, corruption in public transportation preceded him by decades, and much of it is firmly entrenched. So even his best efforts to alleviate much of it will likely involve serious challenges – even with a strong bipartisan cheering section in support of these efforts. But again, the efforts made to alleviate such corruption remains to be seen – although to be fair, I will speculate that corruption in public transportation is among the deepest and most-clever of that in any industrial sector of our nation. And, of course, this single article could serve as the central roadmap identifying most of it.

While the extraordinarily polarized Congress may battle throughout Trump’s entire term, and the Democrats will likely prevail in both the House and Senate in the mid-terms, this does not mean that every sector of our economy and every individual must fight the new Administration every chance it gets, irrespective of the issue. And I do not care how much MSNBC and other sources encourage us to do so. I think the oversimplistic and na?ve approach to improve efficiency touted by Elon Must is beyond idiotic and could create more harm than he thinks he can fix – if it is not merely a ruse to punish members of the Deep State (without any regard for the dysfunctional consequences) – or worse. Regardless, I do think that there is tremendous waste and corruption in the public transportation field, and a more sensible and responsible approach would be for non-government expert to work cooperatively with the new Administration to address these problems. As noted, most Americans of both political persuasions would likely support such efforts, and participate in them where and when they can afford to.

As the points above suggest, without considerable technical help, the Musk/Trump approach to eliminating waste and improving efficiency will fall on its face. In contrast – to the degree the new Administration is interested, and to the degree these are the Administration’s legitimate goals, with the right mix of technical help, these goals can be met. While I hope they are not met in healthcare, deportation and many other areas, and that the half dozen critical agencies cited above are not eliminated, these repairs are much needed in public transportation, particularly in some areas of USDOT, and perhaps in other departments.?

If we can ever get the Administration to admit that it needs some technical help to accomplish its goals, in would be incumbent on those outside the government with knowledge about transportation do join forces with the Administration, and help it achieve its goals. This is not a Democratic or Republican goal. It should be an American goal. I only hope that the Administration, at some point, grasps the fact that it can’t possibly identify those incompetent civil servants who should be replaced, and expert to replace them, and then expect them to serve effectively in their roles, without any help from those who understand the subject matter, and who can help train the new staff, with an army of administrators. But if not done well, this approach could take longer than the President’s new term, as the learning curve to improve a large range of inefficient and corrupt services and programs is steep, and likely to meet considerable resistance.

Regardless, the goal should be to become a better country, not to engage in a civil war or bring the nation’s hopes of progress to a standstill.

[1] In contrast, the same dynamics would not be true is, for example, all Medicaid service were eliminated, since the lion’s share of Medicaid recipients are Democrats, and the lion’s share of Republicans likely could not care less: Their tax rates could be lowered, and many businesses would reap a bonanza in lower tax rates – like the reduction from 21 to 15 percent that President Trump has promised, and which could not likely be achieved without serious cuts in social service programs – not the elimination of many of them – like the Affordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) altogether. The new class of beggars would simply join the estimated 660,000 homeless – an estimate some sources have claims contains several million.

[2] As PTI’s Program Manager for its transportation groups, and a former English major, I got to edit these documents. Some of them – our manual about HOV lanes (a hard copy of which I still possess) was filled with information from cities all over the country where the implementation of HOV lanes both failed and succeeded. A critical thing we learned, for example, was that HOV project succeeded in those cities where these lanes were added to the freeways alongside them. In those cases where an existing lane was suddenly dedicated as an HOV (or “carpool”) lane, the resistance often reached a state of near revolution, as personal occupancy vehicles (POVs) were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic for hours while the observed a bus, or a car with three or more occupants, speed along in the nearly-empty HOV lane alongside them. Such a revelation was invaluable for a city’s highway and transit planning purposes.

[3] During my years at PTI, Inc., President Ford was in command, who in his short time in power, introduced some of the most brilliant and much-needed policies that I can recall in roughly 50 years in the public transportation field.

[4] The discretionary formula for these operating subsidies results in different percentages provided to different transit agencies in different states, not always related to the percentage of the nation’s transit passengers they carry.

[5] This last aspect of a demonstration program is significant. Often, the initial usage of one program leads to other uses, and in the case of paratransit service, exponentially greater usage. The Haddonfield Experiment, initiated in 1969, was effectively a shared-ride van-based feeder service for commuters in southern New Jersey to one or several rail stations on the Lindenwold Rail Line, which mostly transported commuters to and from their jobs in nearby Philadelphia. Before long, the Haddonfield Dial-A-Ride, as it was known to the public, morphed into the first wave of a profusion of pre-ADA paratransit programs, most of which served both the elderly and disabled. These systems, in turn, led to the creation and spread of general public paratransit services in low density areas where fixed route transit services were impractical because of the low density of passengers and the sparsity of ridership that accommodated it.