The Problem

The United States spends more on transportation infrastructure than almost any country on earth and gets little in return. Our roads and sidewalks are among the deadliest in the developed world. Transit ridership per capita is a fraction of what peer nations achieve. The majority of Americans have no viable alternative to owning increasingly unaffordable cars to meet their mobility needs. These personal commuter vehicles are among the largest sources of carbon emissions in the country, and the exhaust, tire particulates, and brake dust from millions of cars sitting in traffic poison the communities they drive through.

For decades, congressional leaders in both parties have failed to sensibly fund our transport networks, denying operating revenue to public transit agencies while pouring money into pointless highway expansions that only serve to induce more traffic.

The end result is a system in operational crisis. Public transit agencies across the country face funding shortfalls that force service cuts, fare hikes, and deferred maintenance. 96 percent of agencies report frontline worker vacancies. The mechanic vacancy rate is 13 percent.

The Mission

The Mission for America will build a public transit network so affordable and comprehensive that any American will be able to travel anywhere in the country cheaply and even for free, and no one will need to own a car. In the process, we will create hundreds of thousands of high-wage, unionized jobs, reconnect our communities, dramatically increase public health and safety, and rebuild a domestic transit manufacturing industry that has been dismantled over half a century.

The first thing the Mission delivers is a ride. From its opening months, the federal government will subsidize on-demand rides for people in the small towns, rural communities, and transit deserts where public transit doesn't reach, starting with the ride-hailing and robotaxi platforms already on the road, so a cheap or free way to get across town and across the county arrives long before the first rail line is finished. Over time, two or three competing national public enterprises — a publicly owned Uber and a publicly owned Lyft — will come online to offer the same rides for less, since no money is skimmed off as profit, and Americans will be able to add their own vehicles to the network and earn income from them. One fare will cover the whole trip, from the intercity train to the last mile to the front door.

Alongside the rideshare network, fleets of publicly available e-bikes, e-scooters, small electric pods, light vans, and neighborhood electric vehicles will roll out at scale in every community, giving people cheap, clean, fast point-to-point movement between any two addresses in a city or a suburb. This is the piece that changes daily life fastest, with e-bikes arriving on city streets before the first new bus rolls off an assembly line. The RFC will pool national demand for these light electric vehicles the same way it does for buses and finance the domestic factories that build them.

The country will build rail again, both kinds at once. The United States built the world's greatest railroads in the 19th century and the interstate highway system in the 20th, yet in the 21st it has built nothing comparable, while China has laid tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in a single generation and France, Japan, Spain, and Korea have all done the same. Whether America can still build high-speed rail is a test of whether this country can still do hard things, and the answer will be a resounding "yes." Dozens of new conventional intercity corridors will open within five years on existing freight rights-of-way, while high-speed construction begins in parallel on the priority corridors — California, the Northeast Corridor, the Texas Triangle, Cascadia, the Gulf Coast, the Chicago hub, and Florida. A new Federal Rail Authority will plan the national network, acquire the right-of-way with direct federal eminent-domain authority, and build it.

The buses and trains people already ride will be transformed too. Every public transit bus in America will be zero-emission within a decade, built to four standard designs — a 40-foot bus, a 60-foot articulated bus, a cutaway shuttle, and a commuter coach — that cover the vast majority of transit needs, ordered at fleet scale through the RFC and built in American factories the RFC will finance and scale. A new permanent federal operations funding stream will fill the frontline vacancies at transit agencies, tied to competitive union wages and dedicated training pipelines.

All of this depends on the federal government changing how it pays for transportation. Transit has starved because Washington funds capital but not operations, buys custom buses instead of standardized fleets, fights over rights-of-way state by state instead of acting nationally, and lets highway spending dwarf transit investment in every authorization bill. The Highway Trust Fund, insolvent by 2028, will be replaced by a new National Transportation Fund that allocates money in proportion to ridership and emissions impact, pays for operations as well as capital, reauthorizes every year or two instead of every six, and replaces outdated design standards with ones that put public safety first. Dense mixed-use housing and transit-oriented development will be built into every federally funded corridor, turning every transit stop into a walkable neighborhood instead of a parking lot.

