Episode 143: Biden’s Transportation Legacy with Dani Simons

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Dani Simons: There’s gonna be times when there’s gonna be setbacks and then there’s gonna be progress. And sometimes that progress is gonna be almost too small to see. But now, looking back through a lens of, like, 20, 25 years of my career, you can start to see some of the things that you’ve done have had an impact, have helped move the needle. Stuff like that makes me think we’ve got a chance. I hope that it can happen quickly enough, but we all have to keep going, and we all have to keep doing our small parts to make it happen.

Sarah Goodyear: Welcome to The War on Cars. I’m Sarah Goodyear, and I’m here with my co-host, Doug Gordon.

Doug: Hey, Sarah. How are you?

Sarah: I’m hanging in there. I’m going okay. How about you?

Doug: I’m doing all right. We are recording this in the past. By the time this releases, we’ll be on day two of the Trump administration, so we’ll see where we are by that point.

Sarah: That’s right. We’ll see whether we’ve survived day one.

Doug: That’s right.

Sarah: Yeah. But in the meantime, we have lots of other great things going on. We’re hoping that we’re gonna be still alive in the future on day two. [laughs]

Doug: That’s right. That’s right.

Sarah: And we would love it if you all who are gonna be in the future with us, if you would support us on Patreon.

Doug: That’s right. You can go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod, and you can sign up for just $3 a month. We really depend on listener support, so thank you to everybody who already pitches in. Thanks.

Sarah: Speaking of the future, we have two big shows coming up. One of them in Manhattan, New York, at the end of January. And that is already sold out, am I right, Doug?

Doug: Yes. That is our live show with Ray Delahanty of CityNerd. The show is sold out. There is a chance tickets will be released in the coming week. We don’t know. Stay tuned. We’ll put out messages on social media if that does change. Otherwise, for the folks who bought tickets, we are really looking forward to seeing you there.

Sarah: And then the other one is gonna be in Minneapolis in April, I believe. I’m counting on you to give me the details so I know where to show up.

Doug: Yes, that’s right. Sarah, just get on the plane and we will be there. April 24 in Minneapolis. We are being brought out there by Our Streets Minnesota, which is an amazing advocacy organization. The Patreon presale has just wrapped up, so tickets are available to the general public. Or if you become a sustaining donor to Our Streets, you can get tickets. So either just go get your tickets if you’re not in Minnesota, and if you are in Minnesota, please support Our Streets. They’re great.

Sarah: So as we said, day two of the Trump administration. There’s gonna be a lot to deal with in the next couple of years—I hope, if the future continues on. And that includes in our own area of special interest: Transportation. Right? It’s a big shift here.

Doug: Yes. We are going from an administration run by Amtrak Joe and our favorite Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, to an administration that will basically be made up of oil barrels disguised as people.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good summary. So it’s a good thing that we have this special guest with us here today. This is someone we have wanted to have on the podcast forever. She is, you might say, a veteran of the war on cars, although she might not put it that way. Dani Simons, it’s great to have you here in the studio.

Dani Simons: Thanks. Happy to be here, finally.

Sarah: Yes, finally. And I’ve gotta say, reading your resume is a little bit like taking a tour through the transportation policy innovations and battles of the 21st century to date. It’s incredible.

Doug: Yeah. Dani, we’ve known each other for a long time. Fellow veteran in the war on cars. Should we go through the list here?

Sarah: Let’s hit the high points.

Doug: So you worked at Transportation Alternatives, the advocacy organization here in New York, and then New York City DOT, where you launched Summer Streets. Let’s talk about that for just a minute.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, Summer Streets, which at the time was a huge innovation. And it was a hard fought innovation in the city of New York, closing more than seven miles of New York City streets to cars, and opening them to people on summer weekends. That program has just gone gangbusters since it launched in 2008, even though I think it could be even more. But we can talk about that. And Dani was then also part of the leadership team that navigated the somewhat contentious 2013 launch of Citi Bike bikeshare in New York City. We’re gonna talk about that, too. It is now by far the largest bike share system in North America. Tens of millions of rides every year. And then …

Doug: Well, no. I want to say something about that first, because if you all remember the all-powerful bike lobby rant from Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal where she accused the Bloomberg administration of being like tyrants and all the rest, the lead picture on that video is of Dani docking a Citi Bike in a Citi Bike t-shirt. I still have it burned into my brain.

Dani Simons: Same, same. That is—that will be part of my memory forever. That is being yelled at by someone like that, and having your photo be associated with that moment is—I feel like I’m just sort of frozen in time. Like, that is still how I think of myself sometimes.

Doug: You are the face of the all-powerful bicycle lobby. Yeah.

Sarah: Then you went to Waze. You led public sector partnerships with them, promoting carpooling, sharing data. And then from 2021 to 2023, Dani was at the Office of Public Affairs. She led the Office of Public Affairs for USDOT, advising the Secretary of Transportation under President Biden, the one and only Mr. Secretary Mayor Pete Buttigieg, as we like to call him here on the podcast. One of our heroes.

Doug: And I have to apologize because I think barely a week went by in the early days when you were working there, where we would try to say to you, “Could you get Secretary Pete to come on the podcast?” knowing that the answer would be no. So I apologize.

Dani Simons: We always loved being asked.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah, that’s where The War on Cars name just gets a little bit tricky. And now Dani is back in the private sector. Vice President of Public Communications and Public affairs at Alstom, which is something that you might say, “What is Alstom and why do I have anything to do with it?” And apparently, we all have some connection to Alstom, right, Dani?

Dani Simons: Definitely. Alstom is a global company that is a leader in making products for the rail industry. And about three and a half years ago acquired a company that was larger in this region. But between Alstom and this company has responsible for building about one out of every two subway cars in New York City. We’ve built rail cars and rail technology that serve places where about 90 percent of Americans live. And so we have projects in New York City, we have projects in New Jersey, we have active projects in Connecticut, we have projects in the Bay Area. We built BART’s new fleet of the future cars. And we are in the process of building Amtrak’s next generation of Acela trains, which we hope to see on the tracks coming this spring.

Sarah: All right.

Doug: That’s very cool.

