Transportation and Land Use Program

2025 has been an extremely busy year for the Transportation and Land Use program. We published six new reports detailing how to improve transit project delivery and transit operations across the United States. We also traveled the world, delivering invited talks, attending relevant industry events, participating in conferences, and educating elected officials and bureaucrats about our research. Our team has also grown over the last year. We hired a new full-time employee and two new researchers. We have continued to write op-eds, speak to the media, and shape public policy as it unfolds. Finally, we hosted two book talks at 370 Jay Street.

New Reports: In 2025, we published new reports about ridership estimation for the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard Subway in Philadelphia, how to speed up trains on the Northeast Corridor without spending more than $100 billion, the merits of intercity passenger rail electrification and how electric trains can meaningfully compete with driving and flying over intermediate distances, a short review of global train operations, an analysis of the FTA’s Capital Cost Database, and a visionary plan detailing how Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani can begin a subway-building renaissance that would undergird his affordability agenda. Additionally, Elif Ensari also published a paper in Cities about using artificial intelligence to monitor police response to illegal parking complaints.

Talks, Conferences, Industry Events, and Leadership: Eric Goldwyn led off the year, delivering a lecture at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Municipal Finance & Governance on the high cost of transit projects. Eric was also named to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Committee. Alon Levy attended InnoTrans, one of the largest transport trade fairs in the world. Marco Chitti addressed the Canadian Urban Transit Association in Montreal about ongoing research on the high costs of transit construction. Elif Ensari presented a paper at the Vision Zero Cities Conference on Turkey’s subway-building boom.

New Hires: This year we hired Zhexuan “Franklin” Tang as a junior research scholar. Franklin has supported our work developing a rolling stock database, mastering ridership estimation software, contributing to our train operations research, and spearheading our A Better Billion report. We hired Matthew Bornholt to carry out an in-depth case study on London’s transit costs. Bornholt has also provided data on Japanese construction costs and contributed to our train operations research. Finally, we hired Ilya Petoushkoff to lead our Moscow case study.

Media: We wrote op-eds, recorded podcasts, and even did some old-fashioned radio and television interviews this year. We were quoted or cited in a range of media publications, including the Austin Free Press, Sacramento Bee, CityLab, Bloomberg, Daily News, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Mass Transit, Crain’s New York Business, and the New York Times. Our research was picked up by a handful of books, too: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, Dan Wang’s Breakneck, Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, and Benjamin Schneider’s The Unfinished City. 

Events: For the first time in our program’s history, we held public-facing events with authors we admire. Over the summer we hosted Marc Dunkelman and Jerusalem Demsas for a discussion about Marc’s book, Why Nothing Works. In December, Eric Goldwyn and Benjamin Schneider sat down to discuss Benjamin’s new book, The Unfinished Metropolis.