IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook

Two weeks ago, the Institute for Progress published a playbook called Transit Abundance, comprising 15 policy briefs about reducing construction costs. One of them was my own, about itemization of costs. Eric has a good one about phasing funding to prevent the situation of the Boston Green Line Extension in which the planning for the project was funded from the same grant that funded construction, leading to rushed pre-planning to get that money in the first place. And unfortunately, many of the rest are questionable. There’s a mix of good, meh, and downright counterproductive, and unfortunately, I’m seeing people I know and respect from elsewhere say things that are wrong or barely relevant. My first filter for pieces like this is “is this even close to correct?”. There are some pieces that fail the test right there, praising projects that were extremely expensive as examples to emulate rather than avoid (for example, the reliably incompetent Stephanie Pollack is saying that of the…