Volts
Volts
David Roberts
US transit costs and how to tame them
1 hour 36 minutes Posted Jul 30, 2025 at 4:02 pm.
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Show notes

I'm joined by Alon Levy of NYU's Transit Costs Project, whose work documents how expensive it is to build transit in the US relative to the rest of the world. We discuss how countries like Spain and Italy build cheaply by relying on in-house public expertise and standardized designs, while the Anglosphere is captured by a costly ideology of privatization. Levy explains how applying these lessons could make ambitious projects like high-speed rail in the Northeast not just possible but affordable.



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