Sarah: So that’s an overwhelming amount of things that Dani has done, and I feel completely inadequate now. [laughs] But that said, there are so many things that we could talk about, obviously, but I do want to deal with this big, looming federal situation that we’re in, this change of administration. You know, going from a president who enjoys riding a bicycle himself, sort of the patron saint of Amtrak—speaking of Amtrak—going from that guy to one who, as far as I can tell, he moves from private jet to helicopter to SUV with as few steps in between as possible, and preferably not to be taken in a public thoroughfare, right? Like, he just literally doesn’t ever enter the public way.

Doug: Yeah, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would probably complain, but he would never walk on Fifth Avenue. So maybe we’re gonna be safe.

Sarah: So maybe we could start out by talking about what the Biden administration’s legacy is on transportation issues. If you could stop a random person on the street and tell them passionately, like, this is something that the Biden administration did in this field that is gonna make your life better and the lives of millions of other people better, but you feel like people don’t know about those things, what do you think are some of the great achievements of the administration that need to be foregrounded?

Dani Simons: First of all, thanks for giving me the opportunity, because I feel like I’m still kind of unpacking all the things that happened, and I feel like I am doing this kind of processing or post-administration therapy, maybe by podcast. So thanks for the free therapy session.

Doug: [laughs]

Dani Simons: Maybe I’m gonna start—and I think my former boss, Secretary Buttigieg, would probably be mad at me for starting in this way, because I’m gonna start with vibes and then go to specifics. He liked to start with a specific story and then sort of go to the larger vibes from there. But for me, one of the reasons that I was drawn to working in the Biden-Harris administration, sitting at home during COVID, working for Waze, I had a great job, I had a great team, paid well, Google benefits are amazing. And I had voted for Biden, obviously, because obviously.

Doug: Obviously, yeah.

Dani Simons: And I hadn’t really spent a lot of time with his policy platform, to tell you the truth, because it was just so obvious to me that of course he was the one that I was gonna pick. But again, being at home during COVID, less going on, had some time to dive in. And really unpacking his policy platform, I really saw someone who for the first time in my memory really centered transportation at the nexus of climate, equity, jobs, and really saw the linkage between those things and really saw how transportation was in the center, and how having a good transportation system could help us fight climate change, could help us create a more equitable society and could help us create good-paying jobs that we desperately needed at that point, because so many people had lost their jobs.

Dani Simons: And I thought, “Wow, this is someone who really gets it. This is what I care about, this is what I want to be doing.” And I thought maybe I would try to go and work with this guy. And it seemed like kind of a lark. Like, I didn’t think it was really gonna happen. I thought I was just sort of getting a little antsy stuck at home like so many of us were. And I put in a resume, and they gave me some interviews, and next thing I knew, they had offered me a job leading up public affairs at USDOT. And I was shocked and surprised, not as shocked and surprised as when I was called two weeks later by the woman who wound up being our deputy chief of staff, Sophie Shulman, who was brilliant. And she said, “Look, you have the job. President Biden is your boss, like, he chose you. But you’re gonna wanna talk to this guy who’s gonna be your, you know, day-to-day boss. His name is Pete Buttigieg.”

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Maybe you’ve heard of him.

Dani Simons: Maybe you’ve heard of him. And I almost fell over. And I think first of all, something that this administration should get credit for is sort of how they brought together these topics, and how they brought this laser focus from the very beginning all the way through on topics like climate, on equity, on growing the economy, especially for the middle class and lower class. And I think that that is something that just from a big picture point of view, I really hope people understand, and understand how—how rare that is. I don’t—I don’t think, you know, even under the Obama administration there was some of that, but I don’t think to this level.

Dani Simons: And I think the other thing that was different, from what I understood and from what I saw and what I’m seeing now, is just how prepared the Biden team was really from day one to hit the ground running to make sure that that agenda got done. And so from day one and even before day one, there were people working on drafting pieces of what became the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or the IIJA that really allowed them to have a comprehensive piece of legislation that they could work on selling immediately.

Dani Simons: And I didn’t know going in that transportation would be one of the president’s top priorities, or one of the biggest pieces of legislation that would get done. But as soon as I got in, that’s—you know, that’s sort of where it was. And I think it was funny for me to be in the midst of that and then sometimes talking to people back in Brooklyn about what they understood about what was in that. Like, for me, that just became my everything. And it was the air I was breathing and the water I was swimming in, but people didn’t really even know what was inside of that. So let me tell you some of the stuff that was inside of that.

Sarah: [laughs]

Dani Simons: Beyond—I think we can get into this later. Like, there was a lot of other things, I will just say this as a caveat. There were a lot of other things that we were dealing with that were big transportation things that I think your listeners probably actually care about, whether or not they think about it when they come to the war on cars or not. We were dealing with the pandemic. Some of the first things that we did were actually working on a mask mandate for public transit and for airplanes so that people could actually feel safe going out in the world and using these types of transportation again.

Dani Simons: We had to work on dealing with a broken supply chain that had been broken very much because of the pandemic, and also because of a lot of choices big companies were making in terms of how they ship things on demand. But that meant that people weren’t able to get basic goods like toilet paper, let alone bigger things that they might need if their cabinets broke or a refrigerator broke in the middle of the pandemic. Like, good luck. And those were huge things that were massively important to getting our economy moving again. And so that was all—like, that was just the background that was happening.

Dani Simons: And then at the same time, we were working on passing this legislation that had programs that were going to improve safety. And I think your listeners are probably familiar with the program Safe Streets and Roads for All, but that program was so important because it provided funding not just for planning, but actually for implementation of road safety projects. And it gave that money directly to local communities. They didn’t have to wrangle with the state DOTs about priorities. They didn’t have to justify this versus a road expansion. It was dedicated for roadway safety. It went to local communities, and there was an intentionality about it that it was balanced between urban and rural communities both.

Dani Simons: And that was really fascinating to me because I think a lot of times when you think about the war on cars, you think about urban areas and you think about safety in places like New York City or Los Angeles or Minneapolis. But there’s tons of rural communities, and I was always intrigued by the programs and the projects that we funded, especially in tribal communities where you have huge, huge traffic fatality disparities. It’s one of the highest per-capita traffic fatality populations. And what it takes to actually improve roadway safety on a reservation in a rural community versus what it takes in New York City are really different. But these programs are really important for that. This administration updated the notorious MUCTD, and actually got in place policies that are going to be able to be leveraged by local communities, by progressive state DOTs, by advocates, to be able to bring better street design to places around the country.