The RFC will build these industries to power this transformation. It will pool national demand for buses, rideshare vehicles, and light electric vehicles, finance the domestic factories that build them, underwrite the new public rideshare enterprises until they are self-sustaining, purchase municipal infrastructure bonds at sovereign rates, co-invest in transit-oriented development with agencies, and fund the Federal Rail Authority's high-speed rail construction directly. It is the buyer, the banker, and the industrial partner, at a scale no individual transit agency or state DOT can match. A new Federal Infrastructure Court with exclusive jurisdiction over eminent domain and NEPA challenges for major rail projects will let legitimate grievances get heard and resolved quickly, rather than stalling projects for a decade while lawyers run out the clock.

Solution 1: A National Public Rideshare System

Where fixed routes do not reach, a public rideshare system will. The federal government electrified rural America in the 1930s and wired it for telephone in the 1940s, building at federal scale the infrastructure private markets had skipped. It will do the same for transportation now. This is the piece of the Mission that Americans will feel first. Long before the first new high-speed train leaves the station, a parent in rural Ohio will be able to pull up an app and get a cheap, subsidized ride to the grocery store, to the doctor, or to the nearest regional rail stop.

Start with the rides that already exist. The fastest way to give a rural family a cheap ride is not to build a new platform — it is to subsidize the rides already on the road. From the opening months, the Mission subsidizes trips on the ride-hailing and robotaxi platforms already on the road for Americans who live where public transit doesn't reach. The cars, the drivers, and the apps already exist; a federal subsidy simply puts a cheap or free ride within reach of the communities the private market prices out. It meets people where they are, immediately, through the networks already running. A condition of the subsidy is that participating platforms serve the low-density and lower-income areas they have historically skipped, and list their rides on the open aggregator described below.

Ride the wave of falling costs. By 2029, a new generation of autonomous, scalable robotaxi services is expected to be expanding quickly and pushing the cost of a ride down. The subsidy program is built to harness that: as autonomous fleets scale and per-mile costs fall, the same public dollars stretch further and reach more places. The Mission does not bet the nation's mobility on any one company's technology — it takes advantage of whatever delivers clean, cheap rides to underserved Americans soonest.

Then turn on the public alternative. Over time, the RFC stands up two or three national public rideshare enterprises — think a publicly owned Uber and a publicly owned Lyft — competing with each other and with the private platforms on price, service, and quality. Because no money is siphoned off as profit to investors, the public option can offer the same ride for less. As they come online, the subsidy can shift toward them: every community gets a cheap, accountable public choice, and the private platforms are kept honest on price. If one raises fares, the others undercut it.

Why the public option has to be national. A national public platform with a national customer base, national software, and a national fleet is the only architecture that reaches every community on the same terms. Thousands of city-owned rideshare platforms would be a 19th-century answer to a 21st-century problem. Rural counties cannot stand up their own fleets. Small cities cannot match Uber on technology or scale. The federal government can, and should.

An anchor buyer of American-made vehicles. As the public fleet grows, it becomes a massive single buyer of American-made electric vehicles — including autonomous ones as that technology matures. The RFC pools that procurement demand and finances the factories that build the vehicles, the same way it finances bus plants, scaling domestic EV manufacturing at a volume no private fleet operator can match.

Peer contribution. Americans who own vehicles — including autonomous ones — will be able to add them to any of the public networks and earn income when they are not using them. The platforms handle dispatch, payment, and integration with the rest of the transit network.

Subsidized access. Rides will be priced to be affordable in every community. The RFC will underwrite service in low-density and lower-income areas the way the federal government underwrote rural electric cooperatives in the 1930s. No American will be priced out of the transportation network their tax dollars pay for.

Open APIs, open competition. A condition of operating any rideshare platform in the United States, public or private, is that the platform publish real-time wait times and fares on a standard open API available to any aggregator or competing service. Today, Uber's terms of service forbid aggregator apps from listing Uber side by side with rivals, which is what stops a regional driver-owned cooperative or any other small entrant from ever scaling against the incumbent. A federal interoperability rule clears the path. A single national aggregator can show a rider every option in their area at once and route them to the best price, and the dominant platforms lose their structural lock on consumer attention. The new public networks operate under the same rule, so riders can compare them against each other and against private services in one screen and pay once for the whole trip. This is the cheapest pro-competition lever available, and it does not require the government to build any technology, run any platform, or write any check. It only requires that anyone running a rideshare service in this country publish the basic data anyone else needs to compete with them.

What this delivers: A cheap or free ride from any address to any other address, in every community in America — starting in the opening months through subsidized rides on existing platforms, and shifting over time to cheaper public alternatives. A national customer base that, as the public fleet scales, becomes the largest single fleet buyer of American-made electric vehicles in the country. A consumer rideshare market where driver cooperatives, regional services, and aggregator apps can actually compete with the dominant platforms. An end to the assumption that Americans outside major cities have no choice but to own cars.

