The Argument
Break the Cycle. Deliver Results.
Why can't American transportation deliver results?
Every community wants the same four things from transportation: accessibility, safety, sustainability, affordability: some version of these four goals show up in real, adopted plans across the country, tied back to the national planning framework Congress wrote into law in 1991 and has renewed, in bigger and bigger bills, ever since.
And still: despite hundreds of billions in annual transportation spending, the U.S. has the most dangerous roads in the developed world, roughly half the population live in transportation cost-burdened households, recent investment is increasing emissions like 50 new coal-fired power plants, and per Beth Osborne (Smart Growth America), the current approach “puts people farther away from the places they need to go, stymying access to opportunity.”
So why can’t transportation deliver? Each of the conversations below has their own theory of the case. And each possesses the tools to solve a portion of the problem. If each adopted the strengths of the other two, American transportation could finally start to deliver the results our communities are demanding.
Abundance
- ✓ Has Reach
- × Lacks Mechanism (from Civic Tech)
- × Lacks Ground Truth (from Advocacy)
Civic Tech
- × Lacks Reach (from Abundance)
- ✓ Has Mechanism
- × Lacks Ground Truth (from Advocacy)
Advocacy
- × Lacks Reach (from Abundance)
- × Lacks Mechanism (from Civic Tech)
- ✓ Has Ground Truth
Within Abundance
Superpower: reach.
Abundance's core message is simple: government should deliver tangible results, not rhetoric. That message has found real reach — for now, most visibly in housing, where land-use reform and permitting simplification have taken hold around a shared diagnosis that artificial scarcity, not ideology or intention, is the barrier standing between people and what they need.
Abundance's superpower is bringing this results-over-rhetoric message mainstream. Klein and Thompson didn't just make a wonky policy argument — they made it mainstream, turned “supply” into a word elected officials say out loud, and built a genuine bipartisan coalition around housing in a political environment that agrees on almost nothing else.
Abundance has dabbled in transportation, but current thought leadership is focused on projects: lowering costs and improving delivery. Necessary work, for sure, but far from sufficient. See “Infrastructure Delivery Is Not Outcomes Delivery” for more.
The stakes here are the same as the ones Klein and Thompson themselves point to: a movement that talks about results without actually delivering doesn't just fail on the merits — it loses the public's trust that government can govern at all. If Abundance wants credibility as a movement beyond housing, it has to show the same thing housing is starting to show: not just a compelling argument, but a result.
Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025)
If you're in this movement
The reach you've built is real, and it's the reason this site is trying to leverage that broad appeal. But reach without a mechanism to deliver results just produces louder promises. Civic tech has already built the discipline to systematically identify and remove procedural barriers standing in the way of results. And Transportation for America has already done the on-the-ground work of showing exactly where “more” backfires.
Within Civic Technology and State Capacity
Superpower: honesty about failure.
A separate lineage — Jennifer Pahlka's Recoding America, the Niskanen Center's state-capacity work, the US Digital Response — has spent the last decade building a different kind of muscle: the discipline to do the hard, boring, unglamorous work of actually closing the loop between policy intent and results.
Civic tech's superpower is honesty about failure. This is a movement willing to point at institutions and say plainly: this isn't working, and the fix isn't another coat of paint.
That discipline has already reshaped digital government and federal benefits delivery. It hasn't yet been turned on transportation institutions — not because transportation doesn't need it, but because this movement's attention has simply been elsewhere.
Jennifer Pahlka — A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform
Horizon 1 is the system we have now. Horizon 3 is the system we're trying to reach. Horizon 2 is the contested space in between — and not all reform work there is the same. H2+ genuinely changes the conditions that produce the problem. H2- relieves the pressure that would otherwise force real change, even while producing real short-term value. Both feel like progress. Only one of them is.
Turning them on transportation means doing something most transportation reform hasn't been willing to do: naming Horizon 3 explicitly, and being honest about which of current efforts are actually building toward it, and which are H2-, relieving just enough pressure to keep the current system tolerable for one more cycle. That's an uncomfortable audit to run on your own wins. It's also the only way to track real progress.
Recoding America's mission isn't just “fix digital government.” It's American government needing to deliver, full stop — building the field, filling in the gaps, wherever government fails to turn intent into results. Transportation is one of the largest, most consequential gaps still unmapped.
This site exists to put transportation on the agenda for when civic tech is ready to widen its aperture — and to have the groundwork already laid when it does.
If you're in this movement
You already have accomplished the hardest part — the discipline to tell real reform from reform that just relieves pressure. What you don't have is a foothold in transportation, or a constituency that appreciates you here. Abundance has already built the political reach to make a technical argument land nationally. Transportation advocacy already has the local trust and influence within government that desperately need your help. Both are available, and neither requires you to invent anything new — just point what you've already built at this new domain.
Within Existing Transportation Advocacy
Superpower: representation.
Transportation is inherently local. Every trip starts and ends on a specific street, in a specific neighborhood, governed by a specific agency's decisions. It's where the national Abundance and Civic Tech conversations eventually have to prove themselves. Transportation advocacy organizations exist in nearly every city and county in the country, embedded in neighborhoods, ready to deploy national best practices at scale.
Transportation advocacy's superpower is representation — transit riders, bikers, and pedestrians that elected officials pay attention to because these groups can move votes, lobby for funding, and effectively carry a message to the broader public.
Beth Osborne, Transportation for America
Osborne's diagnosis, sharpened over a career working directly with states and MPOs, comes down to a disconnect: communities consistently say what they need — safety, affordability, sustainability, accessibility — and funding consistently fails to deliver on these needs. Her own testimony names the two gaps directly. On the missing mechanism: “States get the same amount of money if they produce great results or terrible results, whether they hit their targets or not.” On the missing reach: “We need to talk about what we are going to do to get better results for the taxpayer and traveling public.”
+42%
freeway lane-miles added by the 100 largest U.S. metros, 1993–2017
+32%
population growth over the same period
+144%
growth in congestion anyway
Between 1993 and 2017, the largest 100 U.S. metro areas added 42% more freeway lane-miles, far outpacing 32% population growth. Congestion grew anyway, by 144%. That's more than misplaced spending — it's a direct complication of abundance's own instinct: housing abundance has a simple logic, build more units, get more housing, and transportation doesn't work that way.
If you're in this movement
Your standing with the people who actually use the system and with local policymakers is unparalleled. What you don't yet have is a way to reform the broken system, or a stage big enough to make your case beyond your own region. Civic tech has already built exactly that ability to identify and remove the barriers standing in the way of government ability to deliver results. And abundance has already built exactly that national stage. Neither is out of reach.
Putting it together
What This Adds Up To
Put the three together, and each conversation starts to push past its current barriers. Utilizing the CivTech mechanisms for reform and the local influence of Advocacy, Abundance can add transportation to its resume of delivering results, not rhetoric. With the reach of Abundance and the direct lines to local governments from Advocacy, Civic tech can use transportation to advance its mission of building a field around government delivery. With the reach of Abundance and the mechanism of CivTech, Transportation advocacy can shift policymaking philosophy and procedures toward delivering the goals society wants, instead of repeating the cycle of spending more for worse results.