Commentary
The Biden Administration left Washington with a queue of $64 billion in transit capital projects at various stages of the federal grant process. The new Trump Administration should remove most (if not all) of these projects from grant consideration.
Beyond concerns of whether financially supporting local transportation projects is a legitimate federal function, the latest generation of transit capital grant contenders usually have costs well in excess of their benefits.
As one might expect, the costliest and least defensible projects are concentrated in California which accounts for half the project queue by cost. Perhaps the least defensible initiative is a 1.3-mile rail extension in San Francisco that weighs in at $8.25 billion. The new track would extend Caltrain commuter service from the outskirts of downtown to the largely empty Salesforce Transit Center….