Sarah: Maybe you could just unpack that acronym for those who don’t know it.

Dani Simons: The Manual on Uniform Controls and Traffic Devices. NHTSA got a lot of criticism, but NHTSA actually did a tremendous amount of work for safety during this administration. They just recently finalized a rule that will bring pedestrian crash-worthiness into the five-star safety rating for new cars, and that brings the program more in line with the European standards. Speaking of European standards, they finalized a rule that will make automatic emergency braking, including pedestrian AB standard on all passenger cars, SUVs and light trucks by September, 2029. And they have done a lot of other, I think, very important work to bring more thought to pedestrians into their crash testing. And I think that that’s something that they probably don’t get as much credit for as they deserve, and I think people are maybe not aware of those kinds of rulemaking changes. And some of them don’t go into effect right away, and that’s the nature of NHTSA. And that’s something that, you know, talking about sort of what will need to be followed up, I think, by advocates and made sure that those things actually go into effect. I think those are all really important on safety.

Dani Simons: I think in terms of the explicit connections between climate and transportation, first and foremost, from the very beginning at FHWA under Stephanie Pollack—who is brilliant and amazing and you guys should have her on someday, and she’s a character and has a lot of really great stories to tell—she really took an approach with her team—and she got a lot of flack for this—where she issued some guidance to them. And it was just guidance, it wasn’t set in stone in any way. But she basically said, “Let’s try to look at projects first that need repair. And let’s think about every time we’re gonna fix a part of a roadway or build a new roadway that we need to build safety into that.” And really encouraging that for all of the money that flows through FHWA, that’s mostly formula funding, and mostly the states get to say what they want to do with it. There are FHWA regional officers who work with the states on those projects, and to really help them and guide them and how they talk to the states about the projects to make sure that they take a fix-it-first approach, and that they are really building safety into everything has big climate implications. Because there’s such political pressure to build new, to ribbon cut, to have a new project open, but what is happening across the country—and in some ways the infrastructure law was a reaction to this—was just massive underinvestment in keeping up the infrastructure that we have or keeping things in state of good repair.

Dani Simons: And it’s funny because that used to be very bipartisan. In fact, Mitt Romney was, like, a big fan of fix-it-first before he wasn’t. But Stephanie took a great deal of flack for that policy and the idea that the federal government would tell the states, like, “Oh, you need to fix it first.” Which actually should be, like, a very good and solid conservative policy. Climate was built into the criteria for most of the discretionary grant programs that we were giving out. And the IIJA actually shifted the balance slightly from about 80-20 formula funds to discretionary funds to closer to 70-30, so we had a little bit more funding in discretionary programs where we got to choose the grants that went out.

Doug: Can you stop and explain that 80-20? Because that’s a big thing in terms of how money is appropriated to various projects, and something advocates have been trying to fix for a really long time.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So I wonder if you could break that down for people who don’t know.

Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, traditionally most of the federal funding for transportation goes out through something called formula grants or formula funds. And it’s true for aviation, it’s true for highways, it’s true for transit. And those are kind of the biggest buckets. Those formulas are set usually mostly based on population, maybe population plus something about miles driven or airline miles taken off or departures from airports. And states really like that because it gives them a lot of flexibility. And there’s some advantages to it, honestly. There’s all the Ezra Klein discussion now about, like, process, and whether or not the Democratic Party has too much process and just can’t get stuff done. Formula funds go out and the states do what they do with them, and the states can put, you know, process or not process into that. But there’s less friction, for sure.

Dani Simons: The discretionary grants are a lot of friction and a lot of rules. And I think of those as, we used to say at New York City DOT that we were just, like, driving a big tanker ship, and if we could turn that tanker ship by one or two degrees, it could have a huge difference on the trajectory of that tanker ship. And I think about the discretionary grants a little bit like that. They are grants for big projects that will get done, but they are also a way for some of the policy philosophy, I think for the administration kind of comes to life in those discretionary grants—for better and for worse. And I’m sure we could do a whole show debating whether or not that slows things down too much or puts too many strings on things. But if you really do believe that you want to send a signal that climate and transportation are linked, that good-paying jobs and the choice of a union are important, those types of things get embedded into these discretionary grants, and they hopefully change a little bit about the ways that states and local communities actually implement the spending of this type of money.

Dani Simons: And so those discretionary grants are things like RAISE, INFRA, Reconnecting Communities, Safe Streets and Roads for All, those are all discretionary programs where either states or cities or sometimes non-profits have to apply for those funds. They don’t just go as of, right? There’s a competitive process for those. And so the infrastructure law shifted the balance, which previously had been about 80 percent formula funds, 20 percent discretionary grants, to closer to 70-30, which meant that USDOT had a little bit more control over where some of those funds went. The discretionary grants, also Congress writes a lot of the parameters of those into a law, and then we have a little bit of space around the edges to dictate a little bit more detail about those programs.

Doug: We should probably talk about what some of those projects are.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: We talked about on our Project 2025 episode, you know, like, I was at a USDOT event where they had the mayors of Lincoln, Nebraska, Mesa, Arizona, a couple of other places talking about what those grants did for their communities. And in Lincoln, Nebraska, you know, a Democratic mayor in a red state, they received money that went towards a multimodal transportation center. So that included restrooms for bus drivers and, like, charging stations for electric cars. In Mesa, Arizona, I think they built out their charging network for electric cars. Things like that. So you’re talking about that friction. It did take a while, there was a competitive grant-making process, but they got that money and they were able to build it out and benefit the local communities. I think the fear with the Trump administration now is they’re just gonna take this money and, like, give it to state highway departments, which will then never trickle down to build that bike lane in a local community or build out pedestrian infrastructure in a small town.

Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, those grants are vital to getting some of these projects done. And I think that—you know, I have a couple different favorite ones, I would say.

Doug: Yeah, you were mentioning some, like, reservation and tribal stuff. I was wondering if there are any ones that really stand out.

Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, one of the ones I was thinking about this morning on the way over here was the secretary went out to the Inland Empire, which is kind of as it sounds, a little bit inland in California. And it’s a place that has become vital for the supply chain of the entire West Coast. It’s where a lot of the warehousing happens, so things come into and out of the ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach. And the Inland Empire is sort of where everything gets staged to then ship out to other parts of the West Coast and sometimes inland to the Western US. And the area, because of the way that we ship things has changed so quickly and our dependence on the kind of like just-on-time shipping, that area has boomed and it’s rapidly growing. There’s a lot of jobs there for people and the community is growing. And as communities grow, you get kids and kids are going to school. And the kids in this community were walking to school, no sidewalks, just basically, like, in the gutters, not even gutters of the soft shoulders of major arterial roads.

Dani Simons: And they got a big RAISE grant, I think, in 2022, to help create safer connections to the schools there, and to help retrofit some of the streets there to really recognize the fact that things have changed. The traffic has picked up so much because trucks are coming in and out of these big warehouses there. And at the same time, lots of people are working at those warehouses, and they have kids and those kids are trying to get to school and it should be safe for them. And the secretary went out there and he visited and did an event, and he got to see here are the places where the kids are just, like, running basically alongside the highway to just try to get to school every day. And so grants like that, I think, are so important to be able to just make communities be as safe as we want them to be for our families. And I think that’s one of the ones I was really excited about.

Dani Simons: There’s another one I’ve talked about a little bit, which is the Reconnecting Communities grant that was given in Buffalo to undo the harms of the Kensington Expressway. And I think there’s so many Reconnecting ones that are great, but for me, for some reason, this woman who was one of the main community advocates for this project, she spoke at the event where they gave out the grant award. And, you know, not to be cynical, but, like, I would watch a lot of these when I—sometimes I would be with the secretary at these events, and sometimes I would be watching them on Facebook or YouTube as we’re streaming them. I wanted to make sure that they were all going all right. It was always interesting to hear the crowd reactions, but sometimes it just sort of felt like you could watch one, you could watch them all. And, you know, everyone’s saying the same thing over and over again. But every once in a while, someone surprises you. And this woman, Stephanie Barber Geter, really just, like, caught me off guard that day, because she just got up and she just said, “I want young people to know that nothing happens quickly.” And I really appreciated that. You know, I think I was basically in her shoes 20 or 25 years ago. She’s actually a good deal older than me, probably, but—and she’s been doing this for even longer, fighting for this project for her community.

Dani Simons: But she really talked about the fact that officials had come time and time again and promised that there would be money to fix this gash that goes through Buffalo, and that finally, like, someone had come and made it happen. And she actually used the phrase “brought home the bacon.” She goes, “A billion dollars is a lot of money. And what we got today, $55 million, that’s a lot of money. And I personally don’t know anyone who has that kind of money. But the people today, they came and they brought home the bacon.” And this idea that you can fight for something in your community for so long, you can have so many promises made to you and so many promises broken, and then finally someone comes and just makes it happen, and that you know that the project that you have been advocating for for 10, 15, 20, 25 years is gonna finally happen is really incredible. And we have to fight to protect that.

Dani Simons: And I think the good news is that a lot of this money is not just promised, but a lot of this money now is actually obligated. Like, once the grants are getting signed, the money gets obligated, and that it is hard to claw that back. I think the other thing that’s good about these projects is that whether or not you heard about them—and you being sort of a national audience—local elected officials, and that includes the representatives and the senators, were all part of those announcements and all part of those hopefully groundbreaking ceremonies. And there is a buy in from the local communities to keep this funding. And it is harder to claw back money that a congressperson or a senator has stood up for than it is for a project that’s never sort of had that first initial announcement or a series of announcements as the project is getting underway. And so I think when people think about how to protect these projects, it’s really making sure that your local elected officials and your federal elected officials from your communities know how important it is to you and they feel invested and bought into it. Which I think was something that we really tried to do.

Dani Simons: And, you know, there were some Republicans who were happy to stand with us and do it. There were some that were happy to do their own press conferences parallel to ours. And there were a lot of Democrats who were, you know, right there and I think are gonna be fighting tooth and nail to make sure that the funding that came to their communities is gonna stay. People like bringing home the bacon for their communities, and people like seeing new projects in their communities. And so I’m hopeful that it will be harder for folks to claw back this money than to do some of the other million crazy things they have promised to do on Project 2025.

Doug: Yeah, for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, that was one of my questions that I wanted to hear answered is, you know, how do we protect what we have? A lot of us have fought really hard over the last couple of decades to move the conversation. And I think it’s a great perspective to remember that when I look back on oh yeah, the last 20 years, it wasn’t all the Obama administration and the Biden administration. You know, there have been setbacks in the past. There have been times when the administration was not as focused on the things that I wanted it to be focused on. And I guess we can hold onto these individual projects, as you say, where the funds have already been obligated, where the electeds are already want to keep that nice aura of having brought home the bacon.

Sarah: But then on the larger messaging front, sort of the more vibes-y front, is another thing that I’m wondering how can we protect some of the gains that we’ve made, and how can we maybe retain some of the messaging that says yes, transportation is tied to climate change, transportation creates jobs. All these very basic ideas that I think are just in danger of vanishing, frankly, from the discourse because the discourse is so tightly controlled by the same person who has these very material transportation interests.

Dani Simons: I think about it in a couple different ways. One is I think when we have seen Republican administrations come in in the past, there has been a lot more focus on local action and what cities can do and sometimes what states can do. And I think you saw that a lot with climate under the first Trump administration, that a lot of the progress was made at the city or state level. And I think that that will probably continue to be the case with this incoming administration.

Dani Simons: And I think now it’s a little bit different. Some of the funds are out there to actually really implement things. Before there wasn’t; there were continuations of transportation bills or extensions and promises of transportation funding. And now some of this is there, that people actually have the funds and the resources and they can use it, and they can actually build some of the stuff instead of just, like, having a great policy plan that sits on a shelf. And so that to me is hopeful and optimistic.

