Special Briefing: The Future of Mass Transportation under Trump and the GOP

This Special Briefing is focused on the future of mass transportation under the new Administration and Congress.
Our expert panel discusses the upsurge in construction funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as well as solutions to hundreds of billions of dollars in budgetary shortfalls facing transit networks from coast to coast.
Speakers include Leslie Richards, Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and former General Manager & CEO of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), the fifth-largest U.S. transit system; Kurt Forsgren, Managing Director and Sector Lead for Transportation, S&P Global; Randy Iwasaki, President and CEO of Iwasaki Consulting Services, Inc. and former Leader of State and Local Transportation for Amazon Web Services; Polly Trottenberg, who recently served as Deputy Secretary of Transportation under Pete Buttigieg; and David Greising, President and CEO, Better Government Association.
Notable Quotes:
"All new administrations when they come in, of course, set new policy priorities, but I think this is the first time an administration has tried to cancel or rescope projects in mass that have already been awarded funding through a competitive application process." - Polly Trottenberg
"Septa's experienced a huge capital budget crunch as well. And obviously that comes into play with what Polly just described, with the discretionary funds and the uncertainty of what's getting paid out and will get paid out. And what's coming out through formula this year? Septa is facing over a 200 million dollars shortfall." - Leslie Richards
"They're preparing for the Olympics. And Mayor Bass has said that the Olympic trips will be not by car. And so they're making a tremendous investment in transit and the airports in LA. I think we have about 85 billion dollars worth of projects ongoing in Region 9, which includes 4 States, and the the only large project that's outside of California is the heart project in Hawaii. So there's investments in California and transit." - Randy Iwasaki
"The Democrats, at least on the Illinois Congressional delegation, wrote a letter to the office of management Budget a couple of weeks ago, just simply referencing the the suspension of spending on various programs already approved or anticipated. And they added it up and came up with about 1.9 billion dollars worth of programs." - David Greising
"So this sort of strength in taxes and tax support by system operators and by their policymakers and legislators, you know, has been a real strength for credit quality across the sector. In fact, we raised the ratings on about 7 transit operators just in November of last year to reflect the strength and growth that we've seen in this tax support sector." - Kurt Forsgren
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Special Briefing is published by Penn IUR and the Volcker Alliance, and made possible by funding from The Travelers Institute. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the panelists and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Volcker Alliance or Penn IUR.