Solution 2: Light Electric Vehicles for Every Community

Buses and trains move people between neighborhoods and across cities. Light electric vehicles will move people between addresses, across neighborhoods, and along routes no bus will ever run. E-bikes, e-scooters, small electric pods, light vans, cargo bikes, neighborhood electric vehicles. Every city, every suburb. Deployed fast, used daily, integrated into the transit fare system so one payment covers the whole trip.

E-bike and e-scooter fleets can be deployed in cities and suburbs within the first year of the program. By the end of year two, they will be visible on every block in every community. The user experience on day one is simple. Walk out the door, unlock a vehicle at the nearest stand, and go.

A vehicle for every kind of short trip. LEVs are a category, not a single thing, and each type does a specific job:

• E-bikes do the bulk of the work — a five-to-ten-mile commute, a trip across town, errands in between. Fast enough to beat urban traffic, cheap enough to be ubiquitous.
• E-scooters handle the half-mile hops that are too far to walk and too short for a bus.
• Cargo bikes replace the second car for errands. A week's groceries, a kid and a schoolbag, a full load from the hardware store.
• Covered electric pods extend LEV use into bad weather — rain, snow, and winter commutes that an open e-bike won't cover.
• Neighborhood electric vehicles (NEVs) are golf-cart-scale cars already legal on 35 mph streets in most states. School runs, errands, short trips that need four wheels but not a highway.
• Light electric vans cover group trips, senior transport, and neighborhood shuttles.

They fill in the short trips the fixed routes and the rideshare fleet aren't built for, and they do it cheap and fast.

Domestic manufacturing at scale. The RFC will pool national demand for LEVs and finance the domestic factories that build them, using the same bulk procurement and factory-financing model it uses for electric buses and rideshare vehicles. E-bikes, cargo bikes, light electric vans, and neighborhood electric vehicles will all come off American assembly lines. Right now, the domestic LEV industry is a cottage operation dwarfed by Chinese competitors. Federally aggregated demand will turn it into a major industrial sector.

Built into the streetscape. Dedicated lanes, secure parking, and charging infrastructure will be built into every federally funded transit corridor. LEV infrastructure is cheap per mile compared to bus lanes or rail, and it gets installed fast.

What this delivers: Cheap, clean point-to-point movement between any two addresses in every participating city and suburb, visible on the streets within months of launch. A domestic light electric vehicle industry operating at China-comparable scale. A neighborhood mobility option that most Americans have never had before.

Solution 3: A National Rail Program

Commuters in dozens of countries — many of them less wealthy than the United States — travel between cities at 200 miles per hour. China built tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail while the United States has yet to connect its first two cities. Whether America can build high-speed rail is a test of whether the country can still do hard things.

America will build high-speed rail at continental scale and at full speed. And because no country with successful high-speed rail lacks a functioning conventional rail network underneath it, America will build both at the same time.

The moonshot. High-speed rail, built by a federal authority with federal eminent domain. High-speed rail construction begins on priority corridors simultaneously, led by a dedicated Federal Rail Authority — not Amtrak, not state DOTs. This entity will have direct federal eminent domain authority for right-of-way acquisition, ending the current system where the federal government funds projects but has no power to acquire the land they need. The California High-Speed Rail project — now projected at $34.9 to $38.5 billion for the Merced-to-Bakersfield segment alone — demonstrates what happens when high-speed rail depends entirely on state-level sponsors exercising state powers. Every international HSR success (France, Japan, China, Spain) relied on a national government with strong, centralized authority over the program.

Existing rights-of-way first. To minimize land acquisition fights, the Federal Rail Authority prioritizes HSR routes along rights-of-way the federal government already controls — highway medians, utility corridors, and federal land. This avoids the eminent domain battles that have consumed years and billions on state-led projects like California HSR.

A Federal Infrastructure Court. Even with federal eminent domain authority and prioritized rights-of-way, HSR projects will face legal challenges. To prevent projects from dying in drawn-out litigation, Congress creates a Federal Infrastructure Court — or significantly expands the judiciary with specialized judges — with exclusive jurisdiction over eminent domain disputes and NEPA challenges for major rail projects. Legitimate grievances get heard and resolved quickly. Projects do not stall for a decade while lawyers run out the clock.