Dani Simons: The other thing that traditionally happens under Republican administrations—and I think this is really around transit and passenger rail, and this is partly why I feel like the role that I’m in right now is so interesting to me right now is because some of the discourse that helps protect the transportation funding, and especially transit and rail funding, is around manufacturing and around the fact that sometimes that funding is important not just for the big cities where you’re funding a big transit system, but it’s also important for rural communities like the ones where we do work in, in places like Cornell, New York, or Plattsburgh or the suburbs of Pittsburgh where we’re actually building the stuff because we’re creating these good paying jobs in rural communities. And there’s lots of different companies like ours that have pieces of that. There’s lots of different bus manufacturing companies that have pieces of that that are building the stuff that powers transit in these smaller communities and towns that might be more likely to vote Republican or just cover more congressional districts where people know that there is a constituent relationship there, and that their constituents are actually producing the stuff that is making Amtrak go, that is making the bus system go, that is making the subway systems go.

Dani Simons: And I think that that becomes more important in a Republican environment. And I think that that will be something that I, you know, hope to bring that story to the forefront. That it’s not—the research and innovation and trying to push transportation to the next level is interesting and, you know, I can’t be against that. But also just remembering that some of the nuts and bolts of how we keep that going today are creating good-paying jobs across the country, and we should continue to support that whether or not we ever think ourselves personally are gonna ride the bus. It could be providing a great job for someone who will vote for you in the next election.

Doug: Speaking of those jobs that are created when we invest in transit, congestion pricing obviously would have an effect here in New York in terms of traffic, emissions and things like that, but the money would go to fix transit, which leads to jobs, which leads to new train cars, which leads to all kinds of stuff. By the time that this releases, congestion pricing will have been in effect for a couple of weeks. If a judge in New Jersey doesn’t issue a stay, or if on day one, the Trump administration somehow figures out a way to shut it down, hopefully we will be seeing the benefits almost immediately. Can congestion pricing be protected from the Trump administration? What are your thoughts on what happens? You know, let’s assume it’s operating, it’s going, it is at least as successful as most people who study this kind of stuff are predicting, what happens next?

Dani Simons: I was involved with congestion pricing under the Bloomberg administration. In fact, I was the poor soul who had the responsibility of going out and talking about the transportation portion of PlaNYC. We had a roadshow, we had to go to every single community board and we did a PlaNYC roadshow, and I talked about the transportation part, which originally was congestion pricing was, like, the big kind of flagship of that. And I went to probably about 44 community boards with that presentation. And I would be out until, like, 11 or 12 at night because I’d be riding my bike or taking the subway or bus back from some far-flung place in, like, outer Queens or the northern Bronx, and getting back to my Brooklyn place and just collapsing in bed and then waking up at, like, six o’clock in the morning to be at, like, a 7:00 am strategy session at City Hall. And I got yelled at so many times, so many times just to see that whole thing collapse tragically. I will always blame that on Eliot Spitzer in the Mayflower Hotel, but that’s for a different time.

Doug: [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs] I think that’s a pretty good analysis.

Dani Simons: I will—the optimistic me projecting into the future. This is going well. It started. Everything is working smoothly. Yes, the Trump administration could still dismantle this. You know, I think they really held it up last time just by putting it in the bottom drawer of someone’s desk and refusing to make some decisions. And so I have no doubt that if they wanted to, they could. I think that the strategy, like, what I think they would do instead is let it go on and try to make it seem like it was a horrible disaster and make it seem like the Democrats that made this happen are the most horrible people ever, and try to use it as a cudgel when you have a mayoral election and then the gubernatorial election coming up. And I—so I think that that’s probably the case. Like, I think it would be more valuable for it to be alive, but kind of a cudgel than for it to be dead. But I could be wrong.

Doug: That seems like a good compromise. I like that. Like, they’ll just, you know, trash Kathy Hochul, and we’ll get cleaner air still. So fine.

Sarah: Okay. So—so …

Dani Simons: But I think that the challenge then—and I think that what advocates need to do, and people who care about this program want to actually see at scale—is to do everything in their power to demonstrate how this is successful. And I think for all that Janno fought for this to happen and fought for there to be this sustainable, ongoing source of funding for the MTA, it is very much also going to be on him to marshal their own storytellers within the MTA and to marshal advocates to be amplifiers and to marshal elected officials to be amplifiers all around them to show that they are spending this money effectively, and that they are delivering results for riders.

Doug: Yes.

Dani Simons: And that this is actually having an impact that’s improving the lives of the vast majority of people. That that’s the theory of the case. Like, that’s why people supported this in the first place. They need to demonstrate it. People can’t just assume. Like, it’s gone in place. Like, it will be self evident. It is not self evident. In this day and age, nothing is self-evident. You have to tell the story over and over and over again. And Sarah asked earlier, you know, this administration didn’t get the credit for this huge, huge spending bill that has brought in place all of these projects, from, you know, projects that make roads safer in the Inland Empire, to projects that fix bridges in rural communities and make it so that, you know, people on tribal reservations can actually get to the doctor, to programs that help bring electric buses all over the country. We told those stories often on local news because that’s a reliable news source that most Americans still trust. I think that the MTA advocates, everyone, have to be everywhere. The woman who’s one of our admins in our office in beautiful Midtown East, I mean, the way that she is getting her information right now is mostly by TikTok. Like, we need to be in all of these places, and we need to be talking about how people’s subway rides are getting more reliable, how there’s more bus service, how there’s better rail cars, all of these things. People are getting to work on time, and they’re having a better experience doing it. And we have to be out there every single day talking about it once it’s—once this goes into place.

Doug: It seems like such a huge challenge because the right has this massive media apparatus. I mean, I think about just, you know, with congestion pricing, the minute there is a train derailment or passengers trapped on a broken down train—which is gonna happen, because that’s life, it happens. Two weeks after congestion pricing starts, two years after congestion pricing starts, the New York Post will be all over it. Like, congestion pricing was supposed to fix everything. Everything was gonna be kumbaya, rapid transit and you’d never have a delay again. They just lie, right? That’s their thing. They’ll exploit these little one-off moments, much like we’ve seen, I think with the subway crime story. Every incident gets blown up. Not that there aren’t legitimate concerns. How do we—you know, you said, “be everywhere, be on TikTok, be on social media, be on local news,” but what can Democrats realistically do given the asymmetry between the two sides and the media apparatus available to them?

