The ROAD Act and the Transit Abundance Playbook

The Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85–5 on Monday; the House takes up the amended package today, and President Trump is expected to sign it within the week. The bill’s 45-plus provisions cover a wide array of reforms: cutting red tape, overhauling funding and financing, and providing technical assistance plus carrots and sticks for state and local reform. The supply-oriented measures trim federal permitting friction, expand the definition of manufactured housing by relieving the HUD code chassis mandate, raise and index FHA multifamily loan limits, lift the bank public-welfare-investment cap from 15% to 20%, and stand up grant programs to convert vacant buildings and rehab aging homes. Most of the binding constraints on housing still live at the state and local level, but this provides direct cleanup of key paperwork burdens and bad rules that exist at the federal level.

IFP just launched its Transit Abundance Playbook: fifteen memos from transit practitioners and researchers on why the US pays the world’s highest prices to build and run transit (and how to bring those costs down). Rohan Aras and I wrote on bus procurement: US agencies pay anywhere from $500,000 to over $1 million per bus, while peers abroad buy comparable vehicles for under $400,000. Bad incentives in federal-local cost-sharing compound with excessive customization at the agency level…plus burdensome procurement regulations, bans on trade in buses even with US allies, and weak federal state capacity, to produce the world’s least competitive & most expensive domestic bus market.