Centralized planning, not block grants. High-speed rail cannot be built through formula funding distributed to states. A 200 mph train between Dallas and Houston does not emerge from 50 state DOTs making independent decisions. The Federal Rail Authority plans the national network, selects corridors, acquires rights-of-way, and manages construction directly — the way France's SNCF, Japan's JR, and China's National Railway Administration do. Funding flows to the authority, not to states. A dedicated federal authority with its own funding stream and eminent domain power is harder to dismantle than a discretionary grant program.

In-house engineering, not consultant capture. Every country that builds rail cheaply builds it with public engineers on the public payroll. Every country that builds it expensively, including the United States, runs the work through layers of outside consultants who bill by the hour and design by the change order. The Federal Rail Authority will staff up its own engineering, planning, and project management workforce, the way the Army Corps of Engineers and NASA staff theirs, and the way SNCF and JR staff theirs. Consultants will be used for genuinely specialized scopes, not for the core design and oversight that the authority itself should own. This is a multi-thousand-job pipeline of stable, unionized public-sector engineering work, and it is the single biggest lever on long-run construction costs.

Default to design-bid-build. Itemize and publish every cost. The Transit Costs Project's comparison of US megaprojects against international peers points to a clear pattern. Design-build mega-contracts shift risk and information to a single private prime, who prices that risk back into the bid and runs change orders for the rest. Design-bid-build, the default in low-cost countries, keeps design with the public owner and bids the construction work in tighter, more competitive packages. The Federal Rail Authority will use design-bid-build as the default delivery model and reserve design-build for narrow cases with a documented justification. Every project the authority builds will publish an itemized cost breakdown, line by line, in a public database that lets engineers, journalists, and other agencies benchmark costs across projects and against international peers. Sunlight on unit costs is one of the cheapest cost-control tools available, and the United States is one of the only rich countries that does not use it.

Priority HSR corridors:

• Northern and Southern California
• The Northeast Corridor (full high-speed upgrade)
• The Texas Triangle (Dallas-Houston-San Antonio-Austin)
• Cascadia (Portland-Seattle-Vancouver)
• The Gulf Coast (building on the Mardi Gras line success)
• Chicago hub (St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minneapolis)
• Florida

The parallel build — conventional rail on existing freight corridors. The Amtrak Mardi Gras line between New Orleans and Mobile opened in August 2025. It runs on existing CSX freight track at 79 mph. The initial federal investment was $33 million in grants for track upgrades, stations, and sidings, matched by Louisiana, Mississippi, and the City of Mobile. No new rail was constructed. Amtrak projected about 71,000 passengers in the first year. The line carried 70,500 in the first five months. Customer satisfaction is 94 percent. Amtrak has had to add extra cars on weekends and game days.

The demand and the infrastructure were already there. All it took was modest investment in siding upgrades so passenger and freight trains could share the corridor, a negotiated deal with the freight railroad, and a simple two-round-trip daily schedule at a $34 average fare.

This is the model for a rapid national expansion of conventional intercity rail on existing freight rights-of-way — negotiating shared-use agreements with freight railroads, investing in sidings and signals to manage capacity, and standing up service on dozens of corridors within five years. The cost per corridor is a fraction of new construction.

When the freight railroads resist. The freight railroads own most of the track this plan would run on, and they have spent decades resisting passenger access — the Mardi Gras line itself only launched after years of dispute that ran through the Surface Transportation Board. A national program cannot afford to negotiate one corridor at a time on the freight railroads' timeline, so it changes the underlying incentives with three levers working together. First, a statutory backstop. Congress extends to Federal Rail Authority–sponsored intercity service the access and dispatching-preference rights Amtrak already holds — the right to operate on freight-owned track at incremental cost, with terms set by the Surface Transportation Board on a fixed shot-clock when the parties cannot reach a deal. The negotiation no longer happens in the shadow of an indefinite stall. Second, capital that makes cooperation the profitable choice. Most shared-use fights are really fights over capacity, and that is where the RFC turns an adversary into a partner: it finances the sidings, signals, sidetracks, and grade separations that let passenger trains share a corridor — the same upgrades that speed the freight railroad's own traffic — in exchange for guaranteed passenger slots. A railroad that cooperates gets its network modernized on the public's dime; a railroad that refuses still faces the STB. Third, convening. In the pre-legislation phase, the President and the RFC bring the freight railroad CEOs to the table to negotiate a single national framework for shared use, rather than a hundred separate corridor fights. Cooperation is made the attractive option, and the statutory backstop is there for the cases where it is not.