Dani Simons: I wish I was an expert on this. I don’t think I am, but I think maybe I should be. I don’t know.

Doug: I think you’re selling yourself short. I mean, you have a lot of experience with—you know, I think this came into play with Citi Bike a little bit. You saw before it launched, and even immediately after, the more conservative-leaning media outlets here in the city, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, really going to town on those anecdotal stories of the restaurant owner who said, “This is gonna kill my business,” or the parking garage operator who said, “This is gonna kill my business.” Like, how do you fight back?

Dani Simons: Can I—I’m gonna say something that might make you mad.

Doug: Please do!

Dani Simons: I think it was the day that we announced the first—and maybe it was just the notice of funding for Reconnecting. And it was a huge deal. We had already been completely attacked over the Reconnecting program, and made fun of by somehow inventing that there were racist highways, and being torn apart in right wing media for this. And so everyone was, like, feeling a lot of things about launching this program. Congress had given us this money, they had told us to launch this program. We had to launch this program. We were doing it, and it was the right thing to do, and a lot of people were very proud about it. I mean, this was a huge deal to be able to launch a program that for the first time was gonna provide funds to help knit communities back together that had been torn apart by something, whether that was racism or bad planning decisions or what have you, in the past.

 

Dani Simons: And instead of people being out there and celebrating that program, I think on the same day we launched some silly video about some program that was being—like, you know, we had many things going on on social on the same day. And we had launched some video about some program that was helping with our international diplomacy, and helping give some advice to small countries in Southeast Asia about transportation. And instead of advocates being like, “Oh my God, they finally launched Reconnecting Communities,” people were like, “Why is the US giving advice to other countries about transportation? We’re so backwards!”

Doug: I do remember this. Yes.

Dani Simons: And I think that’s part of the problem. The left does have media outlets. You guys are part of a media outlet on the left, but instead of being unified and just deciding, like, we are just gonna focus on telling the story about how awesome this is, like, you guys will also go in and say, like, “This is great, but also, like, the MTA is not spending the money wisely.”

Doug: [laughs] Right. Right, right.

Dani Simons: “You know, they haven’t put enough bus service in Western Queens, and why is that? And let’s go into the details.” Because you’re still advocating and you’re pushing. And yes, we should keep pushing and keep raising the bar and we always can be doing better, but we also need to decide that we are going to be as disciplined as the right is when it comes to just, like, “We’re just gonna get on message now and for the next six months, no one is going to say anything bad about the MTA.”

Doug: [laughs]

Dani Simons: “We are only telling good news stories about how great this is and how it’s helped, you know, Jane Q and, you know, whoever else who now get to work five minutes faster because their subways come on time.” And I think that that’s part of it is really having that discipline and really marshaling together all of these different—you know, there’s like just—there is a lot of left wing media, but it’s very dispersed, it’s very fragmented. Everyone is kind of focused on their own little pieces. And they all are also not just reporting or not just carrying messaging, but they’re also trying to push to the next level, and sometimes that makes it hard to kind of support the great things that are happening today.

Sarah: Yeah, I think it’s a problem being on the side that wants to think critically and analyze things when it comes to the messaging. I think that’s absolutely right.

Doug: Yeah. I mean, you said you were gonna make me angry, and I agree a hundred percent. I think the right’s message discipline is unmatched, and we need to figure out those times. I think, look, sometimes social media and the advocates—and I am one—trains our brains to find the thing that’s wrong because no one’s gonna get a lot of engagement from, “I like this thing. Thanks Joe Biden, thanks Senator Schumer, thanks Kathy Hochul.” And sometimes we need to just say thanks. And then in our private Slack messaging and WhatsApp groups say, “This fucking sucks, but we’re gonna get out there.” The right’s really good at that. They announced something at 9:00 and by 9:15 the entire right wing media apparatus is like, “Thank you, President Trump.”

Dani Simons: Yeah.

Sarah: Well, although I will say that I think that there’s plenty of friction going on over there, too. It’s just, it happens sort of under a veil, and occasionally it does break out. And I think it will probably be breaking out more and more often because the power politics are just so nakedly just about power. And there’s not even ideology underlying much of what’s going on in the Republican Party right now. It’s just power. It’s not like, “Oh, we’re making these considered arguments based on hundreds of years of study and thought about how economics works or how human societies work.” It’s just about, “How can I get more money and power now?” So it’ll be interesting to see, but I promise that I am only gonna say good things about the MTA for the next—I’ll make it a New Year’s resolution that for the first six months of 2025, I’m gonna be very positive. [laughs] I love the subway so much. I mean, I would do anything to save it. And it’s so funny you talk about PlaNYC because I still have my copy of PlaNYC that I got at Mayor Bloomberg’s initial announcement of it. I still have it on my bookshelf, and I look at it and the idealism that it represented and the idealism of that time, I think it’s—maybe that’s another thing that you can speak to, having come through all of that, is how do we resist cynicism and doomerism?

Dani Simons: Wow! I mean, I—I feel stumped.

Doug: Speechless.

Sarah: That’s my answer.

Dani Simons: No, I think that—I don’t know. It’s funny, like, if you ask my friends, I probably have one of the darkest, most cynical senses of humor of anyone, and I think I’m drawn to other people who have very dark and cynical senses of humor. But if you—like, that doesn’t stop me. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to try. I feel like from the very beginning in my career, I’ve been very much driven by this idea that we have to—we have to fight for our planet, and we have to fight for our planet because we have to fight for the people that live on this planet, and we have to keep trying to make this a better place to live, a habitable place to live. And I think I—during the pandemic, I read the book, The Ministry for the Future.

Doug: Yeah, great book.

Dani Simons: It was—yeah.

Doug: A hard book to read, but yes.

Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, it’s—I don’t know, I’ve always liked that kind of like eco-futuristic, bordering on sci-fi, but not quite sci-fi, sadly, book. But I think it really fit with my brain’s view of, like, you’re gonna go through this, you’re gonna move through this. There’s gonna be times when there’s gonna be setbacks, and then there’s gonna be progress. And sometimes that progress is gonna be almost too small to see. But now, looking back through a lens of, like, 20, 25 years of my career, you can start to see some of the things that you’ve done have had an impact, have helped move the needle. We did Summer Streets, which still is one of the favorite things that I’ve ever worked on of all time. We didn’t do that because we thought New Yorkers needed, like, another fun thing to do. We did that because we thought that the best way to convince people that there should be more open spaces in the streets, that we should reclaim some of the street space for walking and biking, was just to show people what it could be like if you did, and let people live a day or two of that every summer, and have that experience. And that that would be more compelling than a hundred community board meetings. And I think we were right.