Formula funding and regional rail commissions. Conventional rail runs on existing freight track with modest upgrades and can be stood up quickly in many corridors. Formula-based funding distributed to multi-state rail commissions makes this politically durable. The money flows automatically. A future administration cannot easily cancel dozens of operating rail services the way it can cancel a single construction grant.

Today, only a few regions have rail commissions, including the Southern Rail Commission (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama), the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission (ten states), the Southeast Corridor Commission (six states plus DC), and the Northeast Corridor Commission. Most of the country — Texas, the Mountain West, California, the Plains, New England outside the NEC — has no multi-state rail body at all. The Federal Rail Authority charters regional rail commissions to cover every part of the country, so every region has an entity to receive formula funding, negotiate freight-sharing agreements, plan corridors, and manage service. The Southern Rail Commission — which took the Mardi Gras line from concept to 70,500 riders in five months — is the model.

What this delivers: High-speed rail construction underway on seven priority corridors, led by a federal authority with the eminent domain and planning power to actually build. Conventional intercity rail service restored across dozens of corridors within five years.

Solution 4: Electrify and Standardize the Fleet

The National Clean Public Transport Standard. Congress establishes a Clean Public Transport Standard requiring every public transit system in the country — buses, rail, and municipal fleets — to transition to zero-emission technology within 10 years. Agencies that meet benchmarks on schedule receive full federal support. Agencies that fall behind lose federal transportation funding.

RFC bulk procurement. The United States has roughly 1,000 transit agencies, and each one orders its own custom bus configuration. No manufacturer gets enough volume to bring costs down. U.S. electric buses cost three times the European average, and domestic manufacturers are going bankrupt for lack of stable orders.

The fix is bulk procurement via the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The RFC pools national transit demand and executes bulk procurement of standardized zero-emission buses. Four standard designs — a 40-foot bus, a 60-foot articulated bus, a cutaway shuttle, and a commuter coach — cover the vast majority of transit needs. Transit agencies order from the standardized catalog and the federal government covers the majority of the cost. Agencies that want custom configurations pay full price.

This creates anchor demand that saves domestic manufacturers, drives costs toward the European benchmark, and standardizes maintenance and parts across the country.

Technology choice: The standard fleet is battery-electric. The technology is proven, costs are falling, and the charging infrastructure is simpler to deploy than any alternative.

Open standards as a condition of RFC procurement. Every vehicle, charger, fare box, scheduling system, and communications stack the RFC bulk-procures will run on open, interoperable standards. Vendor lock-in is one of the largest hidden costs in American transit. Agencies routinely buy proprietary scheduling, dispatch, fare, and maintenance software, then discover years later that a single supplier owns the data, the upgrade path, and the price. The result is the spare-ratio gap that operators talk about openly. Dutch bus operators run roughly 1.05 to 1.10 spare vehicles for every bus in service because their software lets them swap any unit onto any route on short notice. Many California operators run 1.5 to 2.0, buying and maintaining hundreds of extra buses they would not need on open systems. The RFC will require open scheduling and fare data formats, open charger and depot communications protocols, open maintenance and telemetry interfaces, and open APIs for third-party developers, as a condition of every bulk-procurement contract it writes. Domestic manufacturers that meet the standard get the anchor orders. Vendors that try to sell lock-in sell to someone else.

What this delivers: A domestic electric bus industry with stable order books, buses at half the current U.S. price, a standardized national fleet that any mechanic trained on one can service anywhere, and an open software and data layer that lets any agency run any vehicle on any route with any operator.

Solution 5: Build a New National Transportation Fund

The federal government spends enormous sums on transportation and gets the incentives wrong at every level. It funds capital but not operations. It rewards new construction over maintenance. Its cost-benefit framework counts only vehicle speed. The Highway Trust Fund is insolvent, and the authorization cycle is so long that no institutional knowledge survives between votes. The rideshare network, the LEV fleets, the rail program, and the bus electrification all need a funding structure built to carry them. That means building a new one.

Replacing the Highway Trust Fund. The Highway Trust Fund is projected to become insolvent by 2028. Without reform, cumulative deficits will reach $280 billion by 2034. Congress votes on transportation funding roughly every six years — enough time for every legislative staffer to turn over twice, guaranteeing that no institutional knowledge survives to challenge the highway lobby's dominance.

The plan replaces the Highway Trust Fund with a new National Transportation Fund that:

1. Rebalances highway and transit. The current fund overwhelmingly favors highways. The new fund allocates transit and rail a share proportional to ridership and emissions impact, not road mileage.

2. Shortens the authorization cycle. Annual or biennial reauthorization instead of five-to-seven-year cycles. This creates ongoing congressional oversight and prevents the institutional amnesia that lets highway spending balloon unchecked.

3. Rewrites the math that decides what gets built. When the federal government picks between transportation projects, it runs a cost-benefit analysis that measures almost nothing except how much faster cars and trucks will move. It ignores pollution, the asthma and heart disease that pollution causes, the people killed in crashes, the climate damage, and the basic fact that every new highway lane just fills up with more traffic. On top of that, the formula double- and triple-counts the value of time saved for drivers. The math is rigged in favor of highways and against almost everything else. And the rules driving it aren't law — they come from an internal Department of Transportation memo on the "value of time." The plan repeals that memo and replaces the framework with one that counts the real cost of a project — pollution, health, deaths, climate, and the impact on the people who live along the route.

Federal operations funding. The federal government will fund transit operations for the first time. For transit agencies in major metro areas — those over 200,000 population — federal law effectively bars the use of Section 5307 formula funds for day-to-day operations, with only a narrow exception for small operators running 100 or fewer buses. Section 5309 Capital Investment Grants are restricted to capital projects by statute. The result is that the vast majority of federal transit dollars flowing to major-city systems cannot fund the bus drivers, train operators, and maintenance workers who keep the system running.

The plan establishes a new federal transit operations program, distributed by an equity-weighted formula that directs more funding to the communities with the greatest need. The data and reporting infrastructure to do this already exists at the Federal Transit Administration.

The funding comes with conditions:

1. Workforce investment. Agencies must use a portion of operations funding to raise wages, fund training pipelines, and close the vacancy gap. The fact that 96 percent of transit agencies report frontline worker shortages is a workforce crisis and a jobs opportunity. The Mission for Workforce Development will fund and establish dedicated transit training tracks.

2. Rider-centric network redesigns. Agencies that maintain legacy coverage routes optimized for pre-pandemic commuter patterns, running half-empty buses on outdated schedules, must redesign their networks around frequency and actual travel demand. Agencies that have already done this (Houston, Richmond, Columbus) have fared far better on ridership recovery. Agencies that did not are still losing riders despite record federal stabilization funding.

3. Open standards across the back office. Agencies receiving federal operations dollars will run on open, interoperable scheduling, fare, dispatch, telemetry, and charging-management formats, the same standard the RFC applies to bulk procurement. Closed, proprietary stacks force agencies to keep extra buses, extra mechanics, and extra spare parts on hand to compensate for software that cannot share a vehicle across routes or share a route across operators. Open standards are how Dutch operators sustain spare ratios near 1.05 while many U.S. systems sit at 1.5 to 2.0. Federal operations funding is the leverage point that gets every agency onto the same open layer at once.

4. Formula-based distribution. The funding is distributed by formula, not discretionary grants. This makes it difficult for a future administration to unwind — the money flows automatically, the way highway funding does.

Transit-oriented development — dense housing around every station. The goal is simple. Put people and destinations next to transit. A station with a neighborhood around it is a station people actually use. A station surrounded by a parking lot is a station people drive to and park at, which defeats the point. Federal transit capital grants and RFC support are tied to mandatory local zoning reforms. Agencies that want money for new transit lines must eliminate parking minimums and allow dense, mixed-use development around transit corridors as a precondition for funding.

Where agencies can also develop or lease the land around their stations — the Hong Kong MTR model — that is a welcome bonus. Revenue from station-area development can help finance operations, and the RFC will co-invest with agencies that want to pursue it. But the Mission is careful not to make real estate profitability the driver of agency decisions. Station siting, service expansion, and fares have to be set by what serves riders and communities, not by where the land value is highest. Where housing and density happen to produce revenue, good. Where they don't, the zoning reforms still matter and the federal funding still flows.

The war on parking minimums. Parking minimums are stealth anti-density weapons. They force developers to build acres of parking instead of housing, push buildings apart, and make the very walkability that transit depends on physically impossible. Since 2023, California, Washington, Connecticut, Austin, Chicago, and Denver have abolished or reduced parking minimums. In Champaign, Illinois, removing parking minimums produced a 79 percent increase in residential unit density. The new National Transportation Fund makes parking-minimum reform a condition of transit capital funding nationwide.

Fix it first — state of repair before expansion. Federal capital grants will require agencies to demonstrate that existing infrastructure meets state-of-good-repair benchmarks before funding new expansion projects. This reverses the current incentive structure, which rewards agencies for proposing flashy new capital projects while deferring maintenance on existing systems.

Cost-control conditions on every federal capital grant. Federal capital dollars are the largest single lever the country has on construction costs, and right now they are pulled in the wrong direction. A handful of FTA rules functionally guarantee overspending. Research by the NYU Transit Costs Project has documented in detail why American projects cost several times what their international peers pay. The new National Transportation Fund will rewrite the rules around how federal capital dollars get spent, with conditions that apply to every recipient, the FRA included.

1. Repeal the FTA 40 percent contingency rule. Current FTA practice runs every project through a probabilistic cost-risk review that, on complex projects, pushes contingency to 40 percent or more on top of the engineer's estimate before it can advance. In every other large-project context, that level of contingency would be treated as a red flag. In federal transit it is treated as the floor. Sponsors and contractors plan around it, and the budget expands to fill it. The new rule sets contingency at international-benchmark levels and ties any deviation to a public, written justification.

2. Default to design-bid-build. The same design-bid-build default that applies at the FRA applies to every federally funded transit capital grant. Design-build mega-contracts may be used only in narrow, documented cases. The default is the delivery model that low-cost countries actually use.

3. Build public-sector engineering capacity at every level. Federal capital grants will fund agencies to staff up their own in-house engineering, project management, and construction oversight, the way they once did. Grant recipients that rebuild internal capacity get a higher federal cost share. Agencies that propose to outsource the entire scope to consultants get a lower one. Without this, RFC capital and federal grants become a more efficient pipeline for the same overpriced projects.

4. Itemize and publish every cost. Every project that receives a federal capital grant will publish a full itemized cost breakdown into a public, machine-readable database, structured to allow comparison across projects and against international benchmarks. American transit currently lacks the public unit-cost data that European agencies treat as routine. The federal government will provide it.

Roadway design reform. Transit works only where the streets around it are walkable. The current approach to road design produces only two safe conditions. High-speed roads with no pedestrians, or low-speed streets with mixed use. Everything in between is dangerous. The United States has the worst road-safety record in the developed world. The International Traffic Safety Data and Analysis Group (IRTAD), which tracks road safety across about forty mostly high-income countries, reports strong overall progress among its members until the United States is added to the dataset, where American road deaths are high enough to drag the group's averages down. The AASHTO Green Book — the standard reference for road design — contains designs proven to be unsafe, yet gives agencies legal protection for using them. The plan revokes federal endorsement of the Green Book for developed areas and replaces it with a design standard that requires slow speeds, narrow lanes, and pedestrian infrastructure wherever there is development. Federal transit capital grants will require that street design around transit corridors meet these walkability and safety standards.

Day-one executive actions — no legislation required:

Many of the most important reforms do not require Congress. A president can act on the first day:

1. State DOT performance rankings. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics — currently a backwater that hides whether states meet their own targets — will publicly rank every state DOT on safety outcomes, state of repair, and spending effectiveness.

2. Mandatory safety improvement targets. States currently set their own safety targets, and are free to project more deaths than the year before. The plan requires every state to set targets that improve on the prior year. States that miss their safety targets lose flexibility on how federal funds are spent and must redirect money to safety.

3. Evidence-based traffic modeling. No federal funding for projects whose traffic projections rely on models that have never been tested for accuracy. Currently, agencies use models with no empirical basis to justify highway expansions, then never check whether the projections actually came true. The plan requires that any model used to justify a federally funded project demonstrate some history of accuracy.