Doug: You were a hundred percent right. You totally were. You were.

Dani Simons: I mean, it wasn’t. It was Jan Gehl, but it wasn’t me. But then I was, like, the person who did some of the legwork for it. So stuff like that makes me think we’ve got a chance. I hope that it can happen quickly enough, but we all have to keep going, and we all have to keep doing our small parts to make it happen.

Doug: I mean, I think about something that one of your former bosses, Janette Sadik-Khan, would often say, which was that the people are often ahead of the politicians. And that is and isn’t true, depending on the issue. But I think about Citi Bike today. You can’t imagine New York City without it. We’re what, 11, 12 years into Citi Bike’s “reign of terror” on our streets, if you believe the Wall Street Journal. But, you know, it’s just as woven into the fabric of New York City as, like, hot dog stands and pizza joints and yellow cabs now. We used to direct message Dani any time there was, like, a Citi Bike in, you know, a movie or TV show. It was like “Dani Simons, marketing genius.” But, like, you—it took the courage of Michael Bloomberg, of Janette Sadik-Khan. I remember Mayor Bloomberg at the launch press conference, like, just swatting down the press like they were flies. Like, yeah, of course the bike share stations are gonna take up space. You know what took up space before? Parked cars. And it took that political courage and the advocates behind them and people like you working kind of behind the scenes, and now we just take it for granted. So I do think if you take the thousand-yard view here, you know, up from above, things have gotten better over the last 10, 15, 20 years. Progress isn’t always linear, but things have gotten better.

Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, I believe that’s true. And I think we have to sometimes step back and appreciate that. I think it’s really easy when people are driving so hard to make change to just always think like nothing’s ever perfect. But I think first of all, appreciating and thanking the people who helped make those changes is very important. So thank you, Mayor Bloomberg. Thank you, Janette Sadik-Khan. Thank you, President Biden. Thank you, Secretary Buttigieg. Thank you, Senator Schumer. Thank you, Speaker Pelosi. Like, these are people who took bold, decisive moves, and took action that we’re going to be continuing to reap the benefits of for years. And I think stepping back and appreciating that is important. And stepping back and giving credit to people because people do hard things, people make hard choices. They don’t always get the appreciation, and they don’t always get to see it come to fruition in their cycle in office or in their cycle kind of in charge of something. And I think continuing to kind of give them credit for the things that they helped get started is an important part of continuing to build those legacies, and to continue to see more progress like that, and to continue to build courage in future generations for people to do more things like that.

Doug: Well, I think that’ll be hugely important with congestion pricing. So we’ll have to say thank you, Kathy Hochul, even though the process that got us to this point was really messy, if it’s a huge success, we need to give permission to other governors and other mayors in San Francisco, in Chicago, to get congestion pricing going there, too. We can’t focus on the mess that led up to this moment. We have to just—sometimes advocates just have to eat it, and stand with politicians that they sometimes don’t agree with and say thanks. I mean, I stood with Bill de Blasio a lot of times, and I was a huge critic of his. But when he would do things that were good, like getting bike lanes on Queens Boulevard or lowering the speed limits or things like that, it’s sort of—that’s the game we have to play, and it’s fine.

Dani Simons: Yeah. And I mean, I think a huge thanks to the people in the New York State Legislature as well, because I think they took a really hard vote, and they were in this at the time, and they are still continuing to stand by this policy. And I think for me in this job now, the important thing is that the MTA has a stable source of funding, right? And I think for riders, that’s the important thing. People don’t necessarily have a strong feeling one way or another, but the truth is, if there was a better way to do this, probably someone would have figured it out over the last 20 years that we’ve been fighting about this.

Doug: Yeah.

Dani Simons: And so it seems like this is the idea that has emerged that makes the most sense for this region to be able to do this, to be able to provide a stable funding source for the transit system, which is the economic and social lifeblood of this region. And so thank you to the people who took the hard votes to make this happen. Thank you to the governor, thank you to the mayors that have stood behind this over the years and that will continue to need to stand behind us. And yeah.

Sarah: And I guess the other thing that I start thinking about when you’re talking about the MTA and how to sort of support and elevate the MTA is—and this is going back to hitting at Governor Hochul again a little bit, but the legendary diner customer who wouldn’t have gone to the diner if they had had to pay a congestion charge. That was Governor Hochul’s talking point when she paused congestion pricing the first time.

Sarah: But I just would like to put some more focus on the people who ride the MTA, the millions of people who ride the MTA, and to try to, as an advocate, as a journalist, as someone who wants to influence policy or watching other policymakers, to try to always remind everybody that there are just every kind of person that lives in New York City or visits New York City or does business in New York City is riding the subway and the bus, or the people who work for them or with them are riding the subway or the bus. These are us. The people who ride the MTA is us. And just, like, to me, that actually is part of what makes me not a doomer, because I just am like, I know that people know this. I know that New Yorkers know this in their bones. And once this policy is in place, then I think the sense of it will become apparent to everyone, because everyone is there. The same way that the other analogy we always use is the smoking analogy, is, you know, those people who were being exposed to secondhand smoke and going home with their clothes reeking of tobacco every night after going to a restaurant or a bar, that was us. That’s us. That’s our lungs, that’s our bodies that were being affected. And when that burden was taken off of us, we could feel it.

Sarah: So I’m hoping that if we can get the focus back on not the one person in the diner and the millions of people that we—that’s who rides the MTA, and that’s who needs the attention of our policymakers in transportation. It’s just these—it’s not the one person. It’s the millions and millions of people who are using our transportation systems to try to get educated and get health care and go to work and raise their families and everything. And so I don’t know, I do like to focus on the users as well.