What this delivers: A solvent, rebalanced transportation fund that pays for transit operations. Dense, walkable neighborhoods around every transit station, with housing and daily destinations in reach of the people who actually ride. Streets designed for people. Congressional accountability that does not evaporate between authorization cycles.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the candidate will make the end of forced car ownership a centerpiece promise, telling Americans that within a few years they will be able to get anywhere in the country quickly and cheaply without a car payment, an insurance bill, or a tank of gas. The campaign will hold events in the places today's system has failed, from rural counties where the nearest bus stopped running decades ago to working-class transit deserts, neighborhoods severed by mid-century highways, and the shuttered transit-bus factories and idle freight rights-of-way the Mission will bring back to life. Stump speeches will promise a cheap or free ride Americans can summon from their phones in the opening months — subsidized at first on the apps already running, with publicly owned alternatives coming online to undercut them on price — e-bikes and neighborhood electric vehicles on the street soon after, high-speed rail under construction coast to coast, every transit bus running clean within a decade, and, for the first time, federal money to operate the system rather than only to build it.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will choose the first rural and transit-starved markets where the ride subsidies will launch, the markets where the public rideshare enterprises will later stand up, and the first intercity corridors the Federal Rail Authority will open on existing freight rights-of-way. The team will negotiate memoranda of understanding with governors, mayors, and transit agencies covering right-of-way, the operations-funding match, and the transit-oriented zoning that has to travel with every corridor. Leadership at the Department of Transportation, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Federal Highway Administration will be brought together around the Federal Rail Authority stand-up, the four standardized bus designs, and the design of the National Transportation Fund that will replace the Highway Trust Fund. Legislative counsel will pre-stage the full Day One package so it can move at inauguration.

On Day One, the president and Congress will charter the RFC to underwrite the public rideshare enterprises until they stand on their own, pool national demand and finance the domestic factories that build buses and light electric vehicles, purchase municipal infrastructure bonds at sovereign rates, and fund the Federal Rail Authority's construction directly, with the first dollars moving inside the administration's opening months. The president will then sign a package of executive orders to switch the Mission on. Acting within existing authority, the orders will launch the ride-subsidy program — putting a cheap or free ride on existing platforms within reach of Americans the fixed-route network does not serve — direct the Department of Transportation to stand up a Federal Rail Authority transition office that begins planning the priority corridors and mapping the rights-of-way the federal government already controls, so shovel-ready work is waiting the moment Congress vests the Authority with its eminent-domain power and budget, and condition discretionary federal transportation dollars on transit-oriented development at every funded stop.

Alongside the executive orders, Congress will pass the legislation drafted during the transition. The bills will retire the insolvent Highway Trust Fund and replace it with the National Transportation Fund, which pays for operations as well as capital and reauthorizes on a short cycle; charter the Federal Rail Authority and its eminent-domain power; establish the Federal Infrastructure Court with exclusive jurisdiction over eminent-domain and environmental-review challenges to major rail projects; and authorize the RFC's transit financing line.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

The Launch by Year 1 (2030)

• Enabling legislation passed, establishing the Federal Rail Authority and authorizing formula-based operations funding for every transit agency
• Ride subsidies on existing platforms (Uber, Lyft, robotaxis) live for Americans in rural and transit-starved areas
• First national public rideshare enterprise chartered, with first capital committed
• First bulk-procurement contracts signed for standardized electric buses, with initial orders placed
• Wage increases and training pipelines stood up, beginning to draw operators and mechanics back into the workforce
• Network redesigns commissioned at the first agencies receiving federal operations funding
• First LEV pilot programs launched in cities and suburbs, integrated into local fare systems
• Engineering and corridor planning underway for the first set of intercity rail restorations

The Fleet Turns Over by Year 5 (2034)

• Two or three competing national public rideshare enterprises operating, with subsidized coverage in rural and lower-income communities
• Public rideshare and LEVs are the primary mode of neighborhood mobility in hundreds of communities
• LEV fleets operating across the country, integrated into transit fare systems
• First HSR corridor in active construction under the Federal Rail Authority
• 50 percent of the national transit bus fleet converted to battery-electric
• First bulk-procurement cycle complete, standardized electric buses arriving at agencies nationwide
• Workforce vacancy rate below 5 percent through wage increases and training pipelines
• Conventional intercity rail service restored on dozens of corridors
• Domestic electric bus, rideshare-vehicle, and LEV manufacturing at scale, costs approaching European benchmarks
• Parking minimums eliminated in every federally funded transit corridor
• TOD construction underway around stations in early-adopter cities

A System That Works by Year 10 (2039)

• Every American community connected to the transit network through some combination of fixed routes, LEVs, and competing national public rideshare enterprises — no one needs a car to get around
• First high-speed rail corridor operational
• Conventional intercity rail network connecting dozens of city pairs
• 100 percent zero-emission transit fleet
• Federal operations funding fully institutionalized — transit agencies financially stable
• Dense, walkable communities around transit hubs — housing, daily destinations, and clean power within walking distance
• National Transportation Fund solvent and rebalanced toward transit