Doug: Well, I think that’s something that I felt like Secretary Buttigieg was really good at. To broaden it out, you know, you were saying the MTA is us. I always say government is us. The Republicans are very good at positioning government as the bad guy, as standing in the way between you and just the life that you want to live. And I think Democrats need to be better at saying, “No, government is us. Government is us deciding what we want to do with our land, our water, our cities, the money that we collect through taxes, how we give that back to schools and communities.”

Doug: You were mentioning communities in the Inland Empire, getting sidewalks. You know, that’s our money, that’s our land, that’s our government doing things that give back to us. It’s us deciding what we want to do with our resources. So I think that’s something I’d like to see advocates and Democrats do more is reclaim this idea that, like, when government comes with an idea, that is something that impacts you as a person and can have a positive impact on your life. Like I said, clean air, clean water, fewer cars on your streets, that’s important for us to reclaim, I think.

Dani Simons: Yeah, I think one of the things that Secretary Buttigieg always was very mindful of saying was most of the good ideas don’t come from Washington, but more of the funding should. And I think he really believed that most of the great ideas were coming from the local level or the state level, and that DC should help enable those things to get done—mostly by funding. And I think the other thing that really struck me in talking about going to work for the Biden-Harris administration because I really saw how they put transportation at the nexus of climate and equity and jobs, I think one of the things that really impressed me when I found out that Secretary Buttigieg was going to be my day-to-day boss was his real focus on rebuilding trust in government. And that for me was very powerful during the pandemic when there was so much misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic itself, about vaccines, about things like that, and just seeing how broken people’s relationships with the federal government, that he had this fundamental belief that we could rebuild this trust and that we needed to be rebuilding this trust.

Dani Simons: And that for me, each of the projects that we were choosing in the grant selection process for these grants, whether it was RAISE or Safe Streets and Roads for All, was a chance to show people that government could work for them, that government could help empower their ideas and help build things that were gonna make them the streets safer for their kids to get to school, that were gonna make it easier for them to get around, that was gonna make it cheaper for things to be able to arrive reliably at their houses or their businesses.

Dani Simons: And that was very powerful to me and really connected to me. And I think we have to rebuild people’s trust that government is there as an ally. And that is there as a way to give people more of the lives that they want to be living, and not there to take something away or to be scary or to make it harder for you to do the things you need to do. And I think people should be mindful of that as they communicate, but mindful of that also as they govern and lead.

Doug: So as we’re recording this, Pete Buttigieg is no longer working in government because we’re in a new administration. So this means he’ll come on the podcast finally, right?

Sarah: [laughs]

Dani Simons: Yeah. You know, we were just talking about that.

Doug: Okay, send him my best.

Dani Simons: I will send him your best. One of the things that impressed me about Secretary Pete—and honestly, probably a credit to Lis Smith, who came before me and who is still a lion in my mind—was that he had sort of a mentality of go everywhere, do everything, which you really saw in the places he showed up. And I talked a little bit about how a lot of the administration really focused a lot on doing local press because they knew that that was where people would trust and that they—local newscasters had one of the highest trust scores still.

Dani Simons: But the secretary also did everything from, you know, conversations with online influencers to some of my favorites that some of my colleagues helped set up. He did an interview with a woman named Rory from Nick News, which was amazing. She met him out at a site that was training union operators, like machine operators. I think it was in Wisconsin, and went and they drove around, I think, bulldozers or something together. And she was just really cool. And getting him on Nick News was amazing because, you know, kids watch that, but their parents are sitting next to them watching that.

Dani Simons: My former press secretary, who wound up taking my job when I left USDOT, whose name is Carrie, who is tremendous—and if she doesn’t have a job yet, everyone out there, please hire her—had him doing an interview with Runner’s World, and she actually staffed that interview running alongside him. He did it while running. And it was an opportunity, really, to talk about road safety to runners who care, as I’m sure, Doug, you’re very aware, care a lot about road safety because it affects the quality of their runs. And I think the kind of strategy of trying to go where people were and meet people where they were was a huge part of what we were trying to do.

Dani Simons: I think that just sort of reflecting on where we’re at, and whether or not people sort of heard about the accomplishments of this administration, there’s some great things about that because people definitely heard about it, but we were constantly kind of microtargeting those groups. Should we have been doing more broad-scale messaging and more kind of vibes-y ambient messaging? I don’t know. And that’s something that I’m reflecting on now and thinking a lot about, and thinking about sort of places that maybe the Republicans were doing a better job at some of that stuff than we were. But I think for what it was at the time, he, I think, completed something like over 2,000 interviews in his time in office. And I mean, it’s just there were days when we were just 20 hits in a row. Line ’em up, get ‘er done, and just really trying to share what we were up to with the country. And it was an incredible experience to be part of. I’m sorry that he did not make it on The War on Cars.

Doug: Well, we’ll still have him anytime.

Dani Simons: I will recommend that in his interstitial period of whatever time that is, he definitely gives it a strong consideration.

Sarah: The invitation is always there. Thank you so much, Dani, for coming on yourself and sharing all of this knowledge and expertise and perspective with us because it’s so valuable, and it’s given me strength to keep going into this future, which is gonna be strange, but we can handle it, right?

Doug: Yeah. And Dani, thank you. I think your advice to advocates too, and folks on the left is just spot on. So we got to be a little more disciplined in how we really advance our messaging. So thanks so much for everything you do.

Dani Simons: Oh, thank you guys so much for having me on. I’ve been looking forward to this, and it was lovely. And I hope that the future that we are going into, whatever happens, we’ll be in it together.

Sarah: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thank you again to Dani Simons. Really a special episode, and I feel much better as a result.

Doug: I feel pretty good, too. The War on Cars is supported in part by the Helen and William Mazer Foundation. We thank them for their generosity.

Sarah: Remember, you can support us on Patreon and get all sorts of benefits by going to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and signing up today.

Doug: And a reminder, we have our live show in New York City on January 31. Stay tuned to find out if more tickets will be released. And also our live show in April in Minneapolis. I’ll put a link in the show notes, and you can buy tickets.

Sarah: A big thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon, including our top contributors, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Mark Hedlund and Virginia Baker.

Doug: This episode was recorded at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio by Justin Fernandez. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear, and transcripts are by Russell Gragg. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear. And this is The War